I just thought I would add a little activity to this site by posting my latest rendering of an older work, my first (and so far only) string quartet, which I began as a student at Michigan in 1975 and finished, except for minor revisions, in 2020. It's a dissonant, rather Bergian work that drifts in and out of a kind of free atonality, though to my ears there are passing references to key centers everywhere, especially in the Tippett-like 3rd subject and in the newer material (roughly the second half) that was written with the benefit of notation software. It begins and ends in A minor, but very little of the piece is actually in that key, or even in any key. Toward the end the "Tippett" theme is, however, transformed into a lilting, and very diatonic, duet for the violins against a pizzicato accompaniment.
There are no changes to the actual notes since I last posted this work here, but numerous changes to phrasing, articulation, dynamics, and the lengths of fermatas and other pauses as I ported the score from Sibelius to Dorico earlier this month. This is basically the same rendering that I posted recently on a different site (GMG), except for shortening the caesura at letter K from 275% to 200%, which clips off a little less than a second from the rendering.
The score has not been proofread thoroughly; there may still be collisions and extraneous rests left over from Sibelius - the score was exported first to XML and then read by Dorico, which apparently doesn't do any cleanup during the import process - if my impression is correct, you have to edit a measure directly before it will consolidate rests there.
Comments are welcome.
Replies
this is a compelling work and one which continues to grow on each hearing. It is both serious of purpose and haunting at the same time. The musical language and gestures may have some hallmarks of Berg (or Tippet for that matter - I can't recall his quartets at present) but the mood seems much more like the direct, dark and melancholic late Shostakovich which is anyway an idiom I can more easily identify with -- and one which has influenced some of my own more serious quartets.
Thank you David, for your kind words! The first person to point out a similarity with Berg was my composition teacher at Michigan at the time, William Albright. I had only heard a little of Berg's work at that point, so the similarity was coincidental. But I was very familiar with Tippett starting from 1974, and consciously modeled my third subject after some of Tippett's lyrical string writing during his middle period (the period of the 2nd Symphony and the Piano Concerto), so that influence was quite conscious, even intentional. The only influence from Shostakovich came in the reprise of that theme as a lilting duet. I recall distinctly that I had the sounds of his 14th String Quartet (the slow movement and end of the last) in my head as I was writing it.
I only said the work was "rather Bergian" to give the listener an idea of what to expect: music that is not 12-tone and is certainly not as radical as Webern's, but is still only passingly and fleetingly in any recognisable key, and is quite dissonant in places.
interesting that Tippett was such an influence. A friend when I was young was a huge fan and tried to convert me but I now remember little of his music as I haven't seriously investigated it in decades. Perhaps I'll go back at some point.
I was enthusiastic about Tippett only for a few years, in the mid-70s mostly. Much of it eventually started to strike me as a bit "academic" and stilted. He was a very mainstream composer, of course - unlike Havergal Brian and even Robert Simpson. Today both of those composers, as well as Vagn Holmboe, are my biggest influences.
(I hasten to add: don't get me wrong, one of Tippett's greatest strengths imho was his melodic gift, as in the Fantasia on a theme of Corelli and the Concerto for Double String Orchestra. He was a very talented composer. I just didn't think his forays into harder-edged, more "modern" idioms were very successful or even interesting. But I haven't heard them in decades, as I only had them on LP and sold them to a record store when I moved here. My opinion might be different today.)