Music in Search of Home

An engaging blend of memoir and music history,
Distant Melodies explores the changing ideas of
home, displacement, and return through the lives
and chamber music of four composers.
How does music played and heard over many years inform one’s
sense of home? Writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel
is forbidden and distance is felt anew, Edward Dusinberre,first vio-
linist of the world-renowned Takács Quartet, searches for answers
in the music of composers whose relationships to home shaped the
pursuit of their cra«—Antonín Dvořák, Edward Elgar, Béla Bartók,
and Benjamin Britten.
Dusinberre has lived abroad for three decades. At the age of
21, he le« his native England to pursue music studies at the Juil-
liard School in New York. Three years later he moved to Boulder,
Colorado. Drawn to the stories of Dvořák’s, Bartók’s, and Britten’s
American sojourns as they try to reconcile their new surroundings
with nostalgia for their homelands, Dusinberre reˆects on his own
evolving relationship to England and the idea of home. As he visits
and imagines some of the places crucial to these composers’ creative
inspiration, Dusinberre also reflects on Elgar’s unusual Piano Quin-
tet and the landscapes that inspired it.
Combining travel writing with revealing insights into the work-
ing lives of string quartet musicians, Distant Melodies is a moving
and humorous meditation on the relationship between music a