Program Note:
Anamnesis was commissioned for Musica Viva Australia by Barry and Diana Moore in support of Australian composition. It was written in 2018-19 and premiered by the Goldner String Quartet & the Dover Quartet at the Musica Viva Festival in Sydney in 2019.
The piece is inspired by Aden Rolfe’s writing on the topics of memory and nostalgia in the 2016 publication, False Nostalgia. Exploring Plato’s concept of anamnesis (a ‘re- remembering’ or recovering of old knowledge from past lives) alongside Rolfe’s commentary on moderating identity through memory and the placement of memories within constructed narratives, the piece reframes a fragment of disused musical material found in a decade-old sketch. Each of the movements privileges different aspects of the original musical fragment, resulting in three distinct narratives that re-frame the memory.
