The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet

7 Extending the technical and expressive frontiers

This chapter can give only a flavour of the myriad ways in which twentieth-century composers extended the frontiers of string playing in their quartets and, hence, the timbral palette of ensembles. Restrictions of space allow only a general overview, together with some detailed discussions of specific trends, techniques and expressive effects, with pertinent examples from the repertory. In many respects the weight of Classical tradition and the perceived limitations in the technical possibilities of stringed instruments initially resulted in the genre resisting radical change to a greater extent than most other media. Despite the extraordinary variety and concentration of texture and timbres in Webern’s Bagatelles Op. 9, for example, performers are consistently required to pursue their traditional roles of hearing and feeling as a unified ensemble, interpreting each note as belonging to a single melody of timbres.

This is in sharp contrast to the more individualistic roles encouraged later in the century, when the genre became a vehicle for remarkable experiment and radical compositional thought. Bartók’s quartets, with their wide range of pizzicato effects, vibrato indications, col legno and microtones, provided the most significant spark to those composers seeking to expand the vocabulary of available sounds and timbres. The chromaticism, the rhythmic and metrical devices and the colouristic and textural use of glissandi in Bartók’s Third Quartet, for example, were all highly unusual for the sometimes retrogressive 1920s; furthermore, Hindemith’s contemporary Second Quartet (Op. 16) requires the second violinist to reiterate a figure without regard to the pulse of the other parts (finale, bb. 458–511), a technique tentatively foreshadowing the development of aleatory devices such as appeared in, for example, Gunter Schuller’s First Quartet (1957), with its opportunities for improvisation.

As discussed further in Chapter 14, some of the most radical re-thinking of quartet composition emanated from Poland, where, in common with other European countries, a flirtation with twelve-note techniques was followed by a reaction against them. In his two quartets (1960, 1968), Penderecki extended the sound-world of the ensemble by using, for example, quarter tones and indeterminate pitches, notes produced between the bridge and tailpiece, bowing on the tailpiece itself, and the drumming effects of the open hand, the finger-nails, or the frog of the bow either on the strings or on the table of the instrument. Irregular glissando and controlled vibrato effects were also employed. Such extreme effects were indicated by customised notational symbols and copious written directions.

Twentieth-century composers tended to concern themselves less with the practicalities of composition and often opted for rapid changes from one textural, timbral and/or dynamic extreme to another, as powerfully illustrated by the opening of the quasi-development of the first movement of Webern’s Op. 5, the sharply contrasting and extremely detailed dynamic and performance markings in Sculthorpe’s Eighth Quartet (1969), Xenakis’ ST/4-1,080262 or Ligeti’s Second Quartet, or the pppppp ending of Schnittke’s Quartet No. 2 (1980). Furthermore, some of Villa-Lobos’ writing for the medium is, to say the least, awkward, his violin and viola parts involving some precise playing in the stratospheres and tempting some ensembles to revoice the lines.¹

The exploitation of micro-intervals and other such challenges for the left hand lessened the significance of traditional scales and finger patterns. Effects such as harmonics, pizzicato, glissando and vibrato underwent a marked expansion in their range and usage, and scordatura and con sordino also offered additional timbral variety. The vocabulary of the bow was also extended to exploit its various components’ sound potential in a wide range of strokes and contact-points. Vocal effects and the use of electronic and other new technologies altered the relationship between composer and performer, as well as performer and listener, and opened up new colours and compositional styles; and performance problems were sometimes further compounded by literary, narrative and other extra-musical factors that players were duty-bound to ‘research’ and faithfully to realise.

These radical changes in performing techniques and styles and consequent modifications of compositional style, form, rhythm, colour and harmony increased in scope and intensity as the century progressed, requiring performers to re-think strategies of individual technical practice, ensemble rehearsal, concert programming, interpretation and general musical communication. Some composers even required the performers to assume some of the compositional decisions. Sometimes this requirement was highly structured within the work; sometimes it was trusted more freely to the performer’s fantasy and taste. Boulez’s Livre pour Quatuor allows the performers to select which movements they play, while Gunther Schuller resorts to free improvisation on relevant notes selected from his twelve-note series in the finale of his First Quartet. While the second violinist plays tremolandi at a specified tempo, the first violinist is required to improvise on five notes in fast legato runs (not necessarily continuously nor in the notated order); the violist is required to improvise on four notes, tremolo (normal or ‘ad lib. pont.’) and in any order or speed; and the cellist is asked to improvise on four notes in any order or speed but always at the prescribed dynamics. Henry Cowell’s Mosaic Quartet also calls for free improvisation and presents musical segments which the performers may order at will.

Some works have tested players to the limits of their mental, aural, physical and technical potential. Among performers’ numerous challenges is that of familiarising themselves with new musical notation, the unstandardised nature of much of which has led to considerable confusion.² Other challenges are purely technical, often demanding of players an aggressive virtuosity (as in Penderecki’s First Quartet). Broadly speaking, rhythm and metrical considerations have become more complex, sometimes involving tempo being indicated in seconds, so many seconds to each passage marked off by a barline (without metrical significance, as in Penderecki’s First Quartet); dynamic, timbral and articulation requirements have become more exacting and extreme and, as independent compositional strands, are required to be observed scrupulously; and the exploration of harmonic effects and of the different overtones and timbres produced with various, more precisely defined contact points of the bow on the string have resulted in the rapid play of changing timbres, as demonstrated in Penderecki’s Second Quartet. Furthermore, performers’ and audiences’ ears have had to be educated to appreciate atonality and microtonality as well as new methods of sound production – the complex amalgam of colours in Xenakis’ Tetora (1990) or Ergma (1994), for example, creates significant problems of reproduction – and performers have been required to appreciate and realise in their performances the extra-musical inspiration of several works and undertake modes of performance (act, sing, or play percussion instruments) which take them far beyond their specialist musical training into theatrical and other spheres.

The professional string quartet

Although the marked increase in compositional diversity and technical complexity has not, as well it might have, resulted in the demise of the medium, it has certainly moved the string quartet away from its original social function and intimate chamber context firmly into the professional environment of the concert hall. The technical and interpretative requirements of most twentieth-century works are well beyond the capability of amateur musicians and require highly skilled, versatile and specialist performers. Bartók’s quartets, for example, have no place in the domestic environment, while works such as Elliott Carter’s Second Quartet (1959), with its deliberately ostentatious first violin part, strain the technical resources of most professional players; and only the most dedicated and seasoned professional ensemble would possess the commitment and stamina to perform Morton Feldman’s epic String Quartet II, lasting continuously for at least five hours, or his two-hour Violin and String Quartet (1985). Feldman’s works reflect his ‘pre-occupation with scale over form and his interest in enveloping environments, in which listeners experience music from “inside” a composition’.³

The virtuoso physical and mental demands of Heinz Holliger’s Quartet (1973) and the new techniques it encompasses also test performers to the extreme. Each player is required to read two staves, one for each hand, and is even given detailed instructions as to how to breathe. ‘Fatigue from unaccustomed lengths of respiration should’, Holliger notes, ‘manifest itself in the tone’ (for example, in a shaky bow; or in tense, halting bowing).

