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Work

Farwell My Good I. Forever : (excerpt from String Quartet)

by Lyle Chan (2007)

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The Australian Music Centre's catalogue does not include any recordings or sheet music of this work. This entry is for information purposes only.

Materials for this work may be lodged in our collection in the future. Until then, any enquiries should be made directly to the composer/sound artist or their agent.

Work Overview

Farwell My Good I. Forever was composed across 2006-7, and it's my farewell to a part of myself, to a mask I was wearing. I had built myself an enormous, successful career as one of the leading classical music arts administrators in the country, working with any and all the best artists I wanted and winning awards for it. The mask said I was living the dream life - whereas the truth was that I had become what the great creativity teacher Julia Cameron calls a 'shadow artist' - someone who secretly wants to be an artist but instead lives in the shadow of actual practising artists.

André Berthiaume wrote, 'We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.' I had come to that point, where I had to confront the fact that I was doing no one, not myself and certainly not the musicians and audiences who love music, any favours by pretending I wasn't a talented composer. I was. The reason people are afraid of their talent is both mysterious and understandable. Marianne Williamson sums it up wonderfully: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. … There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you…. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same."

Writing my massive and lengthy String Quartet, which includes Farwell My Good I. Forever, was how I proved to myself that I was meant to write great, glorious music. Like all goodbyes Farwell is also a recognition of new things, amongst them my acceptance that the most profound contribution I could make to music was actually writing it.

The title comes from a Christopher Tye viol consort work, from which I quote its closing 2 bars. I've retained the title's unstandardized spelling, but it would be modernized as "Farewell, my good one, forever". It was premiered in November 2010 when the Sydney string quartet Acacia gave four performances of it in their concert season.

Work Details

Year: 2007

Instrumentation: String quartet.

Duration: 9 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

First performance: by Acacia Quartet — 21 Nov 10. Hunters Hill School, Sydney

Performances of this work

28 Nov 10: Humph Hall, Allambie Heights NSW. Featuring Acacia Quartet.

21 Nov 10: Hunters Hill School, Sydney. Featuring Acacia Quartet.

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