Cocteau Dances (string quartet version)

Notes

Cocteau Dances combines and distils many aspects of Cocteau’s personality, his interests, and sense of the archetypal. The key ideas that inform the music are those of ambiguity and transformation; these are already present in the title – is it Cocteau dancing, or the dances of Cocteau?

The piece consists of six movements which are separated by five short cello solos that begin immediately each movement ends, and are ended abruptly by the start of the following movement, which can interrupt their completion. These solos – called Melos – have no relationship to the main body of the work, their material coming from re-composed fragments of the First Delphic Hymn from ancient Greece, and played mostly pianissimo at the threshold of hearing, and as if from another world. The ‘invented’ notation of these cello passages is conceived in a manner that allows for a degree of rhythmic freedom.

This piece is an arrangement of four of the movements from the string orchestra work Cocteau Dances.