The Full Score for Peter Maxwell Davies’ fourth in a series of ten string quartets commissioned by the Naxos Recording company first performed by the Maggini Quartet on 20th August 2004 at the Chapel of the Royal Palace Oslo Norway as part of the Olso Chamber Music Festival. Composer Note: The fourth Naxos quartet was written in January and February of 2004 with the intention of producing something lighter and much less fierce than itspredecessor an unpremeditated and spontaneous reaction to the illegal invasion of Iraq.I returned to the well-known Brueghel picture of children's games (1560 now in Vienna) which had been the inspiration for my sixthStrathclyde Concerto for flute and orchestra. These illustrations liberated my musical imagination but I feel it would limit the listener's perception to be too specific about which game relates to exactly which section of thework. Suffice it to say that there is vigorous play - leap-frog bind the devil with a cord truss wrestling - alongside quieter pastimes - masks guess whom I shall choose courting odds and evens. The single movementjuxtaposes these activities as abruptly and intimately as they occur in Brueghel. Rather as the eye is taken into different perspectives and proportions of scale within the picture taking liberties which would never be presentin for instance Brunelleschi architectural drawings so here with a constant sequence of transformation processes I have distorted the neat precise implications of modal progression expressed in the unison opening phrase(from F to B through A sharp/B flat) so that the ear is led en route into the sound equivalents of strange passageways and closed rooms: sicut exposition ludus. As work on the quartet progressed I became aware that Iwas reading into and behind the games adult motives and implications concerning aggression and war with their consequences. It was impossible to escape into innocent childhood fantasy. The nature of the F to B
