BY THE LETTER STRING QUARTET
The Letter String Quartet has just released its debut album All the Stories. In this blog, its artists take you through each track to share the stories of its creation. You can have a listen and support the release on Bandcamp.
Biddy Connor: The Letter String Quartet’s debut album All the Stories features five songs written as a collaboration between myself and poet and lyricist Maria Zajkowski. These songs were written for the quartet and guest vocalist Marita Dyson (The Orbweavers).
Many years before these songs were written, Maria generously gave me some of her poetry to use as lyrics for my then-band Sailor Days. I used two of them: Species Counterpoint and Born Quick.
After getting a small grant from the Abbotsford Convent, we decided it would be a good opportunity to write songs together from scratch. This was done in a kind of back-and-forth way – I would send Maria some musical ideas and then she would respond with some lyrics, or the other way around. They were always written with Marita in mind as the vocalist, so when I passed the songs on to Marita there was also a bit of collaborating on what felt right for Marita to sing. I really enjoyed those parts of the collaboration.
Maria Zajkowski: Each song in the All The Stories suite has been written from a different point of view, and is the voice of a particular experience.
In these songs you will find the themes of escape, devotion, compulsion, trust, weariness, choice(lessness), beauty, nature, and God in all things.
Days of Thought
MZ: Days of Thought is about daily devotion to ritual, self-exploration through process, and recognising yourself in nature.
BC: This piece uses a lot of string harmonics – both the artificial and natural ones. This means that the tuning and texture of these different types of harmonics give the music a bit of a wonky-but-floating feeling. I love how Marita’s voice also floats delicately over the top for most of the song, and then brings in some intensity to the parts where the words are repeated – ‘I resist, I resist…’. It is a great contrast to the scratchy distorted viola solo in the middle – self-exploration is never a smooth ride!
Same but Swallowed
MZ: Same but Swallowed is the migrant song, for those who endured a long journey to an uncertain future. It’s about the need to fit in while preserving your identity. For this song, I drew on my father’s experience as a refugee.
BC: The hammer-on part at the beginning is how this piece began. Getting to amplify this in the recording process was quite satisfying – being able to hear the different wood tones on the necks of each of the four stringed instruments.
When we play this live and all the rhythmic parts settle, it feels pretty powerful to hear the unison violin lines come together over the top. That violin melody line gives the journeying feel to the song.
The three-part harmony in the chorus section is meant to be a real blend of sound, rather than a lead voice with backing vocals – and that turned out really well in the recording. As a quartet, we are getting better and better at singing together.
Blossoms of the Wreck
MZ: Blossoms of the Wreck is about the women and girls who worked long hours in the laundry at the Abbotsford Convent. It’s a mechanical song; a woman as a machine. It’s about the cycles in which we exist, and sometimes live; and about the business of business, the wheeling and dealing of life and lives.
BC: Notating this piece was initially quite hard – getting that fine line between giving the players direction and allowing them to interpret the music in their own way. This was another instance that made me so happy to play with this bunch of people. Everyone is listening and reacting as a cohesive group.
Sometimes, when I bring a piece of music to the quartet, I find it hard to concentrate on playing and listening to the piece at the same time – it’s something I think I’m getting better at with practice. When I finally let go of listening as a composer, and instead start listening as a part of a group, it feels very liberating to know that I am not alone with the music anymore. Accepting advice about interpretation from the ensemble is a wonderful thing.
My favourite part of this piece is how Marita and violinist Steph blend together so beautifully on the melody.
All the Stories
MZ: All the Stories explores the convent grounds as a place of escape, particularly in summer. It’s about losing ourselves in nature and how this is can be a deeply personal and solitary experience.
Just as after summer comes autumn, after we live, we fall. Connecting to this truth through nature can show us what there is to appreciate.
BC: The main riff for All the Stories is something that I wrote many years ago, but felt that I never really found a home for it. It was written on piano, and so doesn’t work or sound that great on a stringed instrument. Sharing it around as a hocket gave it another quality altogether.
Again, it’s great to hear Marita’s vocal tones floating over the top of that rhythmic precipice! Everyone in the quartet sings at some point in this song. It was great working out the best combinations – when to add the lone male voice from Steph is always a little extra step in the dynamics.
The Open One
MZ: The Open One is a vision. It is an intimate appreciation of what you can feel when talking to yourself, your creator, or the unknown.
BC: This song started off as a solo piece for just viola and voice, and originally it would be performed at the start of the song cycle – so the song cycle would begin as a lone player and then end with that same piece with the whole group.
In the end, it felt like it didn’t work so well in the studio – maybe for another time. The way that Marita interpreted the melody and lyrics really helped to ground this song and give it the intimacy that it needed.
The Orbweavers covers:
BC: At the end of the album, there are two versions of songs by Marita’s band, The Orbweavers. The Letter String Quartet has worked live with Marita and Stuart Flanaghan from The Orbweavers many times now. Their songs lend themselves so well to being played on stringed instruments.
Getting to work out the intricacies of Stuart’s melodic guitar parts was very satisfying. Below are some descriptions of these songs by Marita Dyson, which were first published on The Letter String Quartet’s blog.
Momento Mori
MD: Momento Mori was written about silkworms – known as Bombyx mori, in Latin – named after the mulberry genus Morus/Mori on which they exclusively feed.
Silkworms spin a cocoon of continuous silken thread at pupal stage, before breaking from the cocoon to emerge as a white moth. Silkworm cocoons have been used to manufacture silk fabric and embroidery thread for thousands of years. To harvest the silk as a continuous thread, cocoons are usually plunged into boiling water before the moths have a chance to emerge. This was a sobering realisation, and changed the way we felt about the silk clothes we possess, a humbling reminder of the many moth lives that contributed to them.
The song title is a reference to the Latin expression ‘memento mori’, a Western artistic motif and theme, translating as ‘remember you will die’, substituting ‘momento’ Italian for moment, and retaining ‘mori’ latin for both death and the scientific name for the mulberry plant genus. Death is prescient in the Western naming of a moth and plant, whose lives are intertwined.
Merri
MD: Merri Creek has carved its way over ancient basalt lava flows, which are [millions of years old]. A tributary of the Birrarung, it flows north-south, through the unceded lands of the Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri-willam) people, who have cared for it over millennia.
The industrial history of the Merri Creek in Brunswick[…] is one of extraction and exploitation. Its basalt bed and surrounding clay soils provided raw building materials for the expanding colonial settlement of Melbourne. […] In 2009, Stuart and I began walking along the Merri with our adopted greyhound Fern. The song arrived peripatetically, as we followed the infilled creek bank, which is now replanted with eucalypts, wattles, and sheoaks. Lyrics for the song emerged from the stories sensed around us: protruding evidence of the tip, a remnant quarry crane, the scent of wattle tannins rising from the creek valley.
Merri is a tribute to the creek’s resilience despite the violence carried out against it through land clearing, extraction, and waste disposal. The song is written to sing in our heads, to map the passage of its waters, and remember the history of the creek as we walk.
Content courtesy TLSQ. Featured image credit Bryony Jackson. B&W photo by Anthony Paine.
