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String Quartet No.4

Written for the Ligeti Quartett

This work was composed for the Ligeti Quartet, a vibrant and highly accomplished ensemble of young players dedicated to the promotion of contemporary music. Nicholson's First Quartet dates from 1977 and he returned to the medium again in 1984 and 1995, always with a sense of exploration and new insight. In many respects the string quartet is an iconic ensemble which can adapt in a seemingly infinite number of ways to accommodate the needs and priorities of the composer, and subsequent revisitings of the medium can both reflect and initiate stylistic development in a composer's output. The Fourth Quartet is a large-scale work of about thirty minutes' duration laid out in four movements of increasing length. As a whole there is a concentration on texture and colour, as well as on the variety of instrumental relationships that can be derived from this ensemble (solos, duos, tutti). The writing employs heterophony as a means of 'roughening' unison passages, and this can lead to the development of 'factions' (opposed duos) or, indeed, enitrely free four-part writing. At one extreme the third movement develops metrical complexity, in terms of both unison and contrapuntal writing, while the fourth movement has passages that appear to suspend metre altogether (although all the parts are in fact notated with reference to the background of an unsounded metre). Quarter tones are employed in order to intensify the expressive language of the piece and to open up novel harmonic possibilities in which normally tuned and microtonally adjusted pitches are both present. Elsewhere the quarter tone tunings offer the possibility of an alternative 'recessed' harmonic plateau in relation to the normal one.