Obliques
(1958) for orchestra
Duration: 9'
2(pic).222/4331/timp/str

World Premiere: 8 January 1959, BBC Scotland
BBC Scottish Orchestra
Sir Colin Davies, conductor

Publisher:  Chester Music Ltd

Critical Acclaim:

Cast in the form of a Theme and Variations each step in the music's development is clear cut and convincing. The score is finely shaped and nicely paced. The orchestration is characteristically fresh and lucid...
— Peter Heyworth, The Observer

...Obliques, though an early work, seems already to characterize all of Miss Musgrave's music. Her idiom can be placed somewhere between late romanticism and expressionism, tonality and atonality, conventional scoring and aleatorics. But what seems to mark her writing even more is her exceptional sense of drama...
— Benjamin Bar-Am, The Jerusalem Post

Composer's Note:

Obliques is a short work in a single movement written while at Tanglewood during her first visit to the U.S.A. in 1958.

The work takes the form of a theme and variations, but with the unusual feature that the flow of the variations is twice interrupted by an interlude. It culminates in a short finale combining elements of both theme and interlude. The title of the work is taken from a poem by the Scottish poet Maurice Lindsay. Its question-answer form was transformed into the questioning dynamic elements of the theme and variations, and the contrasting calm "answers" of the interludes.

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