String Quartets (Complete)

Richard Reed Parry's Quartet For Heart And Breath is an innovative and original piece based on the performers' own bodily rhythms. This sheet music is for String Quartet (Violin/Violin/Viola/Cello).Richard Reed Parry is familiar to millions as the lead singer of rock band Arcade Fire, yet his foray into classical music is equally worthy of attention. Quartet For Heart And Breath is an experiment into using the performers' heartbeats and breathing to dictate the tempo. The performers are instructed to wear stethoscopes in order to listen to their heartbeats closely, while one complete breath corresponds to one bar and two heartbeats equal two crotchets.The result is a quiet and subtle piece, as each instrument has to play softly so as to be able to keep in time. The piece also has a naturally occurring dynamism in that the players' heart rates constantly change as the performance goes on, with each instrument falling in and out of sync sometimes culminating in a beautiful moment of all heartbeats matching each other. Interestingly, this unique aspect means that no performance will ever be the same, meaning to hear or play this composition will be a truly once in a lifetime experience.Quartet For Heart And Breath is a superbly one-of-a-kind composition by Richard Reed Parry. Commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, this piece makes for a wonderfully distinctive performance, with fascinating implications for the connection between the music and the body. / Quatuor A Cordes

Conducteur Ba 10927 et Ba 10928. Par SAINT-SAENS CAMILLE. Ludwig van Beethoven's overpowering legacy caused many subsequent composers to avoid writing string quartets at all. Saint-Saëns was no exception in this respect and waited until 1899 and 1918 to produce his two contributions to the genre. Couched in classicism, they relate in form and style to early 19th-century French quartets and to a titan of the genre: Joseph Haydn. Saint-Saëns' string quartets appear here for the first time in a scholarly-critical edition. It is also the first edition to contain the original version of the Finale to String Quartet No. 2 in score and parts. An informative Introduction is included in the study score to complete this volume of important French chamber music, based on the Urtext from 'Camille Saint-Saëns - Complete Edition of the Instrumental Works”./ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Description Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky/Alexander Borodin: Complete String Quartets This volume collects Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No.1 in D, Op. 11, Quartet No. 2 in F, Op. 22 , and Quartet No. 3 in E-flat Minor, Op.30 ; and Borodin's String Quartet No.

Chaconne. Par LERDAHL FRED. Chaconne (2016), for string quartet, was commissioned by the Daedalus Quartet to celebrate its 15th anniversary. The commission was supported by New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Helen F. Whitaker Fund, and Aaron Copland Fund for Music. My music has a substantial history with Daedalus. I composed the Third String Quartet (2008) for them, and subsequently they performed my three string quartets on several occasions and recorded them brilliantly on Bridge Records (Bridge 9352: Music of Fred Lerdahl, vol. 3). Chaconne is in one movement lasting 19 minutes. It is effectively my fourth string quartet. Quartets 1-3 form a unified cycle lasting 70 minutes. When I finished the cycle, I thought I would never write again for the medium; yet I could not resist the opportunity of working again with Daedalus. The issue was how to compose another string quartet unrelated to the earlier cycle. The solution came from my solo cello piece There and Back Again (2010), which was based on a four-bar variation pattern from a 17th-century chaconne. Unlike the asymmetrical phrases and expanding variations of much of my music, the chaconne form requires symmetrical phrases and strictly periodic variations. I wished to work again with these symmetries but on a larger scale. Chaconne also differs in character and expression from the three-quartet cycle. The cycle is inward and intense, a kind of psychological excavation. Chaconne is, for the most part, transparent and playful. Many of its textures emerge from little canons, not completely unlike the rounds that children sing. Any composer who writes in chaconne form (one thinks above all of the last movement of Bach’s D minor violin partita and the finale of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony) is confronted with the challenge of how to create a larger form out of a constantly repeating pattern. My Chaconne grows from paired antecedent-consequent phrases, each variation lasting eight bars. The 50 variations group into three large rotations, forming three arcs of tension and relaxation, with subtle parallel connections across the rotations. Notwithstanding my attraction to chaconne form, I purposefully disguised its symmetries and periodicities in order to build an overall dramatic shape. Fred Lerdahl/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Note by the composer:'Triple Quartet is for string quartet and two pre-recorded quartets, or three live string quartets with no pre-recording. The piece is in three movements, fast-slow-fast, and is organized harmonically on four dominant chords in minor keys a minor third apart: E minor, G minor, Bb minor, C# minor and then returning to E minor to form a cycle.The first movement goes through this harmonic cycle twice with a section about one minute long on each of the four dominat chords. The result is a kind of variation form. Rhythmically the first movement has the second and third quartet playing interlocking chords while the first quartet plays longer melodies in canon between the first violin and viola against the second violin and cello. The slow movement is more completely contrapuntal with a long slow melody in canon eventually in all 12 voices. It stays in E minor throughout. The third movement resumes the original fast tempo, maintains the harmonic chord cycle but modulates back and forth between keys more rapidly. The final section of the movement is in the initial key of E minor and there the piece finally cadences.? Steve Reich, 1999 / Orchestre A Cordes