FLINDERS QUARTET
Elizabeth Sellars • violin
Wilma Smith • violin
Helen Ireland • viola
Zoe Knighton • cello

AGATHA YIM, POLYPHONIC PICTURES filming and editing
THOMAS GRUBB, MANO MUSICA sound engineering, editing and mastering

Filmed August 2024 in the Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre, Wurundjeri Country/Southbank

This project was made possible through support from Creative Victoria and FQ’s Fifth String donors

CAROLINE SHAW  1982-
“Blueprint” (composed 2016)

Caroline Shaw is the youngest composer ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, at age 30, for her work Partita for 8 Voices. She has been commissioned by Carnegie Hall, The Guggenheim Museum, and Kanye West. Shaw has studied at Princeton, Rice, and Yale Universities. She is, put simply, a superstar in the classical music world.

A program note from Shaw:

“The Aizuri Quartet’s name comes from “aizuri-e,” a style of Japanese woodblock printing that primarily uses a blue ink. In the 1820s, artists in Japan began to import a particular blue pigment known as “Prussian blue.” … The story of aizuri-e is one of innovation, migration, transformation, craft, and beauty. Blueprint, composed for the incredible Aizuri Quartet, takes its title from this beautiful blue woodblock printing tradition as well as from that familiar standard architectural representation of a proposed structure: the blueprint. This piece began its life as a harmonic reduction - a kind of floor plan - of Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op. 18, No. 6 [“La Malinconia”]. As a violinist and violist, I have played this piece many times, in performance and in joyous late-night reading sessions with musician friends … Chamber music is ultimately about conversation without words. We talk to each other with our dynamics and articulations, and we try to give voice to the composers whose music has inspired us to gather in the same room and play music. “Blueprint” is also a conversation - with Beethoven, with Haydn (his teacher and the “father” of the string quartet), and with the joys and malinconia of his Op.18, No.6.”

This piece proves that a portrait doesn’t necessarily need to be a visual one. One example that immediately springs to mind is Charles Demuth’s famous portrait of William Carlos Williams which references one of his poems, not his face. Of course, there is a strong tradition of musical portraits of people (Elgar’s Enigma Variations) and musical portraits of other compositions are not uncommon either. Blueprint can be aligned with other composers paying homage to their favourite pieces: Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin and Brahms’ Variations on a Theme of Paganini.