Individualisation

Along with the increasing trend of transforming the string quartet into a medium for specialist professional performance, many twentieth-century composers have treated it as an ensemble of four different and individual personae. Charles Ives was arguably one of the first to start such a trend. His Second Quartet (1907–11) also allots each part greater independence and freedom, each reaching extremes of expression and often sounding unrelated to one another. As H. Wiley Hitchcock has commented:

One hears virtually every kind of melody, harmony, rhythm, phrase structure, plan of dynamics, scoring, and writing for the instruments . . . The wildly varied materials succeed each other abruptly, sometimes violently; sometimes they literally co-exist. Alongside the most radical sort of jagged, wide-spanned, rhythmically disparate, chromatic melody is melody of the simplest stepwise diatonicism. Triadic harmony alternates with fourth- and fifth-chords, chromatic aggregates, and tone clusters. Canons without any harmonic underpinnings follow passages anchored to static harmonic-rhythmic ostinatos. ‘Athematic’ writing is set side-by-side against passages quoting pre-existent melodies in almost cinematic collage.⁴

The titles for the work’s three movements (‘Discussions’, ‘Arguments’ and ‘The Call of the Mountains’ respectively) provide the impetus for the juxtaposition of contrasting musical styles, involving amongst other aspects whole-tone scales, rhythmic pedals and the quotation of numerous well-known tunes. A note on the first page of Ives’ manuscript explains his intended scenario: ‘S.Q. for 4 men – who converse, discuss, argue (in re ‘Politick’), fight, shake hands, shut up – then walk up on the mountain side to view the firmament.’⁵ Furthermore, his numerous marginal notes outline how the various discussions and arguments develop.

Later in the century, Elliott Carter’s Second Quartet (1959) concentrated on the superposition of distinctive types of expression in the four instruments. Each instrument has a particular vocabulary of musical intervals (melodic and harmonic) and rhythms and is played in the character indicated in the score’s preface: the first violin should exhibit the greatest variety of character, but plays mostly in a bravura manner; the second violinist’s contribution is regular and often witty; the viola’s role is predominantly expressive; and the cellist’s rubato and accelerando playing looks towards a temporal world beyond the chronometric. The various sections of the work are linked by cadenzas for the first violin, the viola and the cello – a ploy also used by Britten (in the Chacony of his Second Quartet) and other composers – and the players are spatially separated to clarify the different characteristics of the music allotted to each.

Carter’s Third Quartet (1971) is similarly concerned with the interaction between contrasted material, though the parts are grouped here as two duos: first violin and cello; and second violin and viola. Carter explains that: ‘The two duos should perform as two groups as separated from each other as is conveniently possible, so that the listener can not only perceive them as two separate sound sources, but also be aware of the combinations they form with each other.’⁶ In similar vein, his Fourth Quartet is also characterised by ‘a preoccupation with giving each member of the performing group its own musical identity’.⁷

Among other composers who similarly ‘individualised’ the ensemble in the twentieth century have been Milton Babbitt, George Perle, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Pascal Dusapin (Time Zone), each of whom has treated the medium as four different voices or characters engaged in musical discourse but united only by commonality of instrumental family. Sculthorpe, too, cultivated independence, his indication ‘Liberamente’ in his Eighth Quartet (1969) referring to his desire ‘that players should be rhythmically independent of each other’. Lutos U+0142 awski also writes of his String Quartet (1964):

Within certain points in time particular players perform their parts quite independently of each other. They have to decide separately about the length of pauses and about the way of treating ritenutos and accelerandos. However, similar material in different parts should be treated in a similar way.⁸

While Ligeti’s quartet writing often emphasises the individuality of the four parts, he is quick to signal the need for precision of ensemble. In the third movement of his Second Quartet he demands: ‘very precise: the demisemiquaver motion is simultaneous in all 4 instruments’.⁹ For composers such as Shostakovich and Schnittke, however, individual contributions were very much for the corporate cause. The quasi-recitative solo passages for each player in Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 14 are cases in point, while ‘Cadenza’, the third and final movement of Schnittke’s String Quartet (1965/66), distributes its material among the four players ‘in the manner of a “collective solo”, in such a way as to create, when performed, the impression that a single, super-dimensional string instrument is playing’.¹⁰

Notation

Some twentieth-century composers dispensed, partly or wholly, with conventional notation and presented performers with a whole new and unstandardised language of performance directions (and hence sounds) to recognise and realise. Henze’s Fourth Quartet, for example, includes an opening movement written in proportional, and sometimes graphic, notation and a finale whose indeterminacy is manipulated to a great extent by the first violinist, while Betsy Jolas exploits space-time notation to excellent effect in her Second Quartet (1966).

The cello part of Carter’s Second Quartet incorporates various kinds of indicated rubati. In one example, a dotted arrow line extends from the first note-value (a crotchet tied to a quaver), which is to be played for its full length, to the final note of the group (a semiquaver), which is also to be played for its full length. Carter explains: ‘The intervening notes are to be played as a continuous accelerando (in other cases, where the notation indicates it, a ritardando), the notation indicating approximately whether the accelerando (or ritardando) is regular, or more active at the beginning or the end of the passage. In all cases, however, the first note-value, over which the arrow starts, and the last, to which it goes, are to be played in the metrical scheme in which they occur.’¹¹

Penderecki employs graphic notation in his First Quartet, conventional barlines being replaced by individual sections of one second’s duration that determine the actual tempo. Each period of five seconds is clearly demarcated, tempo deviations from 0.8 to 1.4 seconds being permitted within each period, depending on the first violinist’s choice. More fluid still with regard to tempo is Penderecki’s Second Quartet – there is no strict division of bars into seconds. This work also uses an adventurous system of customised notational symbols that represent performance instructions (involving indeterminate pitches, vibrato specifications, microtones etc.), as explained in his preface.

