Advanced Sheet Music for String Ensemble

Schoenberg composed his Fourth String Quartet, Op. 37, on a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. The four movements of the quartet are based on a single, twelve-note row, although this is fairl...

Bloch was 73 years old when the String Quartet No. 3 was premiered in 1953 by the Griller Quartet. It is far more 'pared-down' than his earlier works, and avoids the influence of Jewish music which he...

This piece was commissioned by the Stanley String Quartet in 1958 and completed in 1959. It was awarded the Pulitzer prize in 1960. Scored for 2 Violins, Viola, Cello.

This 4 movement work was inspired by weather patterns that occured one day while the composer was looking out his window in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This string quartet was commissioned by the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts for the Cleveland Quartet.

The Composer writes: 'In February 1987 I saw in the Tate Gallery in London a painting by the Victorian English painter John William Waterhouse. The painting kept haunting my memory, and as I at the sa...

Stride is a work for String Quartet by American composer Nico Muhly from 2005.

Set of parts for Vagn Holmboe's String Quartet No. 7 ('7. Quartetto') / Strygekvartet Nr. 7 Op. 86 (1964-65).

British composer Michael Nyman 'discovered' this work when he played Leporello's catalogue aria from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni on the Piano in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis. He has written that that...

Parts for Stepping Still for String Sextet by Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen.

Olga Neuwirth's string quartet, written in 2009, is a homage to the American artist Henry Darger and his richly illustrated book manuscript of the same name, which was only discovered posthumously. Ne...

My 3rd String Quartet is in six contrasted movements. Certain musical figures recur across the work, but there are few themes as such. The main emphasis is on contrast of mood, texture, harmony, pacin...

Foreign Tongues explores a different way of looking at the standard string quartet setup. Envisaged as a work where the cello is pitted against the rest of the string players, the piece aims to explor...

My second string trio is a more large-scale piece than the compact, single-movement first, written just over a decade ago. It is made up of seven short movements, each one picking up an idea, or a not...

Written in a single day in August 2012 while on a residency in Massachusetts, this simple piece makes an interplay with the respective colours of the violin and cello. Both instruments are retuned, ca...

This piece is made of a sequence of eight short movements. It begins with an ascent and a gradual unfurling. We hear a network of voices flowing, pulsating, revolving, crying out. The music moves betw...

The composition of Krzysztof Penderecki’s four string quartets is marked by an idiosyncratic interruption: the first two experimental, improvisatory quartets were composed in swift succession in the 1...

My quartets composed between 1997 and 2005 were conceived as an interconnected, self-contained cycle of works ranging from the (in my opinion) quasi revolutionary Quartet No. 1 to the Quartet No. 5 en...

My String Quartet No. 7 – the second of my ‘Beethoven studies’ – is the first of my quartets to possess a two-movement structure. The density of texture is additionally enhanced, meaning that the open...

My String Quartet No. 8 is made up of three movements, and a fast tempo prevails almost throughout the entire work. The extreme brevity of the opening movement oscillates between rugged unisono passag...

I consider Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 130 with its Grosse Fuge as the pinnacle of all quartets. In each of the four movements, Beethoven succeeds in re-inventing the archetypal movement forms with...