Third String Quartet, Op. 30

Finnissy's Third String Quartet is the composer's response to the natural world and man's place in it. The work incorporates birdsong both transcribed and recorded and the instruments gradually fade out at the end of the work to leave only the sound of birds.

Chaconne. Par LERDAHL FRED. Chaconne (2016), for string quartet, was commissioned by the Daedalus Quartet to celebrate its 15th anniversary. The commission was supported by New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Helen F. Whitaker Fund, and Aaron Copland Fund for Music. My music has a substantial history with Daedalus. I composed the Third String Quartet (2008) for them, and subsequently they performed my three string quartets on several occasions and recorded them brilliantly on Bridge Records (Bridge 9352: Music of Fred Lerdahl, vol. 3). Chaconne is in one movement lasting 19 minutes. It is effectively my fourth string quartet. Quartets 1-3 form a unified cycle lasting 70 minutes. When I finished the cycle, I thought I would never write again for the medium; yet I could not resist the opportunity of working again with Daedalus. The issue was how to compose another string quartet unrelated to the earlier cycle. The solution came from my solo cello piece There and Back Again (2010), which was based on a four-bar variation pattern from a 17th-century chaconne. Unlike the asymmetrical phrases and expanding variations of much of my music, the chaconne form requires symmetrical phrases and strictly periodic variations. I wished to work again with these symmetries but on a larger scale. Chaconne also differs in character and expression from the three-quartet cycle. The cycle is inward and intense, a kind of psychological excavation. Chaconne is, for the most part, transparent and playful. Many of its textures emerge from little canons, not completely unlike the rounds that children sing. Any composer who writes in chaconne form (one thinks above all of the last movement of Bach’s D minor violin partita and the finale of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony) is confronted with the challenge of how to create a larger form out of a constantly repeating pattern. My Chaconne grows from paired antecedent-consequent phrases, each variation lasting eight bars. The 50 variations group into three large rotations, forming three arcs of tension and relaxation, with subtle parallel connections across the rotations. Notwithstanding my attraction to chaconne form, I purposefully disguised its symmetries and periodicities in order to build an overall dramatic shape. Fred Lerdahl/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Sir Arthur Bliss (1891-1975) was a British composer and conductor. He studied under Wood and Stanford at Cambridge and the Royal College of Music where he met and drew inspiration from Vaughan Williams Holst Howells and Goossens. He was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music in 1953 and wrote music for many state occasions including the Coronation and the Funeral of Winston Churchill. The String Quartet No.1 in Bb Major was first published in 1941. It was actually the third String Quartet Bliss composed but the first two were early works which he withdrew or lost. It was written in America in 1940 and first performed inBerkeley California; it became the last work he wrote before he returned to Britain to help the war effort.

Giles Swayne's third string quartet was commissioned by Lord Harewood for the 1993 season of concerts at Harewood House Leeds. The first performance was given by the Skampa Quartet at Harewood House December 1993. The work is written in one continuous movement duration 21 minutes. Instrumentation Violin I Violin II Viola Cello.

Set of Parts for Kevin Volans 'White Man Sleeps' for string quartet. (Violin I, Violin II, Viola, Cello). Written for the Kronos Quartet in 1986. Duration 24 minutes. Score available: CH61123 / Quatuor A Cordes