Dirac
String Quartet
[2014]
Premièred 31st January, St James' Church, Islington, by the Manon Quartet as part of the 840 concert series.
Programme note:
Thankfully, I have nearly forgotten everything I learned whilst studying. I had already started writing this composition before being asked; therefore it has a peculiar quality that I don’t really know how to deal with. This section should contain all the places I’ve studied, the awards I’ve won, where my pieces have been played, who played them and all that nonsense. Morton Feldman once said, in 1967 on radio to John Cage, that it’s a feeble defence now, to have a mind. Fifteen years earlier, Alan Watts wrote that the thinker has no other form than his thought. On page 279 of The Logical Construction of the World, another thirty-nine years earlier, Rudolf Carnap wrote: “Let us now proceed from classes to classes of classes and to relations between classes and from relations to classes of relations and to relations between relations; such objects are generally no longer called real”. I have four heroes so far; John Cage, Richard Feynman, Alan Turing and Paul Dirac – an English theoretical physicist born in 1902. His dizzying abilities applying advanced mathematics (and forgotten techniques) to the physics of the day revolutionised quantum mechanics and a cherished hobby was making relativistic versions of classical situations. In 1956 at Moscow University, he was asked to summarise the philosophy of physics and he wrote on the blackboard PHYSICAL LAWS SHOULD HAVE MATHEMATICAL BEAUTY. He made mistakes, hardly spoke (the unit of one Dirac represents a word spoken per hour) and was emotionally depleted, but enjoyed playing practical jokes, like sending a friend a crocodile in the post, which jumped out, biting her hand. He read Crime and Punishment with extreme care and described it as ‘nice’ but noted that Dostoevsky had made a mistake, describing in one chapter the sun rising twice on the same day.
Dirac
String Quartet
[2014]
Premièred 31st January, St James' Church, Islington, by the Manon Quartet as part of the 840 concert series.
Programme note:
Thankfully, I have nearly forgotten everything I learned whilst studying. I had already started writing this composition before being asked; therefore it has a peculiar quality that I don’t really know how to deal with. This section should contain all the places I’ve studied, the awards I’ve won, where my pieces have been played, who played them and all that nonsense. Morton Feldman once said, in 1967 on radio to John Cage, that it’s a feeble defence now, to have a mind. Fifteen years earlier, Alan Watts wrote that the thinker has no other form than his thought. On page 279 of The Logical Construction of the World, another thirty-nine years earlier, Rudolf Carnap wrote: “Let us now proceed from classes to classes of classes and to relations between classes and from relations to classes of relations and to relations between relations; such objects are generally no longer called real”. I have four heroes so far; John Cage, Richard Feynman, Alan Turing and Paul Dirac – an English theoretical physicist born in 1902. His dizzying abilities applying advanced mathematics (and forgotten techniques) to the physics of the day revolutionised quantum mechanics and a cherished hobby was making relativistic versions of classical situations. In 1956 at Moscow University, he was asked to summarise the philosophy of physics and he wrote on the blackboard PHYSICAL LAWS SHOULD HAVE MATHEMATICAL BEAUTY. He made mistakes, hardly spoke (the unit of one Dirac represents a word spoken per hour) and was emotionally depleted, but enjoyed playing practical jokes, like sending a friend a crocodile in the post, which jumped out, biting her hand. He read Crime and Punishment with extreme care and described it as ‘nice’ but noted that Dostoevsky had made a mistake, describing in one chapter the sun rising twice on the same day.
Dirac
String Quartet
[2014]
Premièred 31st January, St James' Church, Islington, by the Manon Quartet as part of the 840 concert series.
Programme note:
Thankfully, I have nearly forgotten everything I learned whilst studying. I had already started writing this composition before being asked; therefore it has a peculiar quality that I don’t really know how to deal with. This section should contain all the places I’ve studied, the awards I’ve won, where my pieces have been played, who played them and all that nonsense. Morton Feldman once said, in 1967 on radio to John Cage, that it’s a feeble defence now, to have a mind. Fifteen years earlier, Alan Watts wrote that the thinker has no other form than his thought. On page 279 of The Logical Construction of the World, another thirty-nine years earlier, Rudolf Carnap wrote: “Let us now proceed from classes to classes of classes and to relations between classes and from relations to classes of relations and to relations between relations; such objects are generally no longer called real”. I have four heroes so far; John Cage, Richard Feynman, Alan Turing and Paul Dirac – an English theoretical physicist born in 1902. His dizzying abilities applying advanced mathematics (and forgotten techniques) to the physics of the day revolutionised quantum mechanics and a cherished hobby was making relativistic versions of classical situations. In 1956 at Moscow University, he was asked to summarise the philosophy of physics and he wrote on the blackboard PHYSICAL LAWS SHOULD HAVE MATHEMATICAL BEAUTY. He made mistakes, hardly spoke (the unit of one Dirac represents a word spoken per hour) and was emotionally depleted, but enjoyed playing practical jokes, like sending a friend a crocodile in the post, which jumped out, biting her hand. He read Crime and Punishment with extreme care and described it as ‘nice’ but noted that Dostoevsky had made a mistake, describing in one chapter the sun rising twice on the same day.