SKU: PR.16400272S
UPC: 680160588442. 8.5 x 11 inches.
My third quartet is laid out in a three-movement structure, with each movement based on an early, middle, and late work of the great American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. Although the movements are separate, with full-stop endings, the music is connected by a common scale-form, derived from the name MARY CASSATT, and by a recurring theme that introduces all three movements. I see this theme as Mary's Theme, a personality that stays intact while undergoing gradual change. I The Bacchante (1876) [Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] The painting shows a young girl of Italian or Spanish origin, playing a small pair of cymbals. Since Cassatt was trying very hard to fit in at the French Academy at the time, she painted a lot of these subjects, which were considered typical and universal. The style of the painting doesn't yet show Cassatt's originality, except perhaps for certain details in the face. Accordingly the music for this movement is Spanish/Italian, in a similar period-style but using the musical signature described above. The music begins with Mary's Theme, ruminative and slow, then abruptly changes to an alla Spagnola-type fast 3/4 - 6/8 meter. It evokes the Spanish-influenced music of Ravel and Falla. Midway through, there's an accompanied recitative for the viola, which figures large in this particular movement, then back to a truncated recapitulation of the fast music. The overall feeling is of a well-made, rather conventional movement in a contemporary Spanish/Italian style. Cassatt's painting, too, is rather conventional. II At the Opera (1880) [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts] This painting is one of Cassatt's most well known works, and it hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The painting shows a woman alone in a box at the opera house, completely dressed (including gloves) and looking through opera glasses at someone or something that is NOT on the stage. Across the auditorium from her, but exactly at eye level, is a gentleman with opera glasses intently watching her - though it is not him that she's looking at. It's an intriguing picture. This movement is far less conventional than the first movement, as the painting is far less conventional. The music begins with a rapid, Shostakovich-type mini-overture lasting less than a minute, based on Mary's Theme. My conjecture is that the woman in the painting has arrived late to the opera, busily stumbling into her box. What happens next is a kind of collage, a kind of surrealistic overlaying of two different elements: the foreground music, at first is a direct quotation of Soldier's Chorus from Gounod's FAUST (an opera Cassatt would certainly have heard in the brand-new Paris Opera House at that time), played by Violin II, Viola, and Cello. This music is played sul ponticello in the melody and col legno in the marching accompaniment. On top of this, the first violin hovers at first on a high harmonic, then descends into a slow melody, completely separate from the Gounod. It's as if the woman in the painting is hearing the opera onstage but is not really interested in it. Then the cello joins the first violin in a kind of love-duet (just the two of them, at first). This music isn't at all Gounod-derived; it's entirely from the same scale patterns as the first movement and derives from Mary's Theme and its scale. The music stays in a kind of dichotomy feeling, usually three-against-one, until the end of the movement, when another Gounod melody, Valentin's aria Avant de quitter ce lieux reappears in a kind of coda for all four players. It ends atmospherically and emotionally disconnected, however. The overall feeling is a kind of schizophrenic, opera-inspired dream. III Young Woman in Green, Outdoors in the Sun (1909) [Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts] The painting, one of Cassatt's last, is very simple: just a figure, looking sideways out of the picture. The colors are pastel and yet bold - and the woman is likewise very self-assured and not in the least demure. It is eight minutes long, and is all about melody - three melodies, to be exact (Young Woman, Green, and Sunlight). No angst, no choppy rhythms, just ever-unfolding melody and lush harmonies. I quote one other French composer here, too: Debussy's song Green, from Ariettes Oubliees. 1909 would have been Debussy's heyday in Paris, and it makes perfect sense musically as well as visually to do this. Mary Cassatt lived her last several years in near-total blindness, and as she lost visual acuity, her work became less sharply defined - something akin to late water lilies of Monet, who suffered similar vision loss. My idea of making this movement entirely melodic was compounded by having each of the three melodies appear twice, once in a pure form, and the second time in a more diffuse setting. This makes an interesting two ways form: A-B-C-A1-B1-C1. String Quartet No.3 (Cassatt) is dedicated, with great affection and respect, to the Cassatt String Quartet, whose members have dedicated themselves in large measure to the furthering of the contemporary repertoire for quartet.
