String Quartet, Op. 1

[krummholz]

As some may have noticed, I've been having a lot of trouble writing anything new for the last couple of years. Some of the problem is work-related, some is just me. Anyway I decided to revisit my Op. 1, a string quartet that I began as a student at Michigan decades ago and finished in 2020. I tweaked the articulation, dynamics, and timing of entrances and phrase-ends and I really like the result now. A link to the latest MIDI rendering is below; the score is a mess so I'm not posting it for now. It's in a late Romantic idiom but is extremely chromatic, hovering on the brink of atonality and occasionally going over it. It plays about 15:30.

Edit: I've cleaned up the score enough to post it, and futzed a little with tempi and durations so the rendering is a new one too - though the differences are really things only the composer would notice.

Audio file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lR9_87Jem0H-UybIroPB3zqYotZyD7Ru/view?usp=share_link

Score used for rendering:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y-wQaVVQVRUPy9pzNEmcmOBouwR2s8NO/view?usp=share_link

Some of the cello double stops in the second subject are likely unplayable. I'm willing to work with any interested cellist to find a way to make them playable.

[relm1]

I enjoyed it, nice balance of tension and reflection.  The solemn ending was beautiful!

[krummholz]

I enjoyed it, nice balance of tension and reflection.  The solemn ending was beautiful!

Thank you, much appreciated!

[Crudblud]

A skilful take on the early Second Viennese School sound. Well done.

[krummholz]

A skilful take on the early Second Viennese School sound. Well done.

Interestingly enough, at the time I began the work many years ago, I had really very little exposure to Schoenberg / Berg / Webern, and my actual inspiration was Bartok. Yet, my professor at the time (Albright) said that it struck him as rather Bergian. It wasn't until I actually heard the sketch rendered in MuseScore that I understood what he meant. Finishing it up in 2020, that style was very much in mind of course - though more Schoenberg than Berg, I think.

In any case, thank you for listening and for your comment!

[Karl Henning]

I'll listen this week. I remember much enjoying the older draught. Looking forward to the refresh!

[krummholz]

The score is up now in the OP.

[krummholz]

I just revisited my original sketch (on paper and in Musescore) for comparison with the finished piece and have to say that I am very pleased with how this turned out. Up through m. 112 I made very few changes from the sketch - slight modifications of harmony or dynamics, an added scale fragment here and there, but mostly it's the same piece. From m. 113 on everything in the sketch was downright inchoate and had to be either recomposed or replaced entirely, and most of it is new stuff that I would never have thought of back in 1975. The only things that I kept were the first violin's intense solo at the climax (m. 136 to letter J) and the tutti pizzicato passage just before letter P, but their contexts are totally different from before. Today I can't imagine what follows m. 112 as unfolding any other way. Funny how the mind works...

[Karl Henning]

Nice!

[lunar22]

as I said elsewhere, this is a powerful and interesting work which deserves more than one listening. Particularly like the climax around bar 136.

[krummholz]

I finally finished porting this work to Dorico, after some difficulty getting the viola glissando in m. 36 to play back - I learned that in Dorico, a glissando that ends on a grace note will not be rendered.

There were also numerous changes to things like tempi, dynamics, and articulation, and the lengths of some of the pauses were also adjusted. I'd appreciate feedback from anyone who knows the work from its previous implementation in Sibelius on whether the changes are an improvement or not. Most of the changes are subtle, but the beginning of the development starting at Letter G is noticeably slower than before (quarter note = 56 instead of 60) and then accelerates quickly at the last moment into the Agitato section beginning at letter H. My question is whether the piece works better as a whole.

For those who haven't heard it, the idiom is probably best described as Bergian, even though when I started the piece as a student in 1975, I knew very little of Berg. To my ears it sounds tonal, though very chromatic and dissonant, especially the parts that were composed "recently".

Audio file:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DL4m274cP8DKKQTz25NZp-IZvIHd36nR/view?usp=sharing

Score (more readable than the one output by Sibelius):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a5EqqPDQlUYDccVnamQWb54P5097uTv6/view?usp=sharing

[Spotted Horses]

I found it a compelling work, well worth listening to.

[Karl Henning]

I'll revisit this soon!

[krummholz]

I found it a compelling work, well worth listening to.

Thanks!

[Karl Henning]

I found it a compelling work, well worth listening to.

I'm digging into it.

[relm1]

Ooh, very nice! I enjoyed it and found it expressive and one thing I've always liked about your stuff is your rich harmonies.  There isn't a very wide range of tempos throughout.  Ignore if that is by intent, but I'm giving you feedback as a listener as well.  It is possible you are handling some of the tempo variations through rhythmic notation, but I suggest making your intentions very clear unless ambiguity *IS* the intention. 

Even then make it clear you want it ambiguous.  For example, if violin 1 is muted and violin 2 is doing something very similar but unmuted, I'd put in parenthesis (senza sord.) just so they don't ask.  This is a bit of an art...you want to say as much as possible with the least number of words saying it.   Another example, if everyone in the ensemble is loudly playing an A minor triad and one player has a quiet F#, you might get asked "is that right because it feels off" unless it has context.  The point is you want your intention to be clear.  Prokofiev has tons of harmonic rubs and owns them.  They are clearly not mistakes. 

