My music
Quartet for Anne sources
Quartet for Anne is a string quartet, written with love as a surprise birthday gift for my wife, Anne Midgette. I brought musicians to our home to play it.
It’s the first track on my Three Quartets recording on the Acis label, gorgeously played by the Terra String Quartet.
As of February 24, 2026 (10 days after the release) it’s been broadcast three times on classical music radio.
You can hear it, and see the score
I wove this piece together from music of mine that Anne knew:
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- 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, click the plus signs:
From an As You Like It tenor arioso.
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 starts at 2:04.
Hear what the end of it became in the quartet, with inner voices brought to life
Two surprises here.
First, the dance music, which in the quartet sounds complete in itself, starrted just as an accompaniment, to part of an opera scene from As You Like It.
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.
The music somehow works in the opera scene as an ending, and in the quartet as a beginning. The same music. And 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 to Quartet for Anne. It worked, I thought, magically.
Read the libretto of the opera scene, to see what they’re singing about