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The sentence
for string quartet

Instrumentation:

string quartet with optional narrator

Words:

(optional)

after Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The pit and the pendulum’

Duration:

6' 35"

Year of composition:

1998

Commissioned by:

the Endellion String Quartet with funding from Eastern Arts

Premiere:

Endellion String Quartet, The GoehrFest, West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, 24 February 1999

'The Sentence' –the second part of Book of Shadows – may be performed separately, as a free standing composition,  with or without the narrator's part.

 

‘The sentence’ sets fragment from Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’; it is an account of the images that rush through the mind of a prisoner of the Inquisition as he hears ‘the dream-sentence of death’.

 

S.M.

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