Sculthorpe: The Complete String Quartets with Didjeridu
9/30/2014, 15 Tracks, 1:22:11
Featuring
Benjamin Kreith
Rick Shinozaki
Charlton Lee
Kathryn Bates
Stephen Kent
Del Sol String Quartet
Peter Sculthorpe
Did you know?
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Composer Biography
Peter Sculthorpe, the composer, was born in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, in 1929 and had an idyllic, solitary childhood in a small, close-knit community.
Cultural Impact
Peter Sculthorpe's String Quartet No. 8 gained a global audience thanks to the advocacy and commercial recordings of the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Peter Sculthorpe, the composer, aimed to give life to the Australian landscape through the sun and a human dimension through loneliness, resignation, and death.
Instruments
The didjeridu, an Indigenous Australian instrument, is a large wooden drone pipe made from termite-hollowed Eucalyptus branches, traditionally 3 to 5 feet long.
Composer Biography
A musicologist at Oxford University, Wilfred Mellers, stated that Peter Sculthorpe, the composer, 'discovered his true identity, becoming the first composer to make a music distinctively Australian' while studying there.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Peter Sculthorpe, the composer, declared a new aesthetic direction in 1965, stating, 'Europe is the past; Australian, Indonesia, the South Pacific, the future.'
Compositional Technique
Peter Sculthorpe's early significant work, Sonatina for Piano, composed in 1954, already featured his mature style with interlocking ostinatos, harmonic pedals, and hidden drones.
