Variations on One String

In his Kongsgaard Variations (2006) Swedish composer Anders Hillborg takes the Arietta-theme from Beethoven’s last piano-sonata No. 32 in C minor Op. 111 as the basis for an evocative 16-minute string quartet. Beethoven’s sublime music drifts strangely through the centuries and is warped vaporised and refashioned as if in the words of Hillborg the Arietta ‘is dreaming yet another variation on itself’.

from Swan Lake-The dances (variations) from Swan Lake offer your students a new insight into the ballet music of Tchaikovsky. Rich memorable melodies with dramatic flare coupled with the ethnic dance rhythms make this work a winner for theconcert stage. Includes: Hungarian Czardas Spanish Bolero and Neopolitan Tarantella.

The A Flying Start for Strings series presents a carefully graded sequence of music for teaching the beginning string player. The books are suitable for teaching individuals or groups of the same instrument. Many tunes in the series for violin viola and cello are in the same key and can be played together.Teachers can use this versatile series in a way that suits their own teaching style. There is ample room in all books for the teacher wishing to add more dynamics slurs bowing signs tempos instructions or explanations. The large easy-to-read notes and clear and simple layout help students concentrate on the notes they are learning. Lively folk and traditional tunesmake learning fun and lead to confident playing.With only one tune on most pages the young student gains a sense of achievement from turning the pages quickly and moving on.Book 2 starts with D string tunes to consolidate reading skills and provide the most comfortable pitch for singing. Students progress from one-string tunes to two-string tunes. The book introduces slurs simple dotted rhythms and dynamics. There is a page of bowing variations with rhythms and bowings to apply to a scale arpeggio or melody. Ensemble playing is brought in with canons and rounds.

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