String Quartet No 1 "In 4/4"

Score

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.

Duration ~16'