Reflections on Writing a String Quartet (and Studying an MA in Composition)
I seem to always begin blog posts the same way: ‘Hello, it’s been a while’. Hopefully shortly, after what has been a crazy few years for everyone, I will have some exciting things to share on here soon - so watch this space!
The first thing to say is that, obviously, I have written a string quartet - and that the score and parts are available for free to any quartets who want to play it - just drop me a message!
Part of the craziness over the last few years for me was that I was studying an MA in Composition at the University of Sheffield. I finished this last year after studying part-time, and graduated early 2023. It was, truth be told, quite a difficult experience. I would probably mostly put this down to universities not being equipped to deal with the reality of part-time students as well as repercussions from the pandemic and lockdowns (my first year was pretty much entirely done remotely, and my second was a mixture of both online and in-person teaching). The staff in the department were excellent, and I had a really rewarding experience in terms of the opportunities I had to compose and interactions with them. The ‘university machine’ was not so excellent. But then, let’s just say that the current political climate has not been favourable to higher education at all. Let’s hope that changes soon.
One of the highlights of my course was having the opportunity to compose a longer work for a final portfolio submission. I chose to make the bulk of this portfolio a four-movement string quartet, which was something I’d always wanted to write. I did lots of research quite a long time in advance as I was dead set on this project for a while. The first thing I thought was how great it would be to be able to present the score to an enthusiastic amateur quartet or advanced students at around grade 6-8 for them to be able to play. While there are a lot of great contemporary works for string quartet, I can’t help but feel you have to be a bit of a virtuoso to play some of them - not to mention in order to listen and fully appreciate some too. I wanted to write something students could play and listen to, relate to a bit but also find genuine contemporary techniques and thinking in there as well. So that’s what I set out to do!
I would say that the main thing I learned during my studies, and especially through composing this piece, was to compose more from the heart. For a long time I had been studying different compositional processes and how I might come up with my own - and I still believe that the process of creating a piece cannot be understated. However, at certain moments during the composition of this piece I realised that process would only get me so far. I composed an original draft of the second movement which was entirely different and based almost completely on processes alone. I spent ages crafting the perfect arrangement of numerical and pitch sequences and how these would develop, and ages writing this down with a new time signature almost every bar. But - well - it just didn’t work. There was no musicality, and it sounded strangely boring and simple given the complexity that had gone into it. So I went back to the drawing board. Hopefully as I describe how each movement was created here, you will see how process and intuition were combined. My eventual philosophy with this was to use a strong idea which had come about as part of a process and then use it to show as many different musical angles as possible.
My initial process, then, was to create a set of ‘rules’. Eventually, not ones I always had to stick to - but ones around which the core ideas of the piece, and the ones which stitch all the movements together, would be formed. Here is a very basic image of what I came up with. We were just in the process of coming out of the pandemic and I wanted this piece to somehow be themed around the idea of connections between people. If I assigned 3 of all 12 pitches in an octave to each instrument in the quartet, I could create a set of unique pitch relationships between all the players. For example, the viola and cello share the unique combination of D and B - no other instruments plays either of those notes in this model.
In reality, the strictness of keeping these pair combinations and pitches to a specific instrument wasn’t used that much, but the pitch relationships it outlined were indeed a key musical feature. It immediately presents a lot of interesting possibilities - there are a huge variety of intervals caused by these pitch pairings, and each note essentially has an ‘opposite’ according to this system. The core way in which this was used was that I created a series of the 12 pitches, each used once, and this became the main theme of the entire piece. And, as each pitch has a counterpart, I swapped all the notes for these to create another 12-tone melody, and this became the secondary theme, primarily in the first movement.
I also really tried to push myself when writing this piece, at times working on all four movements at roughly the same time so that I could cross-pollenate ideas between all of them to create a cohesive piece. I started with a section of the third movement based on the pitch relationships, then went back to create what eventually became the development section of the first movement which explicitly states the pitch relationship model, exactly in the instruments as shown. I kept crossing back and forth and think that this really helped - there are even bits in certain movements that are fragments from drafts of movements that never saw the light of day, but they do add the right colour to the part of the music they actually ended up in. It was lots of fun, but I needed lots of space in my brain.
I’ll go through each movement sequentially and discuss some of the key moments or interesting/important points. There’s no way I can go through all my thought processes otherwise we’d literally be here for months - and also sometimes things have only really become apparent to me after I finished composing the piece, which is interesting. That said, if anyone is interested at all in anything and wants more information or has any questions I’d be more than happy to answer them, either on here in the comments or on whatever social media site of ever-changing names you saw this post on!
