By Various. Edited by Kaiser-Lindemann. For string quartet (2 violins, viola, cello). Includes Deep Rive, Let my People go!, Nobody knows, I got a robe, Where you there??. And Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. Published by Edition Kunzelmann.

String quartet

SKU: FG.55011-498-2

Composed by Kimmo Hakola. Parts. Fennica Gehrman #55011-498-2. Published by Fennica Gehrman (FG.55011-498-2).

ISBN 9790550114982.

Kimmo Hakola's String Quartet No. 4 op. 95 (2016) was commissioned by the Kimito Island Music Finland and it's dedicated to the Meta4 Quartet. In composer's words, it is the floundering, playful, if necessary defiantly dramatic, surprising, capricious and unrestrained tour de force of a youthful entity.Kimmo Hakola has gone through a number of styles and influences in his career as a composer, his idiom expanding at times to embrace Romanticism, Orientalism and klezmer. He has attained international recognition with an output that spans various genres from intimate solo works to full-length operas such as La Fenice (2011) commissioned by the Savonlinna Opera Festival. Many of his works are expansive and epic: his Piano Concerto (1996), for instance, clocks in at 55 minutes. Hakola says that he sees music as drama. His dramas explore almost Shakespearean extremes, from moments of raging 'sound and fury' and violent battles to quiet moments of meditation and heart-rending monologues.

String quartet

SKU: FG.042-09103-6

Composed by Eero Sipila. Score. Published by Fennica Gehrman (FG.042-09103-6).

ISBN 979-0-042-09103-6.

Eero Sipila was an organist by training. His liking for Gregorian chant left its mark on his compositions in the form of stylistic borrowings or at least reflections. In one of his letters Sipila mentioned as his main work the quartet that was to be the last thing he wrote. The name Lux aeterna is a reference to the section in the Gregorian mass, melodic motifs from which dominate the entire quartet. There is no trace of the modernistic tendencies of the works composed in the 1960s, but the pungent seconds harmonies characteristic of Sipila are all there.

For String Quartet and Pre-Recorded Performance Tape. By Steve Reich. (Study Score). Boosey and Hawkes Scores and Books. Size 6.8x10.5 inches. 153 pages. Published by Boosey and Hawkes.

Tenor & String Quartet

SKU: PE.EP72822

Composed by Jonathan Dove. Voice(s) & Various Instruments. Edition Peters. Living Composer. Score and Part(s). 164 pages. Duration 00:30:00. Edition Peters #98-EP72822. Published by Edition Peters (PE.EP72822).

ISBN 9790577011769. 232 x 303mm inches. English.

I have only visited Damascus once, twenty years ago, on the way to Palmyra.  I had a purpose (I was writing music for a play about Palmyra’s Queen Zenobia) but essentially I was a tourist.  Like any visitor, I was thrilled to step out of the noisy modern city into the magical ancient world of the walled Old City, its vibrant souk leading to the magnificent mosque, and a labyrinth of winding, narrow streets filled with the smell of unleavened bread.

In Palmyra, I was met with extraordinary kindness everywhere.  On one occasion, a little Bedouin boy noticed that I was risking sunstroke wandering bare-headed among the spectacular ruins: he showed me how to tie a turban, then took me to have tea with his family in their tent.

Since then, I have watched helplessly as these places of wonder have been devastated and their inhabitants scattered and killed.  When the Sacconi Quartet suggested that I might choose a Syrian poet for our collaboration, I welcomed the idea.

I searched for a long time to find a contemporary poet whose work might gain from any music I could imagine.  I felt it was important to find first-hand accounts of the Syrian experience – but, of course, I was always reading them in translation.  In an anthology called Syria Speaks, I was astonished to read something that looked like prose, but was full of poetry.  It was Anne-Marie McManus’s fine translation of Ali Safar’s A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky – an eloquent, thoughtful, contained yet vivid account of life in a war-torn country, all the more moving for its restraint.

In setting these words, I have not attempted to imitate Syrian music.  However, there is what might be called a linguistic accommodation in my choice of scale, or mode.  Several movements are in a mode that I first discovered while writing a cantata commemorating the First World War: it has a tuning that I associate with war, its violence and desolation.  This eight-note mode is similar to scales found in Syrian music.  I did not choose it in the abstract: it emerged from the harmonies I was exploring in the earlier work, and emerged again as I was looking for the right musical colours to set Ali Safar’s words.  In this work, its Arabic aspect is more prominent. - Jonathan Dove

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