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Luminal

for string quartet

14,42 €
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Specifications
Region
Oceania
Estimated Duration
31 - 40min
Date
2008

ISMN : 979-0-2325-4358-1

Notes on this piece

Luminal was written in Melbourne and Adelaide between January and February 292008, as a continuous six-movement work for string quartetIt was the result of a private commission from Julian Burnside QC in early 2007. Knowing Julian to be a fan of chamber music, and wanting to write a new piece specifically for Silo String Quartet, by mid-2007 wheels were turning for an early 2008 premiereCaerwen Martin, cellist and Artistic Director of Silo was very keen to create a sociological presentation frame for the workShe had just finished reading Robert Jay Lifton’s study The Nazi DoctorsMedical Killing and the Psychology of GenocideIn late 1930’s Germany, borne out of the concept of Lebensunwertes Leben (life unworthy of life), a form of institutional murder masqueraded behind a revisionist-Darwinian idea of racial purityLuminal was a sedative

repeatedly and secretively administered to children marked for the “Euthanasia” program in order to induce “continuous sleep”, coma and ultimately death, as was the practice.

I had for a long time been fascinated with the death of the Goebbels children, through sedative, then poison, at their mother’s handI remain intrigued by them as culturally ambivalent figures, unsure still how to read themThey cannot be fully claimed as victims of the Nazi regime since the suffering of so many others privileged their entire life, nor, as children, can one view them as culpableThey are stuck then, as tragic interstitial cultural icons, broadly perceived as beyond memorialWith so little known of them, save for their life given, and life took, they are in many ways an inversion of the Lebensunwertes Leben principleLife it seems, to their parents Magda and Joseph, was unworthy of themThere are some clear nods to the Second Viennese School (so loathed by Hitlerin the musical language of LuminalI felt it important to give the work aesthetic historiography, as if the Webern Bagatelles or Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht was playing on a gramophone in the other room, while the sedated, wandering mind tries to break through to some point of conscious resistanceThis is less of a programmatic instruction, merely a point of reference.

Part Medea, part KindertotenliederLuminal is loosely conceived as a lullaby requiem for Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig and Heidrun and naturally all the other children whose lives were mangled or extinguished by the broader parent – the State – not just then and there, but still and sadly, hereKnowing the extraordinary humanitarian work Julian Burnside QC continues to do, let alone the fact that this composition exists purely because of his commission, the work is appropriately inscribed and dedicated to him with deep gratitude.

DAVID CHISHOLM FEBRUARY 292008 MELBOURNE

Instrumentation
Violin (2)|Viola |Cello
Recording
Recorded by Myles Mumford
Assembly Hall
Score Details
Format - A4 / US Letter
Pages - 36


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