On 22 June the Aldeburgh Festival saw the world premiere screening of Tim Hopkins’ Four Quartets on Film, featuring his 2020 response to John Woolrich’s Kleine Wanderung from his ongoing string quartet cycle A Book of Inventions. The latest instalment of A Book of Inventions, whose “jigsaw” Woolrich has been assembling since 2017, is Another Journey Calls, which was premiered in March 2023 by the Aris Quartett at the Barber Institute.
Hopkins also created films of quartets by Judith Weir, Helen Grime, and Joe Cutler. But these responses were prompted by Hopkins’ initial work on Kleine Wanderung. The film combines studies shot on the streets of Paris in 2017 – suggestive of the flâneur evoked by Woolrich’s title, ‘a little ramble’ – with his own original artworks, applying paint to clear acrylic plates and sheets. As the film evolved, Hopkins noticed a pattern relating to the action of string playing – abrasions between layers over time – that led to the development of the rest of the project. As guest Artistic Director in 2004, and Associate Artistic Director from 2005-2010, Woolrich is no stranger to the Aldeburgh Festival.
The 2020 film of Kleine Wanderung is available to watch on the NMC website, performed by the Benyounes Quartet, who premiered the piece in 2020. The 11-minute quartet “is a short shaggy dog story”, says Woolrich. The slippery musical narrative was inspired by the digressive literary meanderings of Robert Walser, Laurence Sterne, and Italo Calvino.
There are several films of the quartets that make up A Book of Inventions, also featuring the Benyounes Quartet. These include A still tragic dance, recorded at Chatham Dockyards (where they gave the 2021 premiere), and Villanesca, captured at St Eanswythe's Church in Folkestone, and premiered by the quartet at the Barber Institute in Birmingham in 2018.
Clare Hammond’s Ghosts & Whispers project has also put Woolrich’s music in dialogue with film. Hammond’s hour-long programme interleaves movements from Woolrich’s fragmentary, miniaturist Pianobooks with an unbroken sequence of fragments, last thoughts, elegies and absences by Schubert, Mozart, Wagner, Janáček, Stravinsky, Jacquet de la Guerre and Schumann. The music, performed in near-darkness, is accompanied by stop-motion animation from the Quay Brothers, in a montage assembled from discarded or abandoned film projects. It has been performed at the Barbican and Fundación Juan March, Madrid. Watch the trailer here.