Rhythm and metre

Composers’ fascination with folk and multi-metrical music, the syncopations of modern jazz, ostinato motor-rhythms, complex polyphony and mathematical patterns and formulae has contributed to the emergence of rhythm as a potent structural element in twentieth-century music. Rhythms and metres reminiscent of Bulgarian folk music had a far-reaching influence on Bartók’s works, particularly in the Scherzo of No. 5 and in the complex compound metres exploited in the equivalent movement of No. 4 (Scherzo: 4+2+3/8; trio: 3+2+2+3/8). However, the performing problems posed by such compound metres are negligible when compared with those raised by, for example, the rhythmic oppositions of Ives’ Scherzo ‘Holding Your Own’ (1903–14) for string quartet from A Set of Three Short Pieces,¹³ the algorithmic forms and new sonorities of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Quartet (1931), the indeterminacy of Lutos U+0142 awski’s String Quartet (1964), the freedom of interpretation so vital to the first, third and fifth movements of Sculthorpe’s No. 8 (1969), or the interpretation of movements in which some or all of the quartet members are required to conform to different metres. In Boulez’s Livre pour Quatuor (1948–9), for example, the first violinist is required to play in triple time, without accents, while occasionally ‘conducting’ with his violin in duple time, in which the others play.

Perhaps the greatest rhythmic challenge for performers stems from so-called irrational (in the arithmetic sense) rhythms, indicated by proportional notation. Carter, for example, superimposes independent melodies in polymetrical relationships as complex as 3 against 7 against 15 against 21 in his First Quartet (1950–1), achieving a constant change of pulse by overlapping tempi.¹⁴ Furthermore, in Nancarrow’s Third Quartet, all four instruments play the same material in a tempo ratio of 3:4:5:6, while Ferneyhough’s Sonatas abounds in irrational rhythms, reference points being provided in the relevant other parts to aid synchronisation. A striking freedom is given to the concluding bars; while the viola and cello proceed ‘in tempo giusto al fine’, the two violins are directed ‘to proceed to the end in complete rhythmic independance [sic]’.

Quartet seating

The distribution of the string quartet has only rarely come into the composer’s domain, most opting for the traditional semi-circular arrangement of (from left to right as one looks ‘front-on’): Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola, Cello. However, those works with theatrical objectives have naturally challenged such a convention, as have some quartets involving amplified sound and/or extra-musical influence.¹⁵ No musical reason is offered by Ferneyhough for his suggestion that ‘it may be to the advantage of the musical presentation’ if players were to position themselves as follows for performance of his Sonatas (from left to right as one looks ‘front-on’): Violin 1, Viola, Cello, Violin 2. He adds: ‘a more conventional layout is acceptable if preferred. The distance between the players is immaterial, provided that a tight, homogeneous ensemble sound be produced.’¹⁶ Interestingly, Michael Finnissy requires the first violinist to be seated separately from the rest of the ensemble in his Multiple Forms of Constraint.

Prepared instruments

Mauricio Kagel’s String Quartet I/II (1965–7) requires the instruments to be ‘prepared’ (in the sense of John Cage’s prepared piano) by means of the use of, amongst other things, adhesive tape, strips of paper and pieces of cloth on the fingerboard. In addition, the first violinist is instructed to wear a thick leather glove on his left hand, and the cellist is required to wedge knitting needles between the cello strings, along with matches, coins, xylophone beaters and a strip of paper, in order to alter the instrument’s pitch, timbral and dynamic responses. Kagel illustrates graphically how the various objects are to be employed. In the second movement the preparations are fewer but the range of effects no less wild, including bowing with notched pieces of wood and drumming with fingers on the strings, as well as exploiting a wide variety of more conventional techniques. Among other composers who prescribe unconventional materials to set the string vibrating is Crumb, whose Black Angels calls for the use of glass rods to strike or slide along the strings (in ‘Ancient Voices’), a metal plectrum for a particular pizzicato effect and thimbles on the right-hand fingers for a thrummed tremolando (in ‘Threnody III: Night of the Electric Insects’).

Techniques and special effects

Scordatura

Many twentieth-century quartet composers took advantage of scordatura, but the device was employed more as a timbral and colouristic resource than for tonal brilliance, notably by Scelsi (Quartets Nos. 3 and 4) and Kagel. Penderecki exploits the physical winding down of the string in his Second Quartet, while Xenakis takes this to extremes, requiring the cellist to retune his lowest string for every note. In the last section of his First Quartet (‘Between the National and the Bristol’), Gavin Bryars requires the lower pair of strings of each instrument to be tuned down a semitone. The resultant contrasts between eight normally tuned strings and eight scordatura strings produce a striking effect.

Con sordino

The use of the mute was intensified in the twentieth century. It was particularly exploited by Shostakovich, especially as a timbre with which to conclude many of his quartets. Furthermore, like the second movement of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet, the equivalent movement of Britten’s Second Quartet is muted throughout. However, this particular Bartók example is unusual, in that its dynamic prescriptions extend to fortissimo and much of the movement comprises scurrying, prestissimo quavers. Composers generally opted for instant timbral contrasts within movements and gained a whole new range of tonal colours. Webern’s Bagatelles Op. 9, for example, incorporate sonorities varied strikingly by muted effects; Berio even introduces a notational symbol to indicate con sordino and senza sordino in preference to the verbal instruction, possibly to facilitate the performers’ realisation of an already complex score.¹⁷

Among the unusual demands of Michael von Biel’s First Quartet is the requirement for the cellist to place a double bass mute on the strings between bridge and fingerboard and play alternately above and below it. Furthermore, Scelsi goes so far as to specify the use of a heavy copper mute for the relevant sections of his Third Quartet.

The manner of holding stringed instruments

The wide diversity of compositional influences and styles in the twentieth century led to the development of a corresponding variety of techniques and expressive effects. These have involved both left and right hands and have even extended to the manner of holding certain instruments. ‘Excentrique’, the second of Stravinsky’s Three Pieces, for example, includes one figure to be played by the second violinist and violist with their instruments held like cellos, while two movements of Crumb’s Black Angels require the violins and viola to be held like viols, with the players bowing up near the pegs on the ‘wrong’ side of the left hand. Sculthorpe also directs the first violinist to hold the instrument in a vertical position for col legno effects, as in the fourth movement of his Eighth Quartet (1969).

Fingering

The extended harmonic language of many twentieth-century composers has led to players’ liberation from traditional technical values and diatonic fingerings and the increased exploitation of unfamiliar, often awkward non-diatonic fingering ‘patterns’ (involving chromatics, whole tones, quarter tones and other micro-intervals), and extensions and contractions that often render impossible the recognition of a definite concept of positions. High position-work on all strings, sudden leaps between extremes of register and non-consonant combinations of double and multiple stopping are also frequently encountered. Players have therefore been called upon to master new fingering patterns, many of which may justifiably be considered unnatural, ungrateful, non-uniform and downright unviolinistic, while demands for sudden leaps and unusual intervals have necessitated the development of an acute aural proficiency in anticipating and confirming the notes to which shifts are required.

