String Quartet - Grade 5

SKU: HL.14042989

Composed by Pelle Gudmundsen-holmgreen. Music Sales America. Classical. Softcover. Composed 2014. Edition Wilhelm Hansen #WH31937. Published by Edition Wilhelm Hansen (HL.14042989).

ISBN 9788759829240. English.

All In One for 3 String Quartets was composed by Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen in 2013 (String Quartet No.12,13 and 14 played simultaneously).


Gudmundsen -Holmgreen has written a collection of three new string quartets: String Quartet no. 12, ‘Each in Each’; String Quartet no. 13, ‘Mutual Ordering’, and String Quartet no. 14, ‘Well-Tuned Sounds’. Each quartet can be played on its own; they can also played simultaneously in any combination. When all three quartets are played together, as they are tonight, the combined work is titled All in One. About this collection, Gudmundsen-Holmgreenwrite s:


'Some years ago Kronos and the vocal group Theatre of Voices performed three new pieces, which I had written for the two groups: one for Theatre of Voices (Green), and two for Kronos (New Ground and No Ground). They were played and sung by each group independently – but also both groups together concurrently, on top of each other, as a final gesture. The combined pieces were called New Ground Green and No Ground Green.


'David liked the idea (and the result) of pairs of quartets that could be played both independently and simultaneously, and asked me if the vocal quartet could be transformed into a string quartet. It could not. He then asked me to repeat the whole set-up with a new pair of quartets, adding also some percussion instruments, as was the case with Green for Theatre of Voices. Of course this was tempting. Furthermore David asked me to make one of the two new quartets a little easier to play.
'I began to work. The Kronos part of the pair of quartets turned out to be tough to play, as David puts it. Unfortunately the ‘easier’ one was tough to play also! So I had to write one more, which was then a little easier still (but still not easy).
'The three new works can be played separately and on top of each other in many different combinations, resulting in different kinds of.

Composer's notes: This piece came about in a rather unusual way. I had a dream in which a string quartet were playing some very beautiful music. I was exhorting them to 'play it like late Beethoven' When I woke up, I could not remember any themes or details of what they had been playing, but had an intense memory of the 'feeling' of the music, which was soft, sensual and muted, and I immediately sat down to write a string quartet. What began to emerge was nothing like Beethoven at all, and very early into the writing I had a strong vision of some people dancing a formal and intense series of dances in a village in a very dry and hot landscape - the Australian outback or Africa maybe. The dances were very moving, with an inward, ritualistic quality and they obviously had great meaning for the people performing them. Geoffrey Burgon

String quartet

SKU: HL.49045639

Chaconne. Composed by Fred Lerdahl. This edition: Saddle stitching. Sheet music. String Ensemble. Softcover. Composed 2016. 108 pages. Duration 990 seconds. Schott Music #ED 30174. Published by Schott Music (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.

String Quartet

SKU: HL.14008374

Composed by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Music Sales America. Classical. Score. Composed 2006. 24 pages. Chester Music #CH68629. Published by Chester Music (HL.14008374).

ISBN 9781846096150. UPC: 884088435202. 8.25x11.75x0.105 inches.

The Full Score for Peter Maxwell Davies' fourth in a series of ten string quartets commissioned by the Naxos Recording company, first performed by the Maggini Quartet on 20th August 2004 at the Chapel of the Royal Palace, Oslo, Norway, as part of the Olso Chamber Music Festival. Composer Note: The fourth Naxos quartet was written in January and February of 2004, with the intention of producing something lighter and much less fierce than its predecessor, an unpremeditated and spontaneous reaction to the illegal invasion of Iraq. I returned to the well-known Brueghel picture of children's games (1560, now in Vienna), which had been the inspiration for my sixth Strathclyde Concerto, for flute and orchestra. These illustrations liberated my musical imagination, but I feel it would limit the listener's perception to be too specific about which game relates to exactly which section of the work. Suffice it to say that there is vigorous play - leap-frog, bind the devil with a cord, truss, wrestling - alongside quieter pastimes - masks, guess whom I shall choose, courting, odds and evens. The single movement juxtaposes these activities as abruptly and intimately as they occur in Brueghel. Rather as the eye is taken into different perspectives and proportions of scale within the picture, taking liberties which would never be present in, for instance, Brunelleschi architectural drawings, so here, with a constant sequence of transformation processes, I have distorted the neat, precise implications of modal progression, expressed in the unison opening phrase (from F to B through A sharp/B flat), so that the ear is led, en route, into the sound equivalents of strange passageways and closed rooms: sicut exposition ludus. As work on the quartet progressed I became aware that I was reading into, and behind the games, adult motives and implications, concerning aggression and war, with their consequences. It was impossible to escape into innocent childhood fantasy. The nature of the F to B progression underlying the whole construction derives from a passage in the development of the first movement of Mahler's Third Symphony, and the opening of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet. However, unlike in these models, here a real - if temporary - sense of resolution occurs at the close of the quartet: as when the curtain falls on the reconciled Count and Countess in 'Figaro' one wonders how long the F/B truce will hold, and games break out again. The quartet is dedicated to Giuseppe Rebecchini, Roman architect, and friend since the nineteen-fifties.