Distant Melodies

How does music heard and played over many years inform one¿s sense of home? In Distant Melodies, Edward Dusinberre, the English first violinist of the Tak¿ Quartet, explores changing ideas of home, exile and return in the lives and particular chamber works of four composers: Antonin Dvor¿ Edward Elgar, Bela Bart¿k and Benjamin Britten. A resident of Boulder, Colorado for nearly three decades, Dusinberre discovers ways in which music may both accentuate and ameliorate homesickness, as he visits and imagines some of the places crucial to these composers¿ creative inspiration. Drawn to the storiesof Dvor¿ Bart¿k and Britten¿s American sojourns as they try to reconcile their new surroundings with nostalgiafortheir homelands, Dusinberre looks at his own evolving relationship to England through the prism of Elgar¿s unusual Piano Quintet and the landscapes that inspired it.
New aspects of familiar music reveal themselves under altered circumstances. In the forty-eight years since