Music for String Quartet (1969)

Maconchy String Quartet No.9 was written for the 1969 Radcliffe Music Award. Duration 14 minutes. Parts only edition. A separate score is also available on sale.

Horovitz composed this work during February and March 1969 as a tribute to E. H. Gombrich on his 60th birthday.In this one-movement quartet the opening thematic material is deliberately based on the decadent chromatic gestures prevalent in early twentieth century Viennese music. Healthier diatonic discords tear into these themes during a long development section and in a way finally cleanse them.The melodies of the first section are entirely based on the intervals of the third and sixth but with garish appendages of extra chromaticism (produced by means of bi-tonality between the upper and lower instruments). After the conflict these intervals emerge in their trueand elemental role as essential pillars of a major key.

Quartet For Piano And Strings was written by Gordon Jacob in 1969. It was first performed in 1970 by the Bernard Richards Quartet with Bernard Roberts playing the Piano.Gordon Jacob (1895-1984) was a British composer and arranger and one of the last proponents of the great Edwardian musical tradition. He studied at the Royal College of Music under Stanford Parry Vaughan Williams and Howells and later taught there for over forty years. He was a prolific composer creating over seven hundred works but he was particularly celebrated for his books on music pedagogy. He is probably best remembered for Music for aFestival written for the Festival of Britain and his arrangement of the National Anthem for the Coronation in 1953.