Par ADAMS JOHN LUTHER. John Luther Adams' Everything That Rises for String Quartet. John Luther Adams' Everything That Rises for String Quartet. Composers note: I never imagined I would write a string quartet. Then I heard the JACK Quartet, and I understood how Imight be able to make the medium my own. The result was The Wind in High Places - a twenty-minute work composed entirely on natural harmonics and open strings. Over the next few years, twomore quartets followed. The second quartet, untouched, is a further exploration of the aeolian sound world of the first. Then, in Canticles of the Sky, the musicians finally touch the fingerboards of theirinstruments. And now comes Everything That Rises . This fourth quartet is more expansive, both in time and in space. It grows out of Sila: The Breath of the World - aperformance-length choral/orchestral work composed on a rising series of sixteen harmonic clouds. Everything That Rises traverses this same territory, but in a much more melodic way. Each musician isa soloist, playing throughout. They surround the audience. Time floats. Over the course of an hour, the lines spin out - always rising - in acoustically perfect intervals that grow progressively smaller as they spiralupward... until the music dissolves into the soft noise of the bows, sighing. Duration: 60 minutes/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

9 Classical Pieces-Thoughtful arrangements of well-known classical pieces by Mozart Haydn Beethoven Schubert and Paradies. This collection providesa perfect introduction to classical music and to string quartetplaying.The Schott String Quartet SeriesWith the first books in the series focusing on baroque classical and romantic styles The Schott String Quartet Series has expanded to cover music ranging from traditional pieces through to Eastern-influenced works. Aside from 'Indian Summer' which features original compositions each book contains original arrangements of well known themes which have often never been arranged for string quartet before. An important characteristic of thesearrangements is that they allow all four instruments to demand the attention throughout the music. The pieces are suitable for amateur musicians or school students and are ideal for public performance.

Ian Venables' The Song Of The Severn is a cycle of songs in celebration of Worcestershire scored for Baritone Voice String Quartet and Piano. “The Song of the Severn…clothes poems by Masefield Housman John Drinkwater and Philip Worner in sharply memorable music of bewitching lyricism idiomatic grace and rapt instinct…No lover of the early-20th-century English art song or pastoral tradition should fail to investigate this notable issue.” - Andrew Achenbach Gramophone “These five songs for voice with piano and string quartet accompaniment take the Severn Riverand its historical and natural associations as a common theme. They are absolutely stunning in their poignant beauty their profoundly noble and moving sense of tragedy and desolation that never turns sentimental or lachrymose and their perfect union of text and music to a level that rivals Schubert and Mahler.” - James A. Altena Fanfare Magazine

Juliana Hodkinson's Is There Something You Can Tell Us for String Quartet.This ten minute piece was written for the Anima Quartet and was comissioned by SWR (South-West German Radio) for first performance at Theaterhaus Stuttgart on 7th June 2014 during the festival 'Lost & Found - Stimme. Text. Szene.'.The quartet's title and the titles of the individual movements are taken from Cynthia Troup's libretto 'Turbulence'.I Degrees of freedomII Hidden by an almost perfect balanceIII We are taught that it is out of reachIV For the real earth we do not know yet

Homunculus is a short (circa 12 minutes) work for string quartet which the composer wrote during the Autumn months of 2007 for the Johannes Quartet.He wanted to compose a piece that would be very compact in form andduration but still contain many different characters and textures. In other words a little piece that behaves like a big piece.He has long been fascinated (and amused) by the arcane spermists’ theory who held the beliefthat the sperm was in fact a 'little man' (homunculus) that was placed inside a woman for growth into a child. This seemed to them to neatly explain many of the mysteries of conception. It was later pointed out that if the spermwas a homunculus identical in all but size to an adult then the homunculus may have sperm of its own. This led to a reductio ad absurdum with an endless chain of homunculi. This was not necessarily considered by spermists afatal objection however as it neatly explained how it was that 'in Adam' all had sinned: the whole of humanity was already contained in his loins.He decided to call my piece Homunculus despite the obvious weaknesses of thespermists’ thinking as he found the idea of a perfect little man strangely moving.