How we spent the night

How we spent the night is dedicated to the Rusquartet and commissioned by the Eduard van Beinum Foundation, at the request of the Orlando Festival for the celebration of its 40th edition in 2022. My second and third string quartets were written during the pandemic that began in 2020, and explicitly reflected the experience of lockdown. The second quartet, On the streets and in the sky, contrasted the anxiety of daily life with the beauty of birdsong and unpolluted skies. The third, Togetherness, dramatised isolation and social distancing by separating the players for part of the piece, so that they were unable to share a pulse. My fourth quartet, How we spent the night, was written at a later stage of the pandemic, when it was easier to imagine something more like normal life returning. There is no clear narrative, but I imagine the quartet as a group of friends gathering, talking together, singing and dancing the night away. The first movement is a conversation that progresses by free association. The second is a kind of communing, a song of tenderness and intimacy. The third is a dance. Jonathan Dove