NOTES This first string quartet, as I hope to create more, was commissioned by the Lynn University Conservatory of Music and the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at of an invitation for me to serve as composer-inBrigham Young University as residence at Lynn in March, 2008. In preparation for composing this work I studied quartets by Beethoven, Smetana, Brahms, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Elgar, Debussy, Ravel, Bartok, Szymanowski, Shostakovich, Lutoslawski, and Volans, with emphasis on Haydn, in particular, the Prussian Quartets, Op. 50. After getting my fill of the greatest genius and innovation of these masters and not being able to find the forest through the trees, I attempted to my voice outside of the forest.
The quartet's five movements have an arch-like architecture much like Bartok' s Fifth Quartet, with a twist. The first movement a sonata form an inverted, serve as recapitulation and coda. The and fourth movements are intermezzi structural bookends the third movement The owe much to Shostakovich, contain cadenza-like qualities for the second violin and viola in the first one and the first violin and the second. The.finale is a free-for-all development and matriculation much like that of the first movement, but freed from ~i~~L~~~·~sonfilatmt)llCfill()nS.
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relationships from letter designations found (A) University (B-flat) Conservatory (CIC-sharp) ofMusic (E). The begins in A minor, ending in the first intermezzo begins in C Major, ending in Major; the scherzo G; second begins . . . . . ..,."·U-'-''Y"... E-flat, ending in B-flat and the begins ending triumphantly in A Mixolydian. Harmonically, this work could remind one of Britten, Walton, Finzi, Bartok, Medtner, Paert, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Barber. While it is freely tonal, it is not completely "emancipated," as there are many harmonically strategic moments that hopefully cause the ear to relax in prosaic restfulness hovering with· directed ambiguity and spent ·ambition before landing clandestinely around a focal point. · bp