Interest has also been heightened in the particular sonorities and timbres that stringed instruments are capable of producing. In addition to the standard fare of harmonics, pizzicato, glissandi and vibrato, composers have distinguished timbres requiring the use of specific parts of the stopping finger. In his Second Quartet, for example, Carter explains: ‘The markings U+2780 , U+2781 , U+2782 , indicate that the first, second, or third finger of the left hand is to stop the note so marked by pressing the fingernail vertically on the string, thus producing a ringing, guitar-like sound. The player may use another fingering than that given if it produces the desired sonority more satisfactorily. All notes without this marking are to be stopped in the usual way with the fleshy tip of the finger.’¹⁸

Quarter tones and other micro-intervals

In 1895, the Mexican Julián Carrillo’s experiments with the division of a string into multiple parts led to the development of microtonality and the various theoretical and musical systems derived from it: scales, melodies, harmonies, metres, rhythms, textures and instruments. Carrillo subsequently composed eight quartets using microtones, their accurate performance involving a radical departure from traditional ear-training and their mastery requiring both a new mental discipline and physical precision. Ives also became involved in micro-interval composition, his Quarter-Tone Chorale for Strings (1903–14) supposedly being inspired by his father’s experiment to build a quarter-tone keyboard instrument to imitate the ringing of bells which contained notes ‘in the cracks between the piano keys’.

Ivan Vishnegradsky and Alois Hába both contributed string quartets in quarter tones from the 1920s and early 1930s. Himself a violinist, Hába was inspired by microtonal usage in Moravian folk music and he founded a Czech School of Microtonal Music at the Prague Conservatoire. He used quarter tones systematically as an integral part of the compositional material in his String Quartets Nos. 2–4 inclusive (1919–22), No. 6 (1950) and Nos. 12 and 14 (1959–60; 1963), as well as sixth tones in Nos. 5, 10 and 11 (1923; 1952; 1957) and fifth tones in Nos. 15 and 16 (1964; 1967), all notated according to his system. In the preface to his Second Quartet Op. 7 Habá wrote: ‘It is my concern to permeate the semitone system with more delicate sound nuances, not to abolish it . . . to extend the possibilities of expression already given by the old system.’¹⁹ Hába’s microtonal quartets contrast markedly with his Quartets Nos. 7, 8 and 9, which are characterised by ‘a greater simplicity of harmony and form and a less sophisticated expression’.²⁰

Of course, Bartók also introduced quarter tones in the Burletta of his Sixth Quartet (iii, bb. 26 and 28); and Penderecki (No. 2), Karel Husa (Quartet No. 3 (1968), iv, bb. 8–9), Scelsi (Quartets Nos. 3 and 4) and Crumb (Black Angels, no. 13, beginning) have since exploited quarter tones as a means of bending pitches up or down for expressive effect. Scelsi based many of his compositions on the subtleties of slowly permutating microtone glissandi around a central pitch-mass, as in his String Quartet No. 4 (1964). This work’s successor (1984) was based on recorded and microtonally inflected improvisatory material which was then transcribed and realised in score. Penderecki’s Second Quartet also employs microtones, sometimes in double stopping, while Sculthorpe’s performance directions in his Eighth Quartet include symbols to indicate ‘quarter-tone trills’.

The Italian composer-cellist Pietro Grossi employed third-, quarter- and sixth-tones in his two string quartet works of the early 1960s (Composizione Nos. 6 and 12), and American computer-music buff Lejaren Hiller’s Fifth Quartet (1962) is aptly titled ‘In Quarter-Tones’. Maurice Ohana exploited microtones in his works for the medium, especially thirds of a tone, and Nicola LeFanu has developed a highly expressive use of microtones in her two quartets.

American composer Alvin Lucier (Navigations, 1991) has exploited ‘an organization of “beating” and “interference” patterns that result from the exploration of many intervals between two pitches a minor third apart’.²¹ This exploration is systematised by numbers beneath the notes indicating cents above (+) or below (-) the notated pitch and numbers in parentheses indicating the number of beats per second between adjacent pitches (indicated by diagonal lines); it is combined with a gradual deceleration of the pulse, a graduated diminuendo from mp to pp, and senza vibrato throughout. As Lucier explains: ‘During the course of the performance, audible beats are heard, at speeds determined by the closeness of the tunings. As the intervals between the pitches grow smaller, the speed of the beating gradually slows down, from 14, 13, and 12 beats per second – the number of cycles per second between the original semitones – to zero beats at nison.’²²

Microtonal music has largely lost its significance, not least because electronic music can produce any and all sounds synthetically and only a low-pitch stringed instrument such as the cello can successfully establish a regular system of fingering to realise quarter-tones effectively.

Glissando

Although some theorists have attempted to differentiate between the terms portamento (involving a continuous slide) and glissando (a sliding effect articulating each semitone), twentieth-century composers have tended to use the two terms interchangeably, with glissando the more common.²³ The glissandi in Bartók’s Fourth Quartet (i, bb. 51–2, 75, 79, 81, 103–4) are most effective, while the quasi-glissando in the same composer’s Third Quartet (b. 4 of Seconda Parte, viola) eventually develops into full-scale glissandi in all instruments at the climax of the section (bb. 353ff.) and then again in the recapitulation of the first part, transforming this formerly unnotated expressive ornament almost into an integrated structural feature.

Kurtág’s First Quartet mirrors some of Bartók’s contrasting timbres, articulations and effects; other notable examples through the century include the opening fifteen seconds of Penderecki’s First Quartet and the double-stopped glissandi in the same composer’s Second Quartet, along with quarter-tone glissandi in chords and harmonics and copious written directions such as that for the cellist slowly to unwind the peg in order to extend a downward glissando beyond the normal range of the instrument. In his Tetras, Xenakis prescribes an unusual effect formed by an amalgam of small glissandi interspersed with sustained pitch, while Gerhard exploits glissandi in harmonics (No. 2, cello, i, b. 96), and in pizzicato, in addition to the nail-glissandi in pizzicato mentioned below. Furthermore, Crumb makes effective use of the trilled glissando at the beginning of ‘Threnody II Black Angels’ in Black Angels.

Lutos U+0142 awski (String Quartet, 1967) prescribes an extended glissando and specifies above it rhythms and bowings that are to be realised during its course. In his Second Quartet, Elliott Carter carefully notates the duration of each glissando, which is indicated by the length of the note-value from which it originates; and Earle Brown’s graphic notation in his String Quartet prescribes variations in the speed and width of the glissando, as well as approximate pitches and annotated dynamics during its realisation.

