“A new kind of part writing”

2021 ◽  
pp. 49-72
Author(s):  
Nancy November
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Art And Science ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Middle Period ◽  
Unique Nature

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Beethoven’s two statements that the work shows “a new kind of part writing” and “not less fantasy” than his previous works. The chapters explore, respectively, what each of these statements might have meant in terms of Beethoven’s compositional perspective, and in terms of performance and reception in his day. His comment on a “new kind of part-writing” is especially noteworthy, given that Op. 131 was his penultimate quartet. In light of the considerable experimentation in the middle-period quartets, one might have thought that by the 1820s Beethoven would have exhausted most possibilities for innovating in string quartet part-writing. To further explore what Beethoven meant, I go back to sketches and notes relating to the middle-period quartets, in particular his new idea of composing and hearing all four parts at once, which he noted down in a sketchbook around the time he was composing Op. 74. How does this new idea about the compositional process relate to the late quartets and Op. 131 in particular? I consider evidence from the sketches for Op. 131 as well as the early reception of the finished product. Adolph Bernhard Marx, for example, draws attention to the late quartets’ “Bachian counterpoint.” I focus in particular on the variations of the fourth movement. My analyses draw attention to the unique nature of all four voices, and the sense in which each part is crafted with careful attention to the art and science of listening.

scholarly journals Optimal feedback correction in string quartet synchronization

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (93) ◽  
pp. 20131125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan M. Wing ◽  
Satoshi Endo ◽  
Adrian Bradbury ◽  
Dirk Vorberg
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
String Quartets ◽  
Relative Timing ◽  
Correction Model ◽  
First Order ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Time Series Approach ◽  
Feedback Correction

Control of relative timing is critical in ensemble music performance. We hypothesize that players respond to and correct asynchronies in tone onsets that arise from fluctuations in their individual tempos. We propose a first-order linear phase correction model and demonstrate that optimal performance that minimizes asynchrony variance predicts a specific value for the correction gain. In two separate case studies, two internationally recognized string quartets repeatedly performed a short excerpt from the fourth movement of Haydn's quartet Op. 74 no. 1, with intentional, but unrehearsed, expressive variations in timing. Time series analysis of successive tone onset asynchronies was used to estimate correction gains for all pairs of players. On average, both quartets exhibited near-optimal gain. However, individual gains revealed contrasting patterns of adjustment between some pairs of players. In one quartet, the first violinist exhibited less adjustment to the others compared with their adjustment to her. In the second quartet, the levels of correction by the first violinist matched those exhibited by the others. These correction patterns may be seen as reflecting contrasting strategies of first-violin-led autocracy versus democracy. The time series approach we propose affords a sensitive method for investigating subtle contrasts in music ensemble synchronization.

ON HORATIU RADULESCU'S FIFTH STRING QUARTET (‘BEFORE THE UNIVERSE WAS BORN’) OP. 89

Tempo ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (268) ◽  
pp. 34-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Dougherty
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Compositional Approach ◽  
String Techniques ◽  
Compositional Language ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Formal Construction

AbstractHoratiu Radulescu's Fifth String Quartet, ‘before the universe was born’, is a shining example of his radical compositional approach. With an intense interest in creating a rich, numinous sound-world constructed firmly on principles of nature, science and ancient philosophy, Radulescu developed a unique compositional language that breaks with traditional musical conventions. In hopes of illuminating the inner workings behind his often enigmatic compositional process, this article examines various aspects relating to Radulescu's Fifth Quartet: the work's formal construction, with a focus on its notation and overall large-scale harmonic development; the Quartet's rhythmic devices and their link to the philosophical underpinnings that drive the work; the extended instrumental string techniques employed throughout, the sounds they achieve, and how they are executed; and the work's spectral pitch organisation.

Study, Copy, and Conquer

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Hedges Brown
Keyword(s):  
Chamber Music ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
Expressive Power ◽  
Main Theme ◽  
Sonata Form ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Piano Works ◽  
Piano Quartet ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Critical Writings

Schumann's 1842 chamber music exemplifies a common theme in his critical writings, that to sustain a notable inherited tradition composers must not merely imitate the past but reinvent it anew. Yet Schumann's innovative practices have not been sufficiently acknowledged, partly because his instrumental repertory seemed conservative to critics of Schumann's day and beyond, especially when compared to his earlier experimental piano works and songs. This essay offers a revisionist perspective by exploring three chamber movements that recast sonata procedure in one of two complementary ways: either the tonic key monopolizes the exposition (as in the first movement of the Piano Quartet in E♭ major, op. 47), or a modulating main theme undercuts a definitive presence of the tonic key at the outset (as in the first movement of the String Quartet in A major, op. 41, no. 3, and the finale of the String Quartet in A minor, op. 41, no. 1). Viewed against conventional sonata practice, these chamber movements appear puzzling, perhaps even incoherent or awkward, since they thwart the tonal contrast of keys so characteristic of the form. Yet these unusual openings, and the compelling if surprising ramifications that they prompt, signal not compositional weakness but rather an effort to reinterpret the form as a way of strengthening its expressive power. My analyses also draw on other perspectives to illuminate these sonata forms. All three movements adopt a striking thematic idea or formal ploy that evokes a specific Beethovenian precedent; yet each movement also highlights Schumann’s creative distance from his predecessor by departing in notable ways from the conjured model. Aspects of Schumann’s sketches, especially those concerning changes made during the compositional process, also illuminate relevant analytical points. Finally, in the analysis of the finale of the A-minor quartet, I consider how Schumann’s evocation of Hungarian Gypsy music may be not merely incidental to but supportive of his reimagined sonata form. Ultimately, the perspectives offered here easily accommodate—even celebrate—Schumann’s idiosyncratic approach to sonata form. They also demonstrate that Schumann’s earlier experimental tendencies did not contradict his efforts in the early 1840s to further advance his inherited classical past.

THE UNDISCOVERED FLIGHT PATHS OF THE ‘MUSICAL BEE’: NEW LIGHT ON HUMMEL’S MUSICAL QUOTATIONS

2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROHAN STEWART-MACDONALD
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
String Quartets ◽  
Piano Sonata ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Performance Tradition ◽  
Explicit Reference ◽  
North Germany ◽  
Goldberg Variations ◽  
The Relationship

Hummel’s quoting of music by other composers has been mentioned briefly in a number of studies. While some of these quotations are explicit, others are a good deal more problematic. This article investigates explicit quotations that appear in two of Hummel’s string quartets dating from 1803–1804 and the finale of a piano sonata from 1807. The fourth movement of the String Quartet in G major, Op. 30 No. 2, twice quotes J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, BWV988, the slow movement of Op. 30 No. 3 refers to Handel’s Messiah and the finale of the F minor piano sonata cultivates a complex relationship with the last movement of Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony. My objective is to demonstrate the sophistication and subtlety with which Hummel manipulates the quoted material in these three cases.Hummel’s obvious quotation of Bach and Handel in particular is related to a multi-faceted preoccupation with archaic styles and earlier works that had taken root in the later eighteenth century and that continued to expand into the nineteenth and beyond. Although England was the first nation to develop a performance tradition around the ‘ancient’ musical repertory, it was the accumulation of a didactic tradition around the keyboard works of J. S. Bach in north Germany and its steady migration to centres like Vienna that is of more direct relevance here. And when one surveys the (supposed) quotations by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Clementi of works by Bach and Handel and compares them with Hummel’s, Hummel’s remain outstanding in their exactness and also in their frequent lightheartedness of tone. Whereas many straightforward quotations or instances of modelling appear reverential or seek to exalt the basic idiom, Hummel’s either are humorous or seem calculated to reduce the potency of the original in order to assimilate the earlier idiom into the later one. The three pieces considered here illustrate the spectrum of techniques used by Hummel to manipulate quoted material in his works. The quotations in the two quartets have drawn very little comment; the references to Mozart’s ’Jupiter’ Symphony in the finale of Op. 20 have been remarked on more frequently, but the relationship between the two finales is a good deal more intricate than has previously been shown. The ‘contrapuntal deconstruction’ that takes place late in the third movement of Hummel’s Op. 20, between the most explicit reference to the ‘Jupiter’ finale and the coda, is lighthearted in character – amusing, even – and is in some ways the most ingenious and vibrant episode in the movement.

scholarly journals Sublime and precise: Mind sonorities of Vlastimir Pericic

Muzikologija ◽  
2008 ◽  
pp. 167-183
Author(s):  
Dragana Stojanovic-Novicic
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
New Music ◽  
Professional Activity ◽  
Theoretical Studies ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Professional Recognition ◽  
Technical Realization ◽  
The Moment

Author discusses the course and results of the professional activity of Serbian composer and musicologist Vlastimir Pericic (1927-2000). At the beginning of his career Pericic was a promising young composer who won a prestigous Vercelli Competition Prize in 1950 for his String quartet. His style was characterized by post-romantic musical expression. He was convinced that a tonal system was the only acceptable base for making new music. In that sense, he came close to Paul Hindemith's approach to the world of new sonorities. The author explains Pericic's position in the context of Serbian music of the second half of the 20th century. He was considered somewhat conservative because he never accepted avant-garde techniques and procedures. His imagination and concentration on compositional process made him competent in the technical realization of his rich musical ideas. On the other hand, he was a shy personality who had never been penetrating enough to promote his own works. Hence, during the last decades of his life (when he stopped composing) almost no one was conscious of the great value of his works. Pericic suddenly interrupted his compositional career in the mid 1960s and thereafter devoted himself to theoretical work. His books on counterpoint harmony, and Serbian composers, many articles on contemporary Serbian composers, as well as his major multilingual dictionary of musical terms which includes seven languages, were among the finest fruits of Serbian theoretical achievements in the field of music. Now is the moment to reexamine Pericic's opus because his compositional achievements, as well as his theoretical studies, were of the highest quality. Pericic was a real part of the European music elite as a composer and musicologist, but he never received adequate professional recognition, especially in a broader European context.

Beethoven, String Quartet in E Minor, op. 59 no. 2/i (Allegro)

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-177
Author(s):  
James Hepokoski
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Minor Mode ◽  
Middle Period

Chapter 9 combines features of chapters 7 and 8—Beethoven’s middle-period music as intensely hyperdramatized narrative and the conventions and implications of the minor-mode sonata—by closely examining the first movement of the second of his “Razumovsky” Quartets, op. 59 no. 2. The analysis of Beethoven’s quartet movement also throws into high relief that composer’s different concerns and style from those found in Haydn’s quartets (chapter 6). An initial backdrop sets Beethoven’s op. 59 into its historical context, again stressing the new demands placed by such music on both performers and listeners, and once more reminding the reader that Beethoven often approached and treated the classical “default” procedures of the preceding century with distortions or unusual harmonic swerves for effects both eccentric and dramatic. The chapter also considers some of the problems involved with cadential identification: what counts, for instance, as a “structural cadence,” and how might a decision along these lines affect our larger reading to the piece? In play, as always in Beethoven’s minor-mode sonatas, is the charged, dark-and-light tension between the negatively valenced minor and the ongoing struggle to escape from that minor into a contrasting major.

Composition

2020 ◽  
pp. 450-465
Author(s):  
Joseph Dubiel
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
Prominent Line

The activity of composition is little discussed in philosophy, understandably due to its disunity across musical cultures. In the context of the individually composed concert music that has preoccupied the discipline, composing and the composer are often invoked figuratively as objects of a kind of engagement expected of the listener. This figure has survived a reversal of direction in a prominent line of anti-modern musical critique, in which composers can be faulted for not proceeding in ways that match those to which listeners supposedly are bound. In a music-analytical example drawn from the finale of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet, alternatives are offered to these views. Explicit compositional procedures, realizing Crawford’s radical conception of dissonance, are regarded as influential upon, not definitive of, audible traits of what they produce; and the utility of these procedures is seen as including idle, indirect, and even counter-productive elements. Awareness of compositional process, and of the conceptions in which it is embedded, may substantially affect audition and appreciation.

scholarly journals TheThirdString Quartet by B. Britten as a phenomenof the late composer style

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (55) ◽  
pp. 50-60
Author(s):  
M. Solyanyk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chamber Music ◽  
String Quartet ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Evolutionary Stage ◽  
Late Period ◽  
Late Style ◽  
The Third ◽  
Fourth Movement ◽  
Instrumental Works

