Anne and me, on our way to our wedding,

This was my birthday surprise for my wife Anne Midgette -- a string quartet, played by musicians who came to our home.

It's a short piece, just five and half minutes. and it's based on music I've written that Anne knows well. Most of it comes from the second act of my new opera, As You Like It. The final section is the climax of a song I wrote for Anne's birthday two years ago, based on a Rilke poem ("Ich's bin, du Ängstlicher"), shortly after we'd gotten together. And the very end is a nonsense rhyme I once made up. The opera material is rearranged and changed in many ways, to make it a string quartet, not a series of opera excerpts.

You can hear the music, and look at the score. I've got two performances available. A very lovely one is by the Fine Arts Quartet, who’ve played the piece four times, first at the Helene Zelazo Center for the Performing Arts in Milwaukee, in September 2003. The recording here is taken from a broadcast of one of their later performances. And there's also the birthday premiere, played by Meesun Hong, first violin, John Anderson, second violin, Eric Hammelman, viola, and Ariel deWolf, cello. Meesun organized the performance. She was in my "Classical Music in an Age of Pop" course at Juilliard, in the spring semester, 2001. (This link takes you to the current web page for the course. You can also see a more detailed description of the course and how I taught it around the time Meesun was in the class.) Elsewhere on the site, you can read the enticing request she handed out to the audience at her fine graduation recital – inspired by some things we’d talked about in my course, she invited the audience to applaud during the music, if they wanted to.

You can also look at the score.

Here are program notes I wrote for the Fine Arts performance:

I wrote this short quartet two years ago, as a surprise birthday present for my wife. And I do mean a surprise -- Anne didn’t know I’d written the piece until she woke up in the morning, and musicians showed up at our apartment to play it for her. That was a very special (and very romantic) day for both of us, and to honor it we’re calling tonight the "first public performance," rather than the world premiere.

The quartet is based on music of mine that Anne already knew, starting with pages from an opera I’m writing, based on Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The final section is the climax of a song I wrote for Anne’s birthday four years ago, and the very end is a fragment from a nonsense rhyme we used to sing. I had fun recomposing the opera music, skewing the rhythms and adding some counterpoint, so it sounds like an instrumental piece, not a string of opera excerpts. And I rearranged the song, too. The melody, in the part I borrowed, has a very simple accompaniment. When I rewrote it for string quartet, I gave it a more varied inner life, so that each of the four players would have something individual to play.

This is an important evening for me. I haven’t composed much since the early 1980’s, and wasn’t pursuing my composing career, so my music wasn’t played. Now I’ve reemerged, most notably with an enormously happy performance of part my opera Frankenstein, at a New York City Opera showcase this paste spring. I’m grateful to the Fine Arts Quartet for giving the first public performance any of my instrumental music has had for several years.

 

See the score

Hear the music:

 Fine Arts Quartet

 Birthday premiere