sous rature

3 miniatures for violin & viola

Curtain call after the première of the revised version of sous rature (2017 / 2025) by James Cuddeford and William Lane, at the closing concert of the South China Contemporary Creative Music Institute, Guangzhou, China.

Instrumentation

Violin, viola

Duration

8 minutes

I. (statico)

II. (pochissimo meno mosso, ma sempre volatile)

III. (più lento, molto statico)


Première [original version]

5 August 2017; Ciclo de Música Contemporánea de Oviedo

Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, Spain

Selena Choi (violin) & William Lane (viola)

Première [revised version]

5 May 2025; South China Contemporary Creative Music Institute

Avant-garde Hall, Canton Tower Theater, Guangzhou, China

James Cuddeford (violin) & William Lane (viola)


Dedication

To James Cuddeford and William Lane


Introductory remarks (excerpt)

... Interpretative reduction [...] is partially coterminous with filtering, that is, the privileging of selected elements out of the whole while erasing others from the ‘larger picture’; and since variations in filtering criteria is the impinging factor determining which sets of elements percolating to the foreground, the constitution of the complex whole is thus revealed to be entirely contextually differential: the reduction of a work during the interpretative process is de facto a process of rewriting, exposing the fallacy that the work’s identity [...] could have been singular, or, indeed, predeterminable ab initio. Instead, the process in search of the work unfolds by virtue of this initial act of reduction, which materialises – sets into motion – the plural pathways through which part of the work’s very essence may be glimpsed, then framed and captured, and, finally, as a form of rewriting, suggestively inflected and refracted.

Score samples