Classical Music of the Modern Age Sheet Music Downloads

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...

Brother is an intimate duet for violin and viola in four movements. Throughout the piece the two instruments are very closely intertwined. Their colours fuse and coalesce. Together they weave patterns...

This quartet is in five movements. I wrote the penultimate movement first. It is a personal reflection on William Byrd’s setting of the fifth century hymn ‘Christe, qui lux es et dies’. That ancient m...

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...

Sniff a little Berlin air, fire up the organ-organ and off we go to the Metropol Theater: to a round dance of igniting melodies by Paul Lincke, who enraptured Berliners from the beginning of the 20th...

Maurice Ravel's melancholy popular 'Pavane for a Dead Princess' composed in 1899 was originally written for piano before he arranged it for orchestra in 1910. Though dedicated to a real princess, the...

Maurice Ravel's melancholy popular 'Pavane for a Dead Princess' composed in 1899 was originally written for piano before he arranged it for orchestra in 1910. Though dedicated to a real princess, the...

The composer Johanna Senfter (1879 1961) from Oppenheim concerned herself with chamber music for strings all her life, even studied violin in Frankfurt herself. Max Reger then gave her lessons in Leip...

The original work providing the basis of this arrangement is the Ciaccona for string orchestra dating from 2005 written on the occasion of the death of Pope Johannes Paul II. The composer incorporated...

Der österreichisch-ungarische Komponist Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942) war musikalisch frühreif: Auf Empfehlung Antonín Dvoráks erhielt er Klavierunterricht mit sieben Jahren, wurde mit zehn Jahren Schül...

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...

When Cuarteto Casals approached me with the idea of illuminating Beethoven's quartets anew, you can imagine the many thoughts and feelings that where going through my mind: what a joy, what a great ho...

In 2013, P?teris Vasks set Mother Teresa's peace prayer "The fruit of silence is prayer' for the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. The piece is for mixed choir however the versions for piano quintet...

Nach der Toccata für Klavier und Streichquintett von 1989, dem Quartett für Oboe, Violine, Viola und Klavier von 2010 und dem Klavierquintett von 2014 hat Olli Mustonen nun seinen ersten Werkbeitrag f...

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...

The Sextet starts with cries of agony – the atmosphere is filled with chaos and turmoil. It is as if the listener had been thrown onto the surface of a hostile planet, devoid of any comprehensible lif...

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...

Depth of content, exuberant liveliness and sophistication of the compositional technique – Samuel Rhodes, violist of the renowned Juilliard String Quartet, praises Paul Hindemith's string quartets. Th...