Water out of Sunlight

When I asked T. S. Eliot once why he had called his four late poems Four Quartets, he told me the title arose from his passionate love and admiration for Beethoven’s late quartets. I shared his passion; and certainly my own Quartet 4 relates to that world of intimate and intense musical sound. In Eliot’s poem ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of the four poems, the movement from ‘drained pool’ to ‘water out of sunlight’ comes more than once, as it does also in my quartet. The transcription from four solo strings to string orchestra should make the ‘sunlight’ brighter. Yet the journey from inchoate murmurs to resplendent sound and back remain in essence the same. Michael Tippett