String Quartet Sheet Music

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...

Set across four movements, 'Quatre Tableaux’ (French for ‘Four Pictures') presents four vignettes that progressively build in intensity. The work begins with a luminous calmness that gradually escalat...

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...

String Quartet No. 2 begins and ends with musical ideas that were in the back of my mind in some form or other since my teens. In the process of moving house during 2020 I rediscovered some old minidi...

String Quartet No. 2 begins and ends with musical ideas that were in the back of my mind in some form or other since my teens. In the process of moving house during 2020 I rediscovered some old minidi...

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...

Ignaz Joseph Pleyel (1757-1831), a composition student of Josef Haydn, was not only one of the most successful composers of his time, but also an active concert organizer, pianoforte manufacturer, pub...

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...

Anea is an invented name for a music-crystal modelled on an ionic crystal. It is a piece written in three independent and individual movements which can be played separately or together.Seed I and See...

New incidental music was required for a performance of William Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado about Nothing in the Schönbrunn Schloßtheater in Vienna in 1920. Erich Wolfgang Korngold had already compos...

New incidental music was required for a performance of William Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado about Nothing in the Schönbrunn Schloßtheater in Vienna in 1920. Erich Wolfgang Korngold had already compos...

Streichquartett (Kontrabass ad lib.) oder Streichorchester. Partitur und Stimmen.

My love is as a fever wurde von Sonetten William Shakespeares inspiriert. Das Werk entstand für das Faust Quartett mit dem Anspruch, bei neuer Kompositionstechnik, sowohl vom emotionalen Ausdruck als...

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...

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...