SKU: PR.164002720
UPC: 680160573042. 8.5 x 11 inches.
SKU: BR.KM-2261
ISBN 9790004501658. 16.5 x 11.5 inches.
Gran Torso, for string quartet, was composed in 1971 and revised in 1978. It belongs to a series of works, including Air, Kontrakadenz, Pression and Klangschatten, whose concept of material attempts to free itself from convention. That is, instead of using the sound itself as a point of departure, structural and formal hierarchies are derived from the mechanical and physical conditions present during the process of sound production. It is clear that such a radical break with tradition is not easily achieved: the instrument, the given means, the resonating body itself (as the embodiment of convention) all work against such attempts (with the extended performance techniques representing only the tip of the iceberg of deep-seated contradictions where the bourgeois artist is concerned). Implicit in such a challenge, however, is a claim to aesthetic pregnance: an offer, if one would have it, of uncomprosing beauty.(Helmut Lachenmann, 1978)CDs/LPs:Berner StreichquartettCD col legno 0647 277Berner StreichquartettLP col legno 5504Societa Cameristica ItalianaLP ABT ERZ 1003Arditti String QuartetCD KAIROS, 0012662KAIstadler quartettCD NEOS 10806The JACK QuartetCD mode 267Stadler Quartett, Rg. Caroline SiegersDVD NEOS 51001Bibliography:Alberman, David: Abnormal Playing Techniques in the String Quartets of Helmut Lachenmann, in: Helmut Lachenmann Music with matches, hrsg. von Dan Albertson, Contemporary Music Review 24 (2005), Vol. 1, pp. 39-51.Dulaney, Maxwell: Continuing the Tradition Untraditionally: Helmut Lachenmann's Restructuring of Musical Dialectic through an Analysis of his Three String Quartets, and an Original Composition, Harmonic Concerto, Diss. Brandeis University, MI 2013.Egger, Elisabeth: Kontinuitat, Verdichtung, Synchronizitat. Zu den grossformalen Funktionen des gepressten Bogenstrichs in Helmut Lachenmanns Streichquartetten, in: Musik als Wahrnehmungskunst. Untersuchungen zu Kompositionsmethodik und Horasthetik bei Helmut Lachenmann, hrsg. von Christian Utz und Clemens Gadenstatter (= musik.theorien der gegenwart 2), Saarbrucken: Pfau 2008, pp. 155-171.Hermann, Matthias: Helmut Lachenmann - Gran Torso, in: Analyse Musik XX. Jahrhundert (2). Postserielle Konzepte Klangflachen Aleatorik (= Materialien zur Musiktheorie 4), Saarbrucken: Pfau 2002, pp. 134-152.Hiekel, Jorn Peter: Die Streichquartett Gran Torso und Grido von Helmut Lachenmann, in: Lucerne Festival, Sommer 2005 Neuland, Konzertprogramm 6, pp. 65-69.Houben, Eva-Maria: Helmut Lachenmann: Gran Torso ..., in: dies., Musikalische Praxis als Lebensform (= Musik und Klangkultur 27), Bielefeld: Transcript 2018, S. 208-212Lehmann, Harry: Erhabenheit - Ereignis - Ambivalenz. Zur Asthetik der Neuen Musik, in: Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik 176 (2015), Heft 5, pp. 22-27.Mosch, Ulrich: Kunst als Medium der Ungeborgenheit. Streichquartette und soziale Funktion des Komponierens bei Helmut Lachenmann, in: Positionen 81 (November 2009), pp. 37-39.ders.: Was heisst Interpretation bei Helmut Lachenmanns Streichquartett ,,Gran Torso?, in: Wessen Klange? Uber Autorschaft in neue Musik, hrsg. Von Hermann Danuser und Matthias Kassel (= Veroffentlichungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 12), Mainz u.a.: Schott 2017, S. 163-186Nonnenmann, Rainer: Werke als Schlussel zu Werken? Zur umstrittenen Kategorie ,,Schlusselwerke der neuen Musik, in: MusikTexte, Heft 147 (November 2015), pp. 35-46.Stork, Astrid: Materialbegriff und Strukturdenken. Untersuchungen zu den Streichquartetten von Helmut Lachenmann, Magisterarbeit Ruhr-Universitat Bochum 1992Tsao, Ming: Helmut Lachenmann's Sound Types, in: Perspectives of New Music 52 (2014), Heft 1, pp. 217-238.Velazquez, Rossana Lara: Composicion y escucha burguesa: Principios de continuidad y ruptura en el cuarteto Gran Torso de Helmut Lachenmann, Diss. