For String Quartet.Published in 2002.Commissioned by the Vale of Glamorgan Festival.First performed by Chamber Domaine Museum of Welsh Life Cardiff as part of the Vale of Glamorgan Festival September2002.Score.

Lubo? Fi?er (1935?1999) was one of the most distinctive figures of Czech music in the 20th century and composed the Variations on an Unknown Theme in 1976. The ?unknown theme? was a prankish eight-bar theme from Fi?er?s student days. In the elation following the home-team win over Canada on 15 March 1959, he made a bet with his colleague Kalach to compose a concert piece for violin and orchestra with the working title ?Canada-Rondo?. The whimsical contest was abandoned, but Fi?er did not forget the theme and he later created variations on it for his new composition for the Talich Quartet. The Variations on an Unknown Theme have now been published for the first time ever. This edition is based on the autograph of the score which is housed in the Czech Museum of Music in Prague.

Par RHODES PHILLIP. Score - Set Of Parts (Ep 66620A) Also Available / Contemporain / Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Homunculus is a short (circa 12 minutes) work for string quartet which the composer wrote during the Autumn months of 2007 for the Johannes Quartet.He wanted to compose a piece that would be very compact in form andduration but still contain many different characters and textures. In other words a little piece that behaves like a big piece.He has long been fascinated (and amused) by the arcane spermists’ theory who held the beliefthat the sperm was in fact a 'little man' (homunculus) that was placed inside a woman for growth into a child. This seemed to them to neatly explain many of the mysteries of conception. It was later pointed out that if the spermwas a homunculus identical in all but size to an adult then the homunculus may have sperm of its own. This led to a reductio ad absurdum with an endless chain of homunculi. This was not necessarily considered by spermists afatal objection however as it neatly explained how it was that 'in Adam' all had sinned: the whole of humanity was already contained in his loins.He decided to call my piece Homunculus despite the obvious weaknesses of thespermists’ thinking as he found the idea of a perfect little man strangely moving.

Score and Parts. Commandée par Colin Horsley. Créé dans le Victoria and Albert Museum en Manoung Parikian, Dennis Brain et Colin Horsley, Mars 1954. / Scores