Harmonics

Natural and artificial harmonics were increasingly exploited for their colouristic potential. While Schoenberg incorporated them only relatively modestly, and principally in the Scherzo of his First Quartet and the ‘Langsam ein wenig bewegter’ section of the first vocal movement of No. 2, Webern introduced them profitably in his Bagatelles Op. 9, sometimes con sordino to vary further the rich range of sonorities tapped. More recently, composers have incorporated harmonics even more freely, using them with or without vibrato, in double stopping and incorporating them in trills. Examples of this freer approach are plentiful in the first movement of Ligeti’s Second Quartet, while one passage in Penderecki’s Second Quartet calls for ‘very high natural harmonics on all four strings’, and the opening of Panufnik’s Second Quartet (‘Messages’) is striking in its exploitation of harmonics. Remarkably, Villa-Lobos wrote, as early as 1916, a complete movement with left-hand pizzicatos and double harmonics, effects only rarely tapped before in the medium. His subsequent exploitation of harmonic effects in his Third Quartet is remarkable, as are, on paper at least (because they rarely sound!), the ponticello harmonics required by Berio in his Sincronie.

Ferneyhough uses different kinds and combinations of harmonic with striking virtuosity and variety of colour in his Sonatas for Quartet (1967), while Jonathan Harvey’s Third Quartet inhabits an ethereal world which splits individual notes into slides, harmonics and partials. Furthermore, much of Gavin Bryars’ First Quartet (‘Between the National and the Bristol’) is in the high register and makes extensive use of harmonics (natural and artificial). In the last of its four sections, from the point where the players are required to tune their lower pairs of strings down a semitone, only harmonics are used – natural on the detuned strings, artificial on the ‘naturally’ tuned ones. Bryars later revised the ending for a performance in London where the Arditti Quartet played electro-acoustic instruments, to enable the high harmonics more easily to be realised.

Vibrato (including senza vibrato)

The role of vibrato changed dramatically during the twentieth century, becoming more than simply an integral part of the player’s individual tone quality and serving as an intensifying device, an ornament and an independent expressive technique occasionally separate from traditional musical phrasing. Customary usage of vibrato was often reversed, with demand for an intense, fast vibrato in soft passages, a wide slow vibrato in loud passages, or even a requirement for senza vibrato for contrast or special effect.²⁴

Some composers have expressly indicated their desired gradations of vibrato. Penderecki (String Quartet No. 1) juxtaposed a rapidly oscillating vibrato (molto vibrato) with a very slow one extending to a quarter tone’s breadth. Other composers go further, Schnittke’s ‘starkes Vibrato’ in his String Quartet (1965/66) approximating to a semitone and Donatoni’s in his Fourth Quartet equating to a whole tone.

Other extreme applications of vibrato have also been prescribed, among them the ornamental vibrato-glissando. Instead of keeping the finger in place and rolling it as with ordinary vibrato, the player allows it to slide up and down the string, creating a siren-like effect. The effect can be produced in wide and narrow slides, and in fast or slow oscillations, a wavy line normally indicating its width and speed along with the written term vib. gliss. or sometimes just gliss. In Penderecki’s First Quartet, for example, the wavy line is explained as ‘a very slow vibrato with a quarter tone interval produced by sliding the finger’.

Many twentieth-century composers exploit the senza vibrato effect. In some cases this was a reaction against the excesses of an older style; in others it was intended to emphasise steady-state pitch precision for contrast or other effect. Scelsi’s experiments with the phenomena of wavering single-note surfaces created a palette that included acoustic beating tremolos (both slurred and reciprocating bowing), microtonal trills, different vibratos, and in certain cases, scordatura. Notable examples appear in his Quartets Nos. 3 and 4, while at the beginning of the third movement of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet the violins and viola build up a cluster at first played without vibrato and then with vibrato colouring added. Among other notable examples of senza vibrato are those incorporated in the first movement of Ligeti’s Second Quartet, Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts and the second movement of Husa’s Third Quartet (bb. 34–6). Xenakis’ Tetras and Takemitsu’s Landscape I (1961) are played without vibrato throughout. Takemitsu’s terse phrases alternate with tense pauses, the work’s clustered, sustained chords suggesting the ethereal sounds of the Japanese reed-pipe mouth-organ, the sho. Furthermore, in his Adagissimo, Ferneyhough contrasts the two violinists, who play senza vibrato throughout, with the viola and cello players, who are required to vary the degree of vibrato in accord with the phrasing.

Pizzicato

Along with the powerful use of ‘traditional’ pizzicato in the second movement of Ravel’s String Quartet (1902–3), in the Largo desolato of Berg’s Lyric Suite and in Webern’s Bagatelles Op. 9 and Quartet Op. 28, a wide variety of pizzicato effects has been developed, with demand for various pizzicato locations (e.g. midpoint of string, three-quarter distance between fingerboard and bridge, at bridge, behind bridge), specific plucking agents and other specific instructions such as pizzicato ‘without holding the bow’ (Carter No. 3) and pizzicato holding the violin like a mandolin, using a paper clip as a plectrum and sliding a glass rod along the strings to produce the notated pitches (Crumb, Black Angels). The ‘snap pizzicato’, where the string is pulled away from the fingerboard by the plucking agent and allowed to snap back on to the fingerboard with a percussive noise, was popularised by Bartók; perhaps Bartók’s most notable exploitation of the device occurs in the fourth movement of his Fourth Quartet (bb. 48–51), a movement which requires all four protagonists to play pizzicato throughout and taps a range of pizzicato proficiency, whether of the ‘snap’ or ‘brush’ varieties, or in sul ponticello or glissando.

‘Snap pizzicato’ was taken up by numerous later composers, among them Sculthorpe (e.g. Quartet No. 8), Schnittke (String Quartet (1965/66)), Gerhard (Nos. 1 and 2), Dutilleux (Ainsi la nuit), Carter and Ferneyhough. Carter is particularly explicit about the employment of this effect in his Fifth Quartet. He prescribes that ‘All snap pizzicati should not only produce the pitch but also an audible attack on the fingerboard. On open strings the snap should be as near the nut as possible. On high notes, the pitch should be produced so that the snap occurs over the fingerboard.’²⁵ Ferneyhough’s Sonatas (1967) employs freely various kinds and combinations of pizzicato in an intricate web of colourful and virtuoso effect.

