SKU: HL.49045639
ISBN 9781540004796. UPC: 888680710774. 9.5x12.0x0.37 inches.
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.
SKU: HL.51487045
ISBN 9790201870458. UPC: 888680745318. 6.75x9.5x0.244 inches.
In autumn 1895, after returning from New York once and for all, Dvorák took up his former position as teacher at the Prague Conservatory. This clearly had an inspiring impact on him because in the space of just four weeks he composed a new string quartet in G major. Together with the Quartet in A-flat major op. 105, it forms a glorious close to his chamber music oeuvre. Echoes of Bohemian folk music are here mixed with cantabile themes, while his motivic working shows him to be a master at the height of his powers. Even today, it seems almost as if we can feel the composer's satisfaction with this work: “I am working so easily and it is going so smoothly that I could not wish it better.â€.
SKU: HL.14030980
ISBN 9788759871973. 12.0x16.0x0.285 inches.
Score available: KP00250 The composer writes: 'Even when I was writing Adieu, I knew that I wished to write Angel's 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 Angel's 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 of the 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 Angel's 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 general pattern almost fractionally into the smallest cells of the music, or more correctly; crawl from the small cells into the general pattern.'.
SKU: AP.36-52703210
ISBN 9781621567684. UPC: 830056002105. English.
Sightreadable, violins to 5th position. Contents: Joy to the World; O Come, O Come Emmanuel; The First Noel; Silent Night; Deck the Halls; Lo, How a Rose; Hark! The Herald Angels Sing; What Child Is This?; Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella; We Wish You a Merry Christmas.
These products are currently being prepared by a new publisher. While many items are ready and will ship on time, some others may see delays of several months.
SKU: PR.14440572S
ISBN 9781598066029. UPC: 680160617685. 9x12 inches.
When the family heirs to the legendary Galimir String Quartet (three sisters and a brother) gathered to commemorate the centenary birth years of these famed performers, they chose Ellen Taaffe Zwilich to commission for this honor. The composer, who has also worked professionally as a violinist, responded with a one-movement odyssey entitled Voyage, cross-breeding her own characteristic style with glimpses of Viennese waltzes and other Galimir flavor. There is a sweet, sad lyricism to this work, a hectic discord..., some wailing and moaning, these moods alternating with dancing klezmer rhythms of Jewish wedding music that take over and make things right in the end. (Stanley Fefferman, BachTrack.com).
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