SKU: HL.367873

ISBN 9781705140291. UPC: 840126966657. 9.0x12.0x0.655 inches.

Commissioned by Caramoor Music Festival in New York and premiered July 14, 2017 by the Argus Quartet, this work is in no small part a response to this quartet's sense of adventure and expressive emotional range. Inspired by two end-of-civilization novels the composer was reading prior to composing the work, the quartet unfolds in a single movement, loosely based on plot lines in both novels. One of the novels includes a Traveling Symphony, an assortment of musicians and actors who travel the countryside for decades playing symphonies, jazz and orchestral arrangements of popular music alongside performances of Shakespeare plays, reminiscent of medieval troupes traveling the countryside in plague-ridden times. The work is written so that the quartet embodies the Traveling Symphony, not only playing music but also singing and 'stage whispering' fragments of King Lear and other text across the collection of nine scenes.

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: FG.55011-853-9

Lara Poe's (b. 1993) energetic Divergence (2015-2016) for string quartet was conceived cyclically: the four movements explore drifting in and out of focus between different materials. A light ditty of the second movement diverges to the third movement's overtone derived chords.

Duration: c. 25'

This product includes a set of parts (violin I, violin II, viola, violoncello) and a score.

Lara Poe is a Finnish-American composer who is currently based in London. Her works have been performed across a wide range of venues throughout the US, Europe, and Asia. Her piece Kaamos, which she wrote for the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, was recently nominated for a Ivors Composer Award in the Large Scale Composition category. Kaamos also was selected by YLE Radio Finland to represent Finland at the International Rostrum of Composers 2021 in Belgrade, Serbia. Poe was the 2019 Tanglewood Music Patricia Plum Wilde Fellow and represented Finland at Ung Nordisk Musik 2019 in Piteå. She was also a 2018-2019 participant in the London Symphony Orchestra's Panufnik Scheme, where she worked under the guidance of Colin Matthews and Christian Mason.