In addition to ‘snap pizzicato’, Ferneyhough prescribes different agents, including pizzicato with the fingernail (as, for example, in the second movement of Husa’s Quartet No. 3 and in Carter’s No. 2), various contact-points of pizzicato execution (e.g. tasto for the viola at the opening and sul pont. for the cello at bb. 225 and 258), pizzicato subito sforzando, pizzicato combined with upward or downward glissando and/or vibrato, spread pizzicato in double and multiple stopping, and pizzicato with other descriptors such as sec, marcato and distinto, pizzicato con sordino, and pizzicato effects that acknowledge the full range of dynamics. Among Ferneyhough’s unorthodox requirements in this piece is pizzicato behind the bridge (indicated by an x) on a prescribed string, and he regularly requires players to change rapidly between pizzicato and col arco.

Some pizzicato usage suggests a kind of strumming effect, as in the pizzicato tremolo with the loose first finger in Bartók’s Fourth Quartet (iv, bb. 78–9, first violin and viola) and in the middle section of the Marcia of the same composer’s Sixth Quartet (ii, bb. 84–93), when the viola, playing in guitar position, imitates the banjo underneath tremolandi in the two violins. Penderecki introduces pizzicato effects, thrummed guitar-style across all the strings at an undefined pitch, in his Second Quartet. Left-hand pizzicato has been less readily adopted by twentieth-century quartet composers – although Bartók used it in ‘snap’ form in his Sixth Quartet (iii, b. 101, first violin and cello) and Britten adopts it in his First Quartet (viola, bb. 601ff.).

Many composers have taken considerable care to prescribe particular plucking agents for specific desired effects. In addition to the percussive flicking or ‘picking’ (Carter’s No. 2) of the string with the fingernail, noted earlier, examples include Britten’s prescription of pizzicato with two fingers for the cello double stopping in the opening movement of his First Quartet and his quasi arpa requirement for the cello pizzicato towards the end of the first movement of his No. 2. Furthermore, the pizzicato chords in the third movement of Bartók’s Sixth Quartet (b. 98, all instruments) are normally executed with the thumb of the right hand.

Varieties of pizzicato involving legato slurs (Bartók No. 6, iii, bb. 99 and 101) and glissando have also been used. Some glissandi involve simply sliding up or down with the stopped finger; others require stopping the string with the fingernail, in order to produce a louder, clearer tone during the glissando (e.g. Gerhard No. 1, ii). Xenakis’ Tetras requires a pizzicato in which the nail of a left-hand finger stops a note while a right-hand fingernail slides up or down the string. Schnittke’s String Quartet (1965/66) includes a specific instruction for the cello: ‘Zweimal pizz. gliss. bis zum höchsten Ton: zuerst auf gewöhnliche Weise (rechte Hand zupft unter dem Griffbrett, der Finger der linken Hand rutscht nach unten, d. h. in Richtung von Wirbelkasten zum Steg) dann auf umgekehrte Weise (rechte Hand zupft auf dem Griffbrett), der Finger der linken Hand rutscht nach oben, d. h. in Richtung von Steg zum Wirbelkasten)’.

Although the full potential of pizzicato may not have been tapped within the genre, composers have nevertheless promoted a wide range of sonorities using the technique. It has even been combined with col legno (Xenakis, ST/4-1,080262) and also with harmonic effects, generally of the natural variety, as in Crumb’s Black Angels. Carter’s instruction pizzicato ‘sul tasto – secco’ in his Second Quartet indicates ‘A plucking position very near the L. H. finger stopping the string’,²⁶ while pizzicato and vibrato have formed an effective partnership in numerous instances.

Bowing

Changes in compositional taste and style during the twentieth century led to the development of a wide range of challenges in bow management for string players. Such challenges included awkward string crossings, rapid changes and specific prescriptions of contact-point, speed and pressure, sudden or gradual changes in dynamic, often to extreme levels, irregular slurrings and a variety of complex bowing patterns, explicitly indicated (for example, Berio’s symbol for ‘in one bow stroke, from frog to tip’ in Sincronie).

The increased rate of dynamic change and the enlarged timbral vocabulary in twentieth-century music impacted significantly on matters of bow control, particularly when realising sudden changes from dynamic extremes or dynamic changes on almost every note, as, for example, in Webern’s Four Pieces Op. 7 (1910). The frequent dynamic indications in Milton Babbitt’s Third Quartet (1970) have particular significance for bow control in respect of the inter-relationship of bow-speed, bow-pressure and contact-point and often point to shifts in metrical stress relative to the bar. The detailed dynamics and sempre legatissimo prescription in the third movement of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Third Quartet also impact significantly on bow control, the dotted ties indicating ‘that the first tone of each new bow is not to be attacked; the bowing should be as little audible as possible throughout’.²⁷

The more precise and exaggerated use of relatively familiar prescriptions such as sul ponticello and col legno (discussed later) accounted for many of the developments in twentieth-century bowing technique. However, composers also invented new sounds, often requiring the use of unconventional parts of the instrument and bow and techniques that ran contrary to traditional habits. Demand for asynchronism between the left and right hands, for example, reversed the traditional goals of preserving absolute coordination and synchronisation of fingering and bowing. Some of the fruits of composers’ labours, such as the grating, high-pitched sounds produced on the strings behind the bridge or the ghostly, gravel-like tone resulting from playing with loosened bow hair, would previously not have merited description as musical.

Variable contact-point

The range of contact-points of the bow on the string seems boundless. Sul ponticello, favouring the reproduction of the upper partials over the fundamental pitch, was increasingly exploited by twentieth-century composers such as Bartók (e.g. No. 4, iii, bb. 41ff.), Schoenberg (No. 2, i, bb. 90–1), Webern (Bagatelles Op. 9) and Gerhard. Many composers contrasted the effect in the texture with sul tasto (e.g. Bartók, Quartet No. 3, rehearsal number 30).

Ferneyhough (Sonatas) uses various kinds and combinations of sul tasto and sul ponticello with virtuosity and freedom, while Aulis Sallinen’s single-movement Fourth Quartet (‘Quiet Songs’) is based largely around the interplay of introverted unisono melodies and sul ponticello rhythmic repetitions on a single note. Takemitsu exploits a complex range of textures in his A Way a Lone (1981), ranging from lush string chords to spectral sul ponticello whispers, effects similarly demanded (via extremely light playing on the bridge) in Berio’s Sincronie (1964). Berio uses special signs to indicate sul tasto, a contact-point near the bridge and over the bridge and, like Berg (Lyric Suite, iii, bb. 1–3), combines the effect with con sordino, explaining that the performer should press the bow hair against the mute as closely as possible. He also uses a symbol to indicate ‘bowing at the frog across the bridge’.