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico 2011.Zenck, Martin: Die mehrfache Codierung der Figur: Ihr defigurativer und torsohafter Modus bei Johann Sebastian Bach, Helmut Lachenmann und Auguste Rodin, in: de figura. Rhetorik Bewegung Gestalt, Text und Bild, hrsg. von Gabriele Brandstetter und Sibylle Peters, Munchen 2003, pp. 265-288.World premiere: Bremen (pro musica nova), May 6, 1972.
SKU: HL.14043782
8.5x11.75x0.3 inches.
Simon Holt 's 3rd Quartet is the third of six pieces which make up a cycle with the overall title 'Terrain'. Lasting around 23 minutes, this wonderful work is arranged for String Quartet and was co-commissioned by The Radcliffe Trust, NMC Recordings, Internationales Musikfestival Heidelberger Fruhling and Wigmore Hall. The premiere was performed on 19th January 2015. This is the set of parts for 2 Violins, Viola and Cello. The six different compositions, of which 3rd Quartet is the third, are for different combinations of stringed instruments, featuring Piano in the second piece. The music that comprises 3rd Quartet is drawn from the other parts ofthe cycle as a whole, yet in a reverse order. In this way the piece develops what has come before, foreshadows what's to come, all the while encompassing the entire cycle in a single piece.
SKU: PR.11441733S
UPC: 680160631865.
String Quartet No. 9 is the fourth that Wernick has written for the Juilliard Quartet. A commission by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Wernick's ninth string quartet was premiered by the Juilliard in November, 2015 and subsequently taken on tour. The first movement's affect (marked 'Assertive, Aggressive') [compares] to Rockport's forbidding coastline in the eyes of the first. settlers. This was an apt analogy since the work's musical language is, in today's vernacular, 'gnarly.' [The second movement]...a 'never-ending throb of repeated notes'...the effect of steadily diminishing life-force, though with a 'final burst of hope from the solo cello.' Again, the composer made intriguing use of many of the different ways stringed instruments can produce sound. Geoffrey Wieting, The Boston Musical Intelligencer.
SKU: PR.114417330
UPC: 680160631841.
SKU: BA.BA11525
ISBN 9790260108868. 31 x 24.3 cm inches.
Pavel Haas was one of Leoš Janácek’s most gifted students. His String Quartet No. 2 “From the Monkey Mountains†is considered to be one of the first high points of his oeuvre.In this work, Haas combined elements of Janácek’s compositional technique with jazz, particularly in the fourth movement’s instrumentation for string quartet and percussion ad libitum. This version was premiered in Brno in 1926; later, the work was revised for string quartet only. For this edition Ondrej Pivoda has reconstructed the original version, bringing to light passages that were never published until now.This is the first critical edition of the work. It is based on all relevant sources, taking sketches of the final version of the score and contemporary performance material into account. It includes an extensive Foreword (Cz/Eng/Ger) as well as a Critical Commentary (Eng).
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