Advice to a Girl is the debut release for Adelaide-based composer Anne Cawrse (b. 1981). It comprises chamber music scored for various string combinations written between 2004 and 2021, and opens with Grounded (2021), written for Sharon Grigoryan (cello) and Slava Grigoryan (guitar). Like countless local and international musicians and composers, the Grigoryans watched a global pandemic instantly devour months of bookings and found themselves very literally grounded. The joy of their young son’s realisation that they’d all be staying at home together resulted in a more metaphoric grounding, and it is to this psychic journey that Cawrse’s work responds with an elegant directness that should never be mistaken for simplicity. 

This quality also permeates Skittled (2015), a single-movement work performed by the Australian String Quartet in which a recurrent theme goes on a trip through various travails and emerges triumphant. Imperfect Fourth (2004) is scored in three movements for string quartet augmented with guitar. Its centrepiece is the lengthy Adagio in which a repeated drone figure is used...