String Quartet IV (1988)

String Quartet

SKU: HL.14035183

Composed by Kevin Volans. Music Sales America. 20th Century. Book [Softcover]. Composed 2000. 80 pages. Chester Music #CH61336. Published by Chester Music (HL.14035183).

ISBN 9780711976689. 9.0x12.0x0.372 inches.

Kevin Volans has been described as one of the more inventive composers since Stravinsky. Songlines was composed in 1988, and revised in 1993. Score available: CH61335.

String Quartet

SKU: BT.SCHBB1400374

Composed by Boris Blacher. Set of Parts. 32 pages. Bote & Bock #SCHBB1400374. Published by Bote & Bock (BT.SCHBB1400374).

String Quartet (parts). Blacher, B.

Parts for String Quartet No.3 'Angel's Music' by Bent Sorensen (1988) Premiered by the Arditti String Quartet at the Danish Radio Concert Hall 16 November 1988. Score available: KP00250 The composer writes: 'Even when I was writing Adieu, I knew that I wished to write Angels Music. The title existed in an incomplete form in my mind and gradually more and more ideas and a few outlines became clear. The actual work on Angels Music was started in Rome, where I spent the autumn of 1987 staying at The Danish Academy. Whether this stay has influenced the quartet or not is impossible to say. however, it is true to say that, in the Roman churches I visited, I saw countless angels playing in the top of frescoes and altars. Without these angels, together with the many crackled-gold paintings in this city and my general fascination with the Italian renaissance painter Fra Angelico, (in fact there are only a few paintings by him in Rome, but even his name..!) I am not sure my quartet would have been what it is. Anyway I do feel that there is a bit of Italy in the piece. The angels apart there are, in the short rhythmic agitating part of the quartet, reminiscences of the Italian medieval Trotto dance, and in the most expressive part ofthe piece there are flashes of Puccini-like music. From the very beginning of my work on the quartet, the distant, extremely muted sound in the high register which opens the piece, was on my mind. A sound satiated with a dense heterophonic and polyphonic texture of elegiac melody and vibrating trills. I imagined that little songs (maybe angel songs) could be created in this density, these songs constantly echoing themselves. Gradually as this sound got a more and more concrete musical and instrumental form, I felt, that not only should the little songs be created, played and die out in an echo, but also that the general pattern of the quartet should give the feeling of music which, from the distance, is getting closer and closer, culminates and at last disappears like an echo. Related to this, the general pattern of Angels Music is divided into three: a pre-echo, culmination and echo.. The relationship between the three part is 5: 6: 4. The reason why I can say this precisely and prosaically is that it was necessary to me to mark the overall guidelines before I started to compose. I had to do this in order to enable the relationships to crawl from the small cells into the general pattern.'

String Quartet (Score & Parts)

SKU: HL.49045994

Score and Parts. Composed by Krzysztof Penderecki. String Ensemble. Classical. Softcover. 28 pages. Duration 900 seconds. Schott Music #ED22631. Published by Schott Music (HL.49045994).

The composition of Krzysztof Penderecki's four string quartets is marked by an idiosyncratic interruption: the first two experimental, improvisatory quartets were composed in swift succession in the 1960s. The third and fourth quartets followed substantially later, but were also written in relatively quick succession in the years 2008 and 2016. The quartet cycle as a whole is exemplary of the composerÂ’s two extensive creative phases, thus displaying a stylistic change that is in a class of its own in the history of music. The very short unnumbered quartet Der unterbrochene Gedanke [The Broken Thought], written 1988 in the middle of the 'quartet break', appears as an only too apt commentary.