In his Quartet (1970), Fortner seeks the soft, thin and distant sound produced by a bow contact-point above (i.e. on the ‘wrong’, peg-box side of) the left-hand fingers. Crumb uses a similar technique (and ‘sempre senza vibrato’) in the sixth movement of his Black Angels to recreate the sound of a viol consort (even suggesting that the violin or viola be held upright between the knees while sitting, in the manner of a gamba or cello). Michael von Biel also uses this technique to produce an unusual glissando effect in his Quartet (1965), and he differentiates between a sul ponticello played near the bridge and one played on the bridge. Meanwhile, Leon Kirchner, in his Second Quartet (1958; ii, bb. 115–16, and iii, bb. 240–1), uses the term ‘quasi pont.’ to indicate that some degree of ponticello tone colour is desired, but that the pitch of the note is to dominate.

Some twentieth-century composers prescribe bowing behind the bridge (between the bridge and the tailpiece), yielding a high-pitched, flute-like tone with a thin, ethereal quality. Such bowing has been combined with tremolo, ‘thrown’ strokes (the jeté col arco on the strings between the bridge and the tailpiece in Gerhard’s Quartet No. 2), arpeggiation of all four strings (e.g. Penderecki’s First and Second Quartets and Crumb’s Black Angels), and improvisation according to the composer’s instruction. Changing back and forth from normal playing to playing behind the bridge is a feature of the viola part in the ‘Quasi “Trio”’ of the fourth movement of Britten’s Third Quartet; and near the end of the slow first section of Penderecki’s Second Quartet, the viola plays sforzato with the bow on the tailpiece, before the first violin contributes tremolandi ‘auf dem Resonanzkörper’ and the second violinist indulges in finger-tapping ‘on the soundboard’.

Other unorthodox sounds include the unique scraping effect produced from bowing on the tailpiece, as in Penderecki’s quartets, playing ‘with the bow on the right short side of the bridge’ (e.g. Penderecki’s Second Quartet), or tapping the tailpiece with the bow stick (Gerhard’s Quartet No. 2).

Bow pressure effects

Among the unconventional bowing effects introduced by twentieth-century composers were those relating directly to strong bow pressure. The resultant sounds could retain some semblance of pitch, become an ugly, ‘grinding’ noise (as required in Penderecki’s Second Quartet or sometimes in Crumb’s Black Angels) or include a ‘pedal tone’ (as in Crumb’s Black Angels).

‘Pitched’ sounds were cultivated by starting with normal tone and adding more pressure and/or reducing the speed of the bow, with a contact-point close to the bridge, to create a scratchy, scraping tone quality, yet with pitch still discernible. Penderecki’s ‘grinding’ effect involves the combination of great bow pressure, slow bow speed and a contact-point away from the bridge; a difference in tone-quality is discernible as the bow’s contact-point varies, the tone deepening as the bow is moved away from the bridge. Crumb’s ‘pedal tones’ (in the ‘Devil-Music’ section of his Black Angels) comprise notes produced on the violin (mostly on the G string), which, when strong pressure is applied with a slow bow-speed and a contact-point close to the fingerboard, sound actually lower in pitch (by as much as an octave) than the open string or stopped note.²⁸

Whole bow gliding and other bowing effects

The phenomenon of whole bow gliding begs a specific sound quality, obtained only by drawing the bow for its full length on every note or every small group of notes, as in Stravinsky’s Three Pieces (i, b. 3 and iii, bb. 27–9) or Bartók’s Third Quartet (Seconda parte; ‘con tutta la lunghezza dell’arco’). The prevailing dynamic largely determines the resultant tone quality.

Other twentieth-century bowing techniques that were contrary to conventional practice included the exploitation of irregular bow changes for timbral effect (as in Penderecki’s Second Quartet), gettato, for which, as Ferneyhough explains, the bow is bounced ‘on the string (single bows) as fast as possible, while the left hand fingers the main notes as indicated’, and the effect known as ‘brushing’. This latter involves literally brushing along the string rapidly to and from the bridge to the fingerboard with the bowhair at the point. Sculthorpe’s Eighth Quartet exploits a ‘whispering sound, produced by lightly rubbing bow up and down on open strings’. Playing with loosened bow hair also creates a uniquely soft and ethereal effect.

Tremolo

Tremolo usage expanded considerably in the twentieth century. It could be measured or unmeasured, but such a differentiation was not always indicated with any consistency. Early in the century Bartók used the technique to excellent effect, notably in his Fourth Quartet (iii, bb. 42–54), where the first violin, viola and cello play tremolo double stops sul ponticello which alternate with sforzandi played in the normal bow position, and at the opening of the second movement of No. 6. By contrast, Penderecki exploits a ‘very rapid, non rhythmicalized tremolo’ in his First Quartet and the last movement of Crumb’s Black Angels calls for a very fast tremolo on the strings with two fingers capped with thimbles.

Col legno

Two fundamental varieties of col legno stroke co-existed in the twentieth century: tratto (drawn), during which the bow-stick is drawn across the string; and battuto (hit), usually indicated by a wedge above the note, in which the stick is made to strike the string. The battuto effect is dependent upon the stick’s point of contact with the string. A contact-point over the fingerboard produces a loud, clicking percussive sound, which results from the bow-stick causing the string to strike the fingerboard. Although the actual pitch of the written note does not change, the percussive clicking becomes higher in register the nearer the contact-point is to the bridge and lower the further it is from the bridge, thereby adding a further dimension to the sound. Notable examples of the effect occur in Bartók’s Fourth Quartet (v, bb. 333–4, 336–8), Berg’s Lyric Suite (iii, bb. 96–8), the second and third of Webern’s Four Pieces Op. 7, and Xenakis’ ST/4-1, 080262, the latter using the term frappé col legno.

More unusual col legno effects appear in Britten’s Third Quartet (iv, trio), Schnittke’s Quartet (1965/66), which combines col legno and glissando, and Gerhard’s quartets, which exploit various legno and sul tasto effects in sharp contrast. Penderecki (Quartet No. 1) and Brown (String Quartet) prescribe the use of col legno battuto behind the bridge (with the tip of the bow), while Sculthorpe directs the first violinist to hold the instrument in a vertical position for the col legno strokes in the fourth movement of his Eighth Quartet (1969) and Crumb instructs the player to ‘strike with bow near pegs for a more percussive effect’ in a col legno battuto in Black Angels (fourth movement).

Crumb’s use of the pure col legno tratto stroke in the ‘Sounds of Bones and Flutes’ section of Black Angels is rare in the string quartet repertory. Even Ferneyhough qualifies his instruction ‘c.l.t.’ in his Third Quartet to allow ‘a small proportion of bow hair to remain in contact with the string’. He claims that this ‘is especially important when playing in upper registers’. However, some composers specify a combination of stick and hair contact with the string, Karel Husa’s Third Quartet (1968) including the direction ‘half col legno, half arco’ and Ferneyhough explaining (Third Quartet) that the player should ‘turn the bow on its side in order to use the wood and hairs simultaneously and equally’.

