Quartet Quotes

“It took only a few bars to assure her that Thomas Lynn was a very good cellist indeed. His playing had that drive to it which gave you the sense of the shape of the music opening out before him as he played. And he kept that drive and shape, whether the cello was grumbling against the piano, crisply duetting, or out on its own, coaxed into hollow golden song. That feeling of pattern being made, Polly thought, that I had in the pano. Except that this was so expert and so tried that it was hard to believe that it was being done with a musical instrument in somebody’s hands.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock

“Beside her, the strings were tuned. The quartet started to play. When Tom began it, gently rolling sullen, swelling notes out of the cello, she assumed it would be designed to show him as the superb cellist he was. But when Ann’s viola came mourning in, she wondered if it might be intended as a dirge. Beyond Ann, Sam’s violin sang, and Ed’s sang and soared, and the music became something else again, nearly light-hearted. Showing how much the quartet needed Tom? Polly wondered. There was no question they were a good quartet these days. They had improved almost out of mind from the afternoon Polly had spent hearing them practice in the green basement. … The music broadened and depend, put on majesty and passion, and moved onward in some way, fuller and fuller. All four of the players were putting their entire selves into it. Polly knew they were not trying to prove anything—not really. She let the music take her, with relief, because while it lasted she would not have to make a decision or come to a dead end. She found her mind dwelling on Nowhere, as she and Tom used to imagine it. You slipped between Here ad Now to the hidden Now and Here—as Laurel had once told another Tom, there was that bonny path in the middle—but you did not necessarily leave the world. Here was a place where the quartet was grinding out dissonances. There was a lovely tune beginning to emerge from it. Two sides of Nowhere, Polly thought. One really was a dead end. The other was the voice that lay before you when you were making up something new out of ideas no one else had quite had before. That’s a discovery I must do something about, Polly thought, as the lovely tune sang out fully once and then fell away to the end, as the piece had begun, in a long, sullen cello note. And her mind was made up.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock