Output details

String Quartet No 4 : Written for and dedicated to Quatuor Diotima

22 minutes. Composed for Quatuor Diotima. Premiere 26th November 2011 at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. European Premiere 26th September 2012, Alicante Festival, Spain. Broadcast 3rd December 2011, BBC Radio 3 ‘Hear & Now’. Published by UYMP

This work focuses on the idea of a line presented in a variety of shapes, forms and intensities. Its representations include 'straight lines' (one single tone, often multiplied to its maximum – an eight-fold bundle), 'trembling lines' (melodic utterances in which trills and glissandi play the prime role), jagged lines (manifested in various angular passages progressively occupying the whole registral spectrum of the string quartet), and 'florid streams of overtones' (overlapping cascades of natural harmonics).

Having previously composed two works (String Quartet No 2 & 3) that consist of one single movement, the idea here was to create a form that would have elements of a multi-movement composition, but at the same time preserve the continuity of an uninterrupted line on the macro-structural level, where the movements are linked, rather than divided, by silence. The overall idiom is centred on specific aspects of modality and its microtonal inflections. A clear example here is the textural format of the third movement, which explores a drone-based linearity – a salient characteristic of the ancient musical aura of the Balkans. As Ligeti commented in an interview with Niculescu published in the Romanian _Revista Musica_ 2/1993 (p.67), ‘these types of drones, the origin of long and sustained sound that supports melismatic melodies, can be found on a large scale especially in Southern Albania and among Aromanians’. At the very end of the piece, a 'straight line' is firmly rooted on the lowest note of the quartet.