I wrote this string quartet with love, years ago, as a surprise birthday gift for my wife, Anne Midgette. I brought musicians to our home to play it.
Now the first track on my Three Quartets recording on the Acis label, gorgeously played by the Terra String Quartet, and the first track we released as a single.
That means it’s on streaming services, and has a been broadcast on classical music radio, after we promoted it there.
You can hear it, and see the score.
And, very special — you can see a visual animation of the music, beautifully made by Stephen Malinowski. Each note comes alive visually, as well as musically.
I wove this piece together from music of mine that Anne knew.
The quiet melody at the end comes from a song, with a Rilke text, that I wrote for Anne when we first got together.
The lyrical tune at the start, and the dancelike music later on, come from an opera (still in progress), based on Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
Briefly at the end there’s a nonsense song I’d made up.
To hear the rest — the original music, and how I used it in the quartet — click the plus signs:
From a little As You Like It tenor aria.
Hear it nicely sung by Peter Scott Drackley, at an evening of my music at the Strathmore performing arts center. Marvin Mills is the pianist.
From the Rilke song I wrote for Anne.
Watch Marlissa Hudson sensitively sing it at my Strathmore performance, again with Marvin Mills. The melody comes at the end, starting at 2:04.
Hear what the end of it became in the quartet, with inner voices — quiet in the piano — brought to life, with four instruments available to play them.
Two surprises here.
First, the dance music, which in the quartet sounds complete in itself, starrted just as an accompaniment, to part of an As You Like It opera scene.
And yet, by itself, it still sounds complete.
Hear it in the opera scene, at around 3:24
Sung by Peter Scott Drackley and Melissa Hudson, with Marvin Mills at the piano, again from my Strathmore evening.
At the end you’ll hear the second surprise: The opera scene ends with the softly rising music that begins the quartet.
So that music works two ways — in the opera scene as an ending, and in the quartet as a beginning. Or really it works three ways, because later in the quartet it comes back as a transition.
There’s alchemy in that, which I can’t explain.
At Strathmore, I programmed the quartet, preceding it with the music that it came from. At the end of the opera scene, when the dual ending and beginning music comes, I had the string quartet play it, making a seamless transition from As You Like It, with voices and piano, to Quartet for Anne, with string quartet/
It worked magically, I thought.
Read the libretto of the opera scene, to see what they’re singing about