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Persephone is an abstract work for String Quartet. While the piece is not programmatic, the title did influence the piece, effecting the mood and the musical material.


Persephone was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus in classical Mythology. Hades abducted her and took her back with him to the underworld. As a result, Demeter, the goddess of the Earth, became so upset that plants stopped growing as she searched everywhere for her lost daughter. To stop Earth from dying, Zeus forced Hades to return Persephone. However, Hades tricked her into eating pomegranate seeds, which forced her to return to the underworld for a season each year. As a result, for four months each year, Persephone returned to the underworld and the earth became barren.


The piece begins with a number of different musical fragments which are developed and integrated throughout the piece and interspliced with a number of other sections. The conceptual images of moving between two different worlds evoked swirling chromatic semiquaver sections and the sense of viewing the world from another place added to the sense of distortion and fragmentation which is a feature of the work.

• Adams: Persephone; computer-set 

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• Chris Adams: Persephone 

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“Tathāgata” is the term Goutama Buddha often used when referring to himself after his enlightenment. In Pali and Sanskrit, “tatha” is the “truth”, and “āgata” is “to come”, “arrived”. (The noun buddha drives from “budh”, which means “to understand”.) As Buddha often said, he was a man, not a god or saviour and “…Tathagatas are only teachers… [who] point out the path…”. He taught that it is up to us to make the effort ourselves to follow the right path. “Nibbāna” is the cessation of sorrow and suffering (in Sanskrit “Nirvana”).

The String Quartet is in two contrasting movements. The structure, both overall and within movements, and many musical procedures, build on mathematical ideas. For the composer many layers of intention and personal history combine, but in performance the main impression is of struggle against conflict and discord, eventually overcome in exultant song in the First movement; the Second instead is contemplative, fugal, sometimes complex and intense, but finally resolving tensions and simplifying to end in an ancient cadence.

Maarire Goodall

• Goodall: Tathāgata; computer-set 

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• Goodall: Tathāgata; computer-set 

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