Orava Quartet: A Dream Within a Dream

About the music, Paul Dean’s String Quartet No. 2

I had very little contact with the work of Edgar Allen Poe when I was growing up. We didn’t ever talk about him in school, as far as I can remember. And other than the Alan Parsons Project album Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and that mention of him in the last verse of I am the Walrus I guess I have to admit that those incredible poems had passed me by.

I was at the Adelaide Festival in the early 2000s and during a night off I got a ticket to see Paul Day Clemens and Ron Magid’s one-man play Edgar Allen Poe: Once upon a midnight starring John Astin. To be honest I just went because John Astin starred as Gomez Adams in the popular TV series The Addams Family and I just wanted to see him live. What transpired that night really knocked me. The play was brilliant, John Astin was astounding and I fell in love with Poe’s work immediately and ever since I have always wanted to use his poems as an inspiration to a piece or two in my writing.

However, I didn’t start this quartet with Poe in mind. As is fairly common for today’s composers…I started the first drafts of this work in awe of the string quartet and the burden of the history that the form carries with it. Most of the best known and loved composers in history are in that list because of their operas, symphonies and/or string quartets. (well let’s face it…that is the way that music history has always been told!) So, I started dreaming of the sound that the combination makes and the chance of failure that the form brings with it. Therefore this work began in a very surreal state. And as my imagination wandered, thoughts of Poe’s extraordinary A Dream within a Dream entered my mind. Plato, Aristotle, Descartes before Poe were thinking and writing about the concept that the world and life itself is an illusion and reality in all essence doesn’t exist. Poe’s poem delves into this concept in heartbreaking manner, and he uses it as the basis for this extensive narrative on his own personal ups and downs. (mainly downs it has to be said). A Dream within a Dream was the inspiration for the second movement but from the opening texture in the first movement right through to the last soft short chord 22 minutes later, Poe’s words and the world he created and inhabited in his poems were a constant source of inspiration to the narrative, the sound world and the moods that I have tried to create.

And talking about inspiration, I was thrilled to be writing a piece for the Orava Quartet. I have been watching them for many years now and really admire their energy and brilliance. Edgar Allen Poe aside, writing for this group of musicians was a fantastic inspiration and I am really grateful and indebted to them all for their dedication, and seriously hard work in getting my thousands of dots off the page and into sound. During many hours of writing, I often imagined conversations between the four of them and

these imagined conversations became real musical conversations throughout the course of the work.

Last of all but most importantly, I am thrilled to present this Quartet to Andrew Johnston as his gift to celebrate the 92nd birthday of his mother Stephanie Lillian Johnston.

Andrew has been an enormous supporter of my music for many years and I am forever grateful to him for this extraordinary, constant and life-changing support.

By Paul Dean.