For 2 Violins, Viola and Violoncello. By Ludwig van Beethoven. Edited by P. Mies. This edition: HN268. String Quartets. Henle Music Folios. Pages: Vl I Part = 61 * Vl II Part = 60 * Va Part = 58 * Vc Part = 57. Urtext edition without fingering-paper bound. 246 pages. Published by G. Henle.

Composed by Anton Stepanovich Arensky (1861-1906). Op. 35. Set of performance parts for violin, viola, cello I and cello II. With standard notation. 58 pages. Published by Walter Wollenweber.

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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String Quartet (Score)

SKU: HL.284555

String Quartet. Composed by John Luther Adams. Music Sales America. Classical. Softcover. Composed 2018. 74 pages. Chester Music #CH87868. Published by Chester Music (HL.284555).

UPC: 888680912901. 9x12 inches.

Composers note:

I never imagined I would write a string quartet. Then I heard the JACK Quartet, and I understood how I might be able to make the medium my own. The result was The Wind in High Places - a twenty-minute work composed entirely on natural harmonics and open strings.

Over the next few years, two more quartets followed. The second quartet, untouched, is a further exploration of the aeolian sound world of the first. Then, in Canticles of the Sky, the musicians finally touch the fingerboards of their instruments.

And now comes Everything That Rises.

This fourth quartet is more expansive, both in time and in space. It grows out of Sila: The Breath of the World - a performance-length choral/orchestral work composed on a rising series of sixteen harmonic clouds.

Everything That Rises traverses this same territory, but in a much more melodic way.

Each musician is a soloist, playing throughout. They surround the audience. Time floats.

Over the course of an hour, the lines spin out - always rising - in acoustically perfect intervals that grow progressively smaller as they spiral upward... until the music dissolves into the soft noise of the bows, sighing.

String Quartet

SKU: IG.IMF1824

Composed by Daniel Baldwin. Score and Parts. Imagine Music Publishing #IMF1824. Published by Imagine Music Publishing (IG.IMF1824).

9 x 12 inches.

Written for my first doctoral recital, Celestial Harmonies was a fun exercise in experimentation. I approached another graduate student, Allen Morris, about taking high quality photographs of each of the constellations, which he did between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve in 2013. Upon receiving these photographs, I had staff paper printed on transparency paper and placed the constellation photos beneath the transparency paper and traced out the constellations on the staff paper. These became the introductory sketches for this new string quartet. Like a solitary photographer gazing up at the night sky, the music is quiet and intimate, but reflects the drama and wonderment of this wonderous phenomenon.

String Quartet - Grade 4

SKU: BT.WH31498

Composed by Hans Abrahamsen. Score Only. Composed 2013. 42 pages. Edition Wilhelm Hansen #WH31498. Published by Edition Wilhelm Hansen (BT.WH31498).

ISBN 9788759824603. English.

String Quartet No.4 was composed by Hans Abrahamsen in 2012. Commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Wigmore Hall For the Arditti Quartet. Programme note: The basic idea for my Fourth String Quartet was very clear to me: It should be quiet and soft music or to put it in a german term: hoch im Himmel gesungen ... (”High singing in heaven…”). Each of the four movements has a different scordatura/pitch. The first movement begins like my work ”Schnee” sky-high with an airy and soft melody by the first violin. The second movement is fast and ”movement and joy”-like. It consists of two duets and a reverse style counterpoint. While the sections were progressively longerin the first movement they are getting shorter and shorter in the second. ”Dark, heavy and earthy” is the third movement and its pizzicato recalls big black raindrops falling to the ground. It is the dark and grainy counterpart to the first movement whereas the fourth movement corresponds to the second. The fourth movement was planned as a dark and heavy counterpart but it turned out to be like ”babbling” music of a child. My Fourth String Quartet has become in its way a serene and cool piece. So the Quartet has been finished luckyly after twenty years it was already in 1990 that I was commissioned by Wittener Tage für Neue Musik to write the piece for Arditti Quartet. Hans Abrahamsen.

String Quartet No.4 was composed by Hans Abrahamsen in 2012. Commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Wigmore Hall For the ArdittiQuartet. Programme note: The basic idea for my Fourth String Quartet was very clear to me: It should be quiet and soft music or to put it in a german term: hoch im Himmel gesungen ... (High singing in heaven). Each of the four movements has a different scordatura/pitch. The first movement begins - like my work 'Schnee' - sky-high with an airy and soft melody by the first violin. The second movement is fast and movement and joy-like. It consists of two duets and a reverse style counterpoint. While the sections were progressively longer in the first movement they are getting shorter and shorter in the second. Dark, heavy and earthy is the third movement and its pizzicato recalls big black raindrops falling to the ground. It is the dark and grainy counterpart to the first movement whereas the fourth movement corresponds to the second. The fourth movement was planned as a dark and heavy counterpart but it turned out to be like babbling music of a child. My Fourth String Quartet has become in its way a serene and cool piece. So the Quartet has been finished luckiyly after twenty years - it was already in 1990 that I was commissioned by Wittener Tage fur Neue Musik to write the piece for Arditti Quartet. Hans Abrahamsen

String Quartet (Study Score)

SKU: HL.51487272

Study Score. Composed by Alexander Zemlinsky. Edited by Dominik Rahmer. Henle Music Folios. Classical. Softcover. G. Henle #HN7272. Published by G. Henle (HL.51487272).

UPC: 840126989366. 6.75x9.5x0.245 inches.

Alexander Zemlinsky's music was long unjustly overshadowed by what was regarded as the “more progressive” Second Viennese School. Although Zemlinsky was close friends with its protagonist Arnold Schönberg, he never did take the latter's radical step into dodecaphony. At the same time, he composed works that were no less original or fully fledged. Composed between 1913 and 1915, his Second String Quartet in particular pushed the contemporaneous understanding of form and tonality to its limits. With just one movement but spanning over 1,200 measures, this multi-faceted work numbers among the most significant contributions to the genre of the time and has long merited a critical new edition. The Urtext edition by G. Henle Publishers corrects many errors and inaccuracies in the first edition that came to light after careful comparison with the autograph sources in Vienna and Washington. For the first time, too, the metronome markings that survive only in one of Zemlinsky's letters have been incorporated. Editorial work was kindly supported by the Alexander Zemlinsky Endowment Fund in Vienna.

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