Michael Berkeley

Torque and Velocity

Conductor's score and parts on hire

Forces or Category: String quartet

This is Michael Berkeley's fifth composition for string quartet. Berkeley says that it was the Tacáks Quartet's special qualities of 'exhilarating vigour coupled to innate musicianship, as exemplified in their playing of the Bart?k quartets, which helped dictate the nature of the piece'.

Torque and Velocity

Conductor's score and parts on hire

Michael Berkeley

Description

Programme Notes:

" Torque and Velocity is Michael Berkeleys fifth composition for string quartet. It was commissioned by the Cheltenham Music Society (with financial assistance from South West Arts) for the Takács Quartet, which gave it its first performance at the Pittville Pump Room in Cheltenham on 15 October 1997. Berkeley says that it was the Quartets special qualities of exhilarating vigour coupled to innate musicianship, as exemplified in their playing of the Bartók quartets, which helped dictate the nature of the piece.
Like Berkeleys previous string quartet, Magnetic Field of 1995, this work is in a single movement; and again it has a title derived from physics - torque being the rotary movement produced within an engine. The composer likens the opening gesture to the flicking of a switch which sets the piece in motion. It then accelerates through the gears, as it were, gradually building up increasing momentum with each change of tempo and texture. The energy thus generated throws off sparks in the form of vocal interjections; and at the climax precise pitches and rhythms are briefly abandoned in passages of freely co-ordinated manic, sawing glissandi. However, the works obsessive forward movement is interrupted from time to time by moments of stasis, with quiet, widely spaced chords and expressive fragments of melody. And one such quiet moment occurs at the end of the piece, before the final click of the switch.
© Anthony Burton
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press

Torque and Velocity

Conductor's score and parts on hire

Michael Berkeley

Composer Information