Aesthetically, I think Dorico scores look beautiful, but you have a collision/double treble on bar 31 (sorry for being OCD).  I liked how you balanced the voices giving each one a lot to do.  I really liked how going into bar 142 you dropped out all the low registers and held that solo violin exposed for so long.  This would be a very effective moment in a live performance.  I think you could use more hairpins around there (for example, build up to the fortissimo at 142 violin 1) but I'll acknowledge this is an artistic choice. 

Where exactly does the Agitato tempo in 147 happen?  Generally, make tempo changes on a downbeat so why not make 147 a 3/4 time signature bar instead?  There are other spots where something similar happens like a tempo change mid bar.  This is fine in MIDI (I've had to do some god awful tempo changes for various reasons and I'm embarrassed that had to happen) but not ideal for live performers where you might get asked, where exactly is that tempo switch so best to prevent the question by making it clear like on a downbeat. 

Looking at Stravinsky's Rite of Spring Sacrificial Dance Stravinsky The Rite of Spring and Elliot Carter's String Quartet No. 1, I don't think I saw a single tempo change that was not on a downbeat.  I did see that in Havergal Brian scores but even here, that was rare and frankly unnecessary.  In orchestral context where the more people you have playing, the more confusion/questions you get, this is really a problem.  In chamber music not so much but I take the approach of desiring clarity of intent.  Sort of like if you're a skipper of a boat and see another boat approaching you, you make your intentions clear by sort of exaggerating what you mean to do to avoid a collision.  If your intent is ambiguity, make that clear too.

Please don't take my feedback as criticism, I very much admired your string quartet.  I know you well enough to know you are science heavy like me where in the arts and sciences there is a lot of criticism not to be negative but to fine tune it.  I might just be picky also and am like that to anything, my own stuff as well.  I will end by saying I really liked your ending.  I think it is meditative, atmospheric and think you have a good sense of timbre but can expand the registers more (a critique I too fall victim too).  Ultimately, I liked it and listened to it twice in a row which I rarely do.  I would be very proud if I had written this to present it to a string quartet.

[Karl Henning]

I'm digging into it.

I'm not finished, but I just noticed an orthographic anomaly (because it sometimes happens to myself in Sibelius) the viola in m. 108 has three unnecessary quarter-rests in a secondary "voice."

[krummholz]

Thanks for your comments, @relm1! There are a bunch of redundant and otherwise unnecessary details in the score that I just haven't cleaned up yet - someone else mentioned the extraneous treble clef and I just haven't gotten to it. The bars that Karl found with extraneous rests are another. Sibelius puts those in when material is taken out of a bar. Consider the score a draft version.

The narrow range of tempos is intentional: the Agitato is the "faster" section, and the quartet as a whole is in a rather slow tempo. I think that is more of a problem in Sinfonia Solenne which is much longer - here, in a rather brief, one-movement quartet, it seems like less of an issue. Of course, others may disagree, and that's okay.

Good point about making the tempo change to Agitato on the downbeat - I thought of that too, but as you might know, in Sibelius a change of time signature in the middle of a score can have bizarre side-effects, and originally the whole thing was in 4/4 before I realized that the first part of the development really was in 3/4, and changed it - I almost regretted doing that as it was a day's work to get the time signature back to 4/4 later on in the score without making much of the rest of the score totally unreadable due to collisions. There has never been a clear meter to this piece except in that clear 3/4 section, and then in the reprise of the lyrical third subject, and on into the coda.

I will certainly clean up these details IF I can ever find a string quartet willing to consider playing something by an unknown composer. I have no idea how I'd even go about that, and if I did, there would still be some work involved trying to find a way to make all of the cello double stops playable - some of them would require a cellist with giant hands.

Anyway, thanks for listening and for taking the time to comment.

[krummholz]

I'm not finished, but I just noticed an orthographic anomaly (because it sometimes happens to myself in Sibelius) the viola in m. 108 has three unnecessary quarter-rests in a secondary "voice."

I consider it a Sibelius "bug" - any time you remove material from the middle of a bar, that has rests before and after it, those rests remain and the material you took out is replaced by more rests. It's too stupid to consolidate rests, unlike Dorico which is good about that. But this was an imported score, and I'd have to edit those bars to force it to do that.

As I said in my reply to @relm1, those are all "to do" things for when (if) I ever have an opportunity to present the work to professional musicians. For now, it's a draft.

[Karl Henning]

I consider it a Sibelius "bug" - any time you remove material from the middle of a bar, that has rests before and after it, those rests remain and the material you took out is replaced by more rests. It's too stupid to consolidate rests, unlike Dorico which is good about that. But this was an imported score, and I'd have to edit those bars to force it to do that.

As I said in my reply to @relm1, those are all "to do" things for when (if) I ever have an opportunity to present the work to professional musicians. For now, it's a draft.

Understood. Love the piece! Congrats!