Sheet Music for Strings

Author and arranger Barrie Carson Turner presents a selection of 8 Famous Opera themes arranged for string quartet. The collection includes: Non più andrai (Mozart), Intermezzo (Mascagni), Toreador So...

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...

The piece opens with the strings swaying between two notes that are either right next to each other or 15 tones apart but the interplay of these two notes sets each instrument in sympathetic vibration...

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...

The Quintet in G minor belongs to the first group of three quintets written by Ignaz Pleyel in 1785 and published for the first time in 1786. Of all his quintets, it was the most frequently published...

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...