The moving force of gestures: Gestural transformation in the Serioso from Hannes Taljaard’s Four Essays (2001-2005)

Abstract

Hannes Taljaard’s string quartet Four Essays is a quintessential work in the South African string quartet literature. Various layers of ambivalence and ambiguity in this work make it a cognitively rich work to listeners and analysts. This article is an analysis of the first movement, Serioso, that shows the composer’s complex compositional technique against the backdrop of influences of metaphors in music, Indian Music and Bharatanatyam, musical gestures, musical forces, Set Theory, French poetry, and lullabies. As with many creative individuals, their lives and their creative outputs are mutually shaped. That is one of the fundamental aspects that are elucidated through the analysis presented in this article. I focus mainly on the thematic material of the work and statements that are based on what Taljaard refers to as the ‘protostatement’.