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′