The paper is devoted to theproblematics of the late style in composer creativity. The typologies of the late style described in the musical science works of recent years (including the thesesby E. Nazaikinsky and N. Savitskaya) are systematized. The characteristic of B. Britten’s chamberheritage is given in the context of the achievements of the English composer’s school of аnew musical renaissance of the twentieth century. The purpose of the research is to reveal the specificity of the last opus phenomenon. Achieving the goal of the research involves using the following methods: genre approach, historical approach and stylistic approach. The specificity of the last opus phenomenon is revealed by the example of the Third String Quartet by B. Britten, which is recognized as the composer’s last opus. The late style of the composer is characterized in terms of orchestration, techniques, genre preferences and stylistic unity. Exposition of the main material of the study includes compositional and stylistic analysis of the Third String Quartet by B. Britten. In the paperheritage of B. Britten is considered as an example of a creative composer process which has an explicit division into several periods. The name of B. Britten is associated with the highest achievements of the English composer school of a new renaissance in the twentieth century. The researchers distinguish three periodsof B. Britten’s creativity. The first period is characterized by the interest in chamber music and various chamber compositions, the variation as a principle of development as well as the genre certainty. The individual style of the composer is formed in vocal musicearlier and more intensively. The second period is characterized by expressive orchestral writing, figurative concreteness and clarity of structures. The late period of B. Britten’s creativity is characterized by the desire to find the most flexible form of the modern performance. The stylistic synthesis reveals a reliance on ancient types and forms of playing music: Gregorian chant, heterophony, anemitonicpenta-tonic system and church modes. Most of his works are marked by the asceticism of expressive means. The scores are written in a stingy, honed manner, the composer uses instrumental compositions with vivid coloristic capabilities, but implements them with a subtle sense of proportion. The paper deals with the specifics of the B. Britten’s late style. According to the concept of N. Savitskaya the late style is the final evolutionary stage which includes stylistic elements of the early and mature stages of the composer’s creative formation in an in-depth and concentrated form. The researcher identifies the following types of late style: prognostic, consolidating and reduced. B. Britten’s late style can be classified as consolidating one. The paper isconcerned with the phenomenon of the last opus. B. Britten created three string quartets. The appearance of the first two was connected with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of H. Purcell. The Third Quartet was written thirty years later, in 1975, in Venice, and was first performed after the death of B. Britten in 1976. This work was the last instrumental composition the authorcompleted. The structure of the Third Quartetdeparts from the traditional form. It consists of five relatively short movements which form a kind of symmetrical arch. B. Britten originally used the term divertimento as a working description of the quartet. Each movement of the cycle has its own subtitle: Duets, Ostinato, Solo, Burlesque, Recitative and Passacalia (La Serenissima). All movements are written in three-part form (ABA). The slow lyrical movements of the quartet form a kind of arches inside the composition. The first movement, Duets, is in a sense the most abstract of all five parts. The beginning resembles a “double spiral” (two voices are closely intertwined and are an exact copy of each other). In the second movement, Ostinato, the idea of an ostinato, where a musical pattern is repeated over and over in the background, takes on a somewhat intrusive form. In the third movement, Solo, the lone violin line, moving through wide intervals, is accompanied mostly by only one other voice at a time. In the fourth movement, Burlesque, the world of parody entertainment, clowning, buffoonery is presented. The fifth movement is entitled La Serenissima, a reference to Venice. In this movement B. Britten quoted his own last opera, Death in Venice. The results of the research support the idea that B. Britten’s late style refers to consolidated type of late style. This conclusion is reached based ona specific analysis of the Third String Quartet by B. Britten. The Third Quartet accumulates as features of B. Britten’s late style as the asceticism of expressive means in writing, reliance on the frets of folk music and the rigor of writing. B. Britten’s enthusiasm for the traditions of folk music resulted in a desire for the texture of all the voices in his instrumental scores. The composer’s chamber music is characterized by detailed instrumentation. Despite all the possibilities of using modernist techniques in the creative process B. Britten can be traced to an academic style. It is worth noting the amazing unity of B. Britten’s style throughout his life. Individual composer style is constantly being refined, remaining homogeneous at the same time (there are not style shifts and differences). In addition, B. Britten had always been aimed at performers and often wrote instrumental works on order. Although B. Britten’s heritage is widely represented in Ukrainian and foreign musical science, the specifics of the composer’s late style is still a field for study and comprehension. The paper opens up prospects for the study of the last opus in the late period of the work of composers.

scholarly journals Carl Nielsen, Quartet for two Violins, Viola, and Cello, Op. 5. A Glance into the Composer’s Workshop

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elly Bruunshuus Petersen
Keyword(s):  
String Quartet ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Central Section ◽  
Final Version

The first part of this article describes the compositional process in Nielsen’s String Quartet Op. 5, on the basis of an examination of the sketches, additions and deletions found in the draft score. In the majority of cases the sketches are short and closely related to the musical material beside which they are notated. Close examination shows that Nielsen evidently had a sufficiency of ideas but that he often had problems working them into context. Apart from the short sketches there are three versions of a central section in the second movement. On the basis of an analysis of the entire movement – including the motivic working in the various middle sections and their relationship to the outer sections – the second part of the article gives a rationale for Nielsen’s third and final version.

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