String Quartet No. 1

Daniel Gostelow

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String Quartet

2020

18 min.

Cello

Viola

Violin

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Program Notes: String Quartet No. 1 consists of three successive areas. The first area, analogous to one of the more violent seascapes painted by Turner, resembles a savage, engulfing tempest of inanimate sonic matter organized into high- force currents, rapids, jets, waves, and tides. The material is rudimentary, paradigmatic even, and collectively self- similar. Unidirectional, stepwise, sequential, accelerating and decelerating lines often intertwine, cascade, unify, disband, climb, fall, and jettison. The instruments push, press, and smash within a high tessitura of exertion and resistance, individually and collectively moving towards seamless continuity in repeating cycles. This textural morphology reaches its peak at the end when the tempest homogenizes into the same pool of substance, all wrinkles and breaks conclusively smoothed into a sustained surface. The second area features a trio (violins and cello) oscillating in octaves at constantly varying speeds. The trio collectively undulates and heaves, perhaps constituting ripples on the once placid surface, echoes from the previous music. The ensemble here responds to the preceding tempest through a kind of awakening. The instruments of the trio, particularly the violins, gradually gain greater flexibility and an increased vocabulary, performing new gestures, adding more pitches and harmonic intervals, becoming lyrical and radiant. The final area of the piece spawns a repeated pizzicato riff. Cyclical and ticking, the riff resembles a very important thought, memory, or perception obsessively turning over in the mind, activated, or perhaps birthed, by the awakening. Its circularity, initially a slow but restless rotation, implies the swirling liquidation that gradually consumes the quartet. Flying arco scales, masses of pizzicato and battuto, and returns of the riff in various guises and distortions gain momentum in a growing vortex. Barriers seem to fall away, and the riff and all its attendant associations flood and heave through the mind of the ensemble, liberated and amplified. The piece ends with a soft, muted return of the trio octaves, a tender reminiscence of the music heard minutes ago.
Ensemble Name: Arditti Quartet