String Quartet No 1 "In 4/4"
27/05/07 for string quartet
Composer's note
On the string quartet;
'the highest medium for a composer's thought' - Michael Kennedy The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music
'widely regarded as the supreme form of chamber music' - Cliff Eisen Grove Music Online
'a favoured medium through which composers could establish their more serious thoughts. For this reason ... it tends to come up quite frequently in exams.' - Bruce Cole The Composer's Handbook
'... maintains the dichotomy of sophisticated entertainment and highly intimate, quasi-self-revelatory musical utterances' - Otto Karolyi Introducing Modern Music
'It's in 4/4' - J. Simon van der Walt
Notes
Written for the Dalhousie Quartet, who never got around to playing it. (Perhaps not surprising given what an odd piece it is; in two movements, the second of which is to be improvised, devised or composed by the quartet on the model of the first movement. Check out the score.)
Duration ~16'
Score
in4-4.pdf (384 KB)