The first movement begins with the main 12-tone theme but stated through a sort of layering effect. This particular sequence of notes becomes so important throughout the four movements that I thought it was important to state it a couple of times in different ways - and then also to use standard sonata form in this movement (repeated exposition, development, then a recap). I wrote out the repeats with slight changes in this score. In the secondary melody, formed from the ‘opposites’ of all the pitches in the primary melody, I purposefully wanted to treat it as a fairly standard melody using conventional harmony. Conventional harmony is, after all, just another set of rules that can be treated as guidelines - it is another way to access compositional processes and get different results. The result here is a 12-tone melody arranged so that it fits with sort of conventional harmony, and this begins at 1:40 on the video, with the conventional harmony kicking in when it repeats about 15 seconds later. The development section begins at 4:27 and quickly launches into a section the most clearly describes the pitch relationships model outlined above. I then attempted variety of ways of looking at the two themes that had been set up, like examining a glass object from different sides. I think, of all the sections in the piece this is perhaps the least successful creatively, however it is functional - almost like the seed from which the rest of the piece sprouted. The final section doubles down on the conventional/tonal harmony approach in the accompaniment (but not in the melody) before ending with a reminder of where we started musically. My aim with this was to sort of tie the two approaches to tonality together to make them part of one unified musical language in this piece, making neither unexpected in future movements.
As I mentioned earlier, the second movement was a struggle, and eventually the last thing I composed as my original drafts weren’t working. For the final version presented here, I decided to totally rethink my approach. Fast movements have never really interested me much, but I was determined to stick to a relatively standard 4-movement structure for this quartet for various reasons (1st movement in sonata form, a fast movement, a slow movement and a finale). I often think that fast movements come across as just a load of notes in different instruments, basically - and this is certainly what I was accidentally doing to start with. What unlocked this version for me was thinking about how a standard fast movement is often related to the idea of dancing - typically a minuet or scherzo for example. I thought I’d vent my frustration and make it a bit of an infernal dance! It uses a really simple 3-note chromatic motif, but with lots of space for little nuggets from other movements. The middle section is a Shostakovich-like (although obviously I wouldn’t be bold enough to put myself on the same level) parody of classical form, ‘disrupted’ by the movement’s chromatic motif. I think this worked for me because instead of leaving the decisions entirely down to structure and theory, I admitted to myself that by this point I had a good amount of a foundation laid by the processes I’d come up with, as well as a fair amount of material already generated from this - my job here was to make it musical and expressive, and have more fun with it!
I’m really proud with the third movement. I expected to be told it was too ‘nice’, but I did it anyway. The material used in the first movement is used here too, but in yet another reharmonised, fairly standard way - giving it a sort of modal feel. The section at 13:52 is another demonstration of the pitch system worked out at the start, but in a very different context. Also - this movement demonstrates one of the key skills I learned after advice from my supervisor on this project (Amir Konjani, who, it must be said, was fantastically helpful, encouraging and brilliant throughout the whole process). He told me to offset more things - that things don’t need to happen on beats or at the same exact time as other things, and the possibilities of overlap can be really exciting. It sounds simple, but it’s advice that’s been really useful to me ever since, and you’ll see in this movement that there are offset rhythms that don’t quite align and here create a sense of fluid, expressive movement. This is taken to more of an extreme towards the end, as certain chords merge in and out of each other - almost like ripples settling. The two ‘subjects’ in this movement are also based on the two in the first movement again. The first takes a fragment of that subject and turns it into its own melody - the second is almost like an imitation of its counterpart in the first movement.
If the first movement is a strong statement, and the second is full of activity, with the third a reflection at night, then the fourth movement is the dreamscape of the day gone by. Here I used elements from all previous movements in different ways. The opening cello solo is exactly the same notes in the same order as the main theme from the first movement, just arranged in different octaves and rhythms. I then used it to have a lot of fun with twisted counterpoint that works because it doesn’t quite work. The vast majority of this movement comes from organic development of material, with some direct quotes from other movements - and then at 21:15 it switches back to pure process, with the opening theme inverted or in retrograde or diminution with itself only, which creates really interesting patterns when all the instruments are playing within a similar range - oven with new details emerging once parts are combined and lines are shared between parts. As the movement progresses, different approaches towards resolution are ‘attempted’ within the music, including many that have been heard previously, but the ultimate ending is (sort of) where the piece began, with my hope being that the way things have developed since provide new contexts to the material.
As I said, there is a lot more I could say about this as I have many more thoughts on it - but those are the highlights. A couple of extra things that it’s worth pointing out - I’m aware there’s at least one stupid error in the score. Of course there is - after months of work, there’s bound to be the stupidest of errors. See if you can spot it. Obviously, the video I’ve done to demonstrate the piece isn’t perfect too - it’s not played by real people, just the software I have (and with a few glitches to boot). The images aren’t crystal clear either so I’d suggest keeping it on small screen if you’re following along. All that said, I hope this gives you a good insight into the piece and some of my thinking about how it was written.
I have an exciting performance coming very soon of a shorter piece I’ve written for full orchestra, so keep your eyes out for that this autumn. Thanks for reading and listening!