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

The Snowman is a beautifully composed piece for the traditional Christmas time film of the same title. The composer Howard Blake takes the music through the cold wintery sky, floating blissfully as if it was all a dream.The sheet music is beautifully arranged for a string quartet. The perfect addition to anyones festive collection. / Quatuor A Cordes

PrefaceThe three movements of the quartet may be perceived as three different expressions of an unstable core: an inherent unrest leads to frequent changes of direction. The first movement is full of dramatic contrasts; it is followed by a second movement whose basic mood of meditative rest is challenged by occasional centrifugal utbursts while the third movement takes the inherent conflicts to a higher level contrasting material of introspective lyricism with excessively pathetic moods.The final ?way out? is a retrograde one (back) ?into the source?: through a constant accelerando-diminuendo the piece disappears into a vanishing point. The ?into thesource? of the title may be visualized as a reversed fountain-action: the broad fan-like spread of the first movement a more coherent-solid second movement and finally - in the third movement - a return-run ever more vehemently like a suction into the spring itself ?The musical motifs are varied; there are traffic-situations (which I heard!) with stomping and machine-like rhythms in different but simultaneous tempi and there are more abstract upwards and downwards half-tone-scales with changing accents creating glimpses of melodies.INTO THE SOURCE String Quartet No. 9 was composed on a double-commission from the Orion Quartet and the Vertavo Quartet. The premiere performances took places in Santa Fé in 2002 and in Oslo in 2003.Per Nørgård

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

Holmboe's last quartet work which is unoffi­cially also String Quartet No. 21 was the last work he ever composed and was unfinished on his death in 1996. His pupil Per Nørgård has finished the quartet and himself characterizes his contribution by saying that the score existed “in an only partly completed form which could however be written out with only a few cases of doubt”. With only two movements and a play­ing time of about nine minutes it is at its exist­ing length the shortest of Holmboe's string quar­tets. The first movement takes the form of one long arch in a rocking triple time which constantly shiftsamong different tempo and pulse sensations. At the same time the rhythmic en­ergy increases until the movement in a faster Con moto tempo accelerates to a more flowing 12/8 time coloured both rhythmically by cross-­rhythms in duple time and timbrally by harmon­ics in the viola. In its middle section Con fuoco the movement culminates in both tempo and expression until it falls calm in brief recapitula­tions in reverse order of the first two sections. The rocking feeling continues in the second movement but now at a more extroverted level from the outset Allegro and pizzicato. The en­ergy builds up further as the mood intensifies to Con fuoco while all instruments go over to bowed playing but like the first movement this movement ends Adagio here however not as a gradual attenuation but through a sudden shift in tempo to a calm imitative passage before the movement slowly thins out to the almost inaudible through a last dense open sounding chord with a brief violin solo above it. The quartet is dedicated to Holmboe's wife MeLa May Holmboe and was given its first performance by the Kontra Quartet on 22nd March 1997 at the Carl Nielsen Academy of Music in Odense Denmark.