String Quartet, Op. 168, Bfl

Scored For String Quartet. Commissioned by the New Arts String Quartet first performed in Tokyo November 1996.Quoting Tanaka: The title Metal Strings suggests speed metal rock music which I have been listening to a lotin recent years. I find an explosive energy in its music that people of today thirst for. Previously I have explored solid speedy and metallic sound in pieces such as 'Wave Mechanics' (1994) 'Wave Mechanics II' (1994) and'Metalic Crystal' (1994-95). This idea has been extended and developed in my string quartet Metal Strings.Score only edition separate parts are also available on sale.

The principal post-Romantic Danish composer Carl Nielsen was born in 1865 the son of a painter and village musician. Childhood experience as an amateur performer led to subsidised study at the Copenhagen Conservatory and a long career during which he developed his own personal style of composition in particular in a series of important symphonies. This string quartet includes score and parts.

Par HYUNG-KI JOO RICHARD. Hyung-ki Joo composed his first string quartet for the graduation concert during his last term at the Yehudi Menuhin School in 1990. In it, he pays tribute to six different artists from music, painting and literature: Henry Purcell, Samuel Beckett, Ludwig van Beethoven, Edvard Munch, Johann Sebastian Bach and Arnold Schönberg. This edition is the set of parts. For the study score please click here: UE36966/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Parts for String Quartet No.3 'Angel's Music' by Bent Sørensen (1988) Premiered by the Arditti String Quartet at the Danish Radio Concert Hall 16 November 1988. Score available: KP00250The composer writes:'Even when I was writing 'Adieu' I knew that I wished to write 'Angel’s Music'. The title existed in an incomplete form in my mind and gradually more and more ideas and a few outlines became clear. The actual work on 'Angel’s Music' was started in Rome where I spent the autumn of 1987 staying at 'The Danish Academy'. Whether this stay has influenced the quartet or not is impossible to say. however it is true to say that inthe Roman churches I visited I saw countless angels playing in the top of frescoes and altars. Without these angels together with the many crackled-gold paintings in this city and my general fascination with the Italian renaissance painter Fra Angelico (in fact there are only a few paintings by him in Rome but even his name..!) I am not sure my quartet would have been what it is. Anyway I do feel that there is a bit of Italy in the piece. The angels apart there are in the short rhythmic agitating part of the quartet reminiscences of the Italian medieval Trotto dance and in the most expressive part of the piece there are flashes of Puccini-like music. From the very beginning of my work on the quartet the distant extremely muted sound in the high register which opens the piece was on my mind. A sound satiated with a dense heterophonic and polyphonic texture of elegiac melody and vibrating trills. I imagined that 'little songs' (maybe angel songs) could be created in this density these songs constantly echoing themselves. Gradually as this sound got a more and more concrete musical and instrumental form I felt that not only should the 'little songs' be created played and die out in an echo but also that the general pattern of the quartet should give the feeling of music which from the distance is getting closer and closer