Duration 20:00

‘The Third String Quartet demonstrates JacobTV’s capabilities as a storyteller. its subtitle ‘There must be some way out of here’ is a quotation from ‘All along the watchtower’ by Bob Dylan. A song that particularly embodies the philosophy of life as expressed by the rock generations from which JacobTV stems.

‘There must be some way out of here,
said the joker to the thief.
There’s to much confusion
I can get no relief’

These lyrics can be seen as optimistic or despairing, but also as encapsulating an idea to be explored. That’s the spirit in which the 3d quartet was conceived. The music is about the forces of attraction and repulsion revolving around the central note ‘D’ and about ‘sound’. For JacobTV sound also means harmony. In that sense, the 3d quartet is a search for a harmonic ‘resolution’: in the words of the composer ‘far from the faded avant-garde, from threadbare conceptualism and postmodernism.’ This search yields a huge spectrum of events: a maze of side roads, abrupt transitions and apparent lacunas. The search for a new aesthetic for Jacob TV, however, does not mean falling back into a romantic idiom. On the contrary, the 3d quartet is in essence one large crescendo, with striking elements drawn from blues and rock. Initially, the composer wanted to call this quartet ‘Life and the Boy’ because of its extraordinary energy, and as a deliberate inversion of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’.
The first movement of String Quartet No.3 was used for different choreographies, like Hans van Manen’s Short Cut. (video below)