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

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's  String Quartet No. 10 'New Ground' (2011). Set of parts: WH31462A Programme note: New Ground – No Ground – Green In 1986 I wrote Ground for the Kronos Quartet. I used the principle of the baroque ground and created a series of chords – going up and going down symmetrically. The material formed the basis for the quartet. In my next collaboration with Kronos I wrote the darker Last Ground – at the time supposed to be my last composition of the kind. After some years this seemed a bit pathetic and Idecided to write a new – lighter ground – New Ground. To disappoint my listeners as much as possible I based this piece on a very old and very well-known ground: Pachelbel’s Canon.  The piece is tonal and that suggested another –atonal – composition – No Ground (based on another string quartet – no. 7 Parted from 1984 first performed by Kronos). I am very fond of the elaborated constructivism of the medieval or early renaissance music so in my view the two new quartets needed to be connected and combined. The two quartets can be performed in combination with the four-part vocal piece Green. The text is from medieval England. The pieces are written for the Kronos Quartet and Theatre of Voices.

For Isang Yun String Quartet No. 3 from 1959 marked the beginning of his European creative phase and of his official canon of works. Now it is possible to encounter Yun's early works from his Korean period in the form of his String Quartet No. 1 (1955). Three important 10-minute movements containing references not only to Asia but also to Ravel Bartók and Eastern European folk music and having an idiosyncratic structure: Yun lines up forms and figures makes them emerge from each other in a contrasting manner and assembles them into a mosaic-like whole seeking for integration laying down his material in layer upon layer and ending themovements with a rhythmic unison. […] Even then he probably regarded a work of art as an energetic stream of sounds and as a reflection of a world whose diverging parts weave into a harmonic whole. (Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer)

Three arrangements including Ave Verum Corpus and the Lacrimosa from the Requiem.During the year 1771 when Mozart was 15 years old he and his father Leopold were touring Italy which was at that time the most formidable citadel of the music world. In the following four years the young Mozart was received at the homes and villas of Italy's aristocracy. He met the most famous musicians of the time including Niccolo Piccinni operatic rival to Gluck and Padre Martini from whom he was to benefit from studies in counterpoint. He also met many noted male soprano singers and for one the celebrated Venanzio Rauzzini he wrote in 1773 the motet Exsultate Jubilate from whichcomes the well known Alleluia.At the end of his life only 19 years later in Vienna 1791 Mozart was very ill and working on a number of massive works such as the operas The Magic Flute and Titus also the Requiem. Titus was completed in 18 nerve-shattering days as it had to be performed in Prague in September 1791. At its premiere it was a complete flop. This affected the now overworked almost penniless composer's spirit and he returned to Vienna suffering from mental and physical exhaustion. Rest was denied him. The Magic Flute had to be finished for its premier on September 30th 1791. The task of the Requiem still faced him. In this weakened state Mozart thought that he was in fact writing his own requiem reading evil omens into the commissioning of the work. He thought someone had calculated the precise time of his death and was thus troubled with sombre thoughts. He completed the first two of the twelve parts. The next six parts were in an unfinished state and his manuscript ceased at the Lacrimosa. Süssmayer who was working closely with Mozart at the time was given the task of finishing the Requiem.Ave Verum Corpus is also one of his final works. It is a setting of an anonymous hymn written as a motet for Anton Stoll the choirmaster at Baden in June 1791.Mozart was a composer of great genius who