Percussive effects using left and/or right hands

Some twentieth-century composers incorporated into their vocabulary sounds produced on areas of the violin other than the strings. The guitarist’s tricks of knocking and tapping on the body of the instrument or tapping on the strings with a wood, metal, glass or plastic beater, for example, gradually entered into the string player’s equation. Such knocking might be attempted in various places: on the table of the three lowest instruments with the tip of the bow (Shostakovich No. 13); on the table of the instrument with the knuckle of the right thumb (Gerhard No. 2); on the back of the instrument with either the bow-stick or a padded drumstick (Cowell No. 4); on or next to the saddle (near the peg-box) at the end of the fingerboard; on the strings over the fingerboard with the open palm of the hand or fingers (sul tasto, as in Penderecki’s First Quartet); on the bridge producing a loud rapping sound with no pitch; behind the bridge, producing indeterminate pitches, higher and lower in accordance with the strings employed; on the fingerboard with the fingers of the left or right hands, or with the knuckles of the right hand (as in Crumb’s Black Angels, no. 5), or with the frog or screw of the bow (Penderecki, String Quartet No. 1); on the tailpiece with the bow-stick or with the fingertips of the right hand (Gerhard No. 2); finger-trilling on the wood of the instrument (David Bedford, Five); on the strings with the left-hand fingertips (senza arco), releasing faint pitches; or, as prescribed in Penderecki’s First Quartet: ‘senza arco: set string in vibration by pressing it strongly with the finger with simultaneous trilling’. Evidently this attempt to make a string vibrate without bowing ‘by stopping it with a powerful application of the finger while trilling’ was one of Penderecki’s few miscalculations.²⁹

Percussive effects using other instruments

Some twentieth-century composers incorporated into their string quartets sounds extraneous to the violin family entirely. Percussion instruments such as bells, drums or suspended cymbals and bowed effects on tam-tam, saw and similar ‘instruments’ have entered their agenda, as well as sounds such as floor stamping or scraping, finger-snapping, -tapping or -sliding and hand-clapping.

In Crumb’s Black Angels, for example, the four string players are required to play ‘traditional’ percussion instruments such as the maracas, tam-tam (both struck and bowed, at its edge with a bass bow, as in the fifth movement), and ‘non-traditional’ percussive instruments such as two metal thimbles and seven crystal glasses (as ‘glass harmonicas’ filled to certain heights with water and then bowed to produce specific pitches).

Extra-musical influences on interpretation

By and large the quartet has remained staunchly a vehicle for abstract musical thought. However, the decision of a small number of composers to be swayed by extra-musical influences places extra responsibilities on executants fully to investigate, examine and realise that inspiration in their performances. The autobiographical nature of Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet and its numerous self-quotations is a particular case in point; and no ensemble should attempt to play Janáek’s ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’ and ‘Intimate Letters’ or Berg’s Lyric Suite without a knowledge of and empathy for the specific circumstances associated with them – those in Tolstoy’s novel, Janáek’s relationship with Kamila Stösslova and Berg’s secret programme (addressed to Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, with whom he was in love). Furthermore, the significance of other factors such as the Berg work’s direct quotations from Wagner, the Suite’s highly mathematical system of rows, its numerical symbolism (the significance of the number 23 in the metronome markings and number of bars in each movement except the second) and the fact that the last movement, Largo desolato, is a ‘setting’ of Baudelaire’s poem ‘De profundis clamavi’ (‘From the depths I have cried to you’) from Les fleurs du mal, with the ‘vocal’ lines (that is the melodic lines to which Berg subscribed the words of the poem) divided variously among the four instruments, should also be assimilated.³⁰

Texts from Hölderlin assist performers in their interpretation of Nono’s Fragmente – Stille, an Diotima (1979–80). Hugh Wood’s Third Quartet (1976–8) has a similar skein of poetic superscriptions from John Donne’s ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day’ and George Herbert’s ‘The Flower’; furthermore, these are not small snippets but complete phrases and sentences, speaking of spiritual negation and rebirth.

The breathtaking land- and sea-scapes of Peter Sculthorpe’s native Australia have always been central to his musical output. Quartet No. 11 ‘Jaribu Dreaming’ (1990) is rooted in the Kakadu National Park, while No. 13 ‘Island Dreaming’ (1996), which features a soprano soloist, was inspired by the Australian far north as well as the islands in and around the Torres Straits. By contrast, his Eighth Quartet reflects his interest in Balinese music in the late 1960s.

In his Hambledon Hill (for amplified string quartet and tape), Tim Souster sought an approach which grew out of some fundamental archetype of the quartet medium. Contemplating the relationship between the instruments’ acoustic sound, amplified sound, and their sound as modified and extended on tape, he stumbled on his ‘basic shape’, or archetype: three concentric circles. Souster equated this with the basic layout of ancient structures which still haunt the British countryside, the iron-age hill forts, of which Hambledon Hill in Dorset is one of the most imposing, even if its sinuous contours are by no means exactly circular. In his work, the concentricity governs not only the layout of the players, who form a closed circle surrounded by a ring of loudspeakers, but also determines the harmonic and melodic structure (three symmetrically expanding sets of intervals), rhythmic structure (inter-related metres), instrumental groupings within the quartet (monophony, duophony, triophony) and in a sense, too, the overall registration of the work (a circular progression from high to low and back).

The titles and arrangement of the thirteen continuous sections of Crumb’s Black Angels, written in response to the Vietnam war, hold programmatic significance as the stages of the ‘voyage of the soul’ that Crumb invoked. Performers will also benefit from familiarity with this work’s arch structure, within which numerological relationships occur in terms of durations, groupings of certain notes and patterns of repetition,³¹ and the significance of its various citations (from the ‘Dies Irae’, Tartini’s ‘Devil’s Trill’ sonata and Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ Quartet, D. 810).

Poetry and voice

The addition of the voice to the string quartet brought to the genre an extra programmatic dimension in the form of the sung text. With it came an additional responsibility for the performers to familiarise themselves with the text and assist in the true musical expression of its meaning. The most celebrated example of this enlarged ensemble is Schoenberg’s Second Quartet Op. 10, its last two movements featuring settings for soprano of poems by Stefan George. The verses embody the longing for elsewhere and the psychic and physical pain of existence pervasive throughout nineteenth-century European Romanticism. The soprano reaches an emotional nadir in the supplication of the ‘Litanei’ and her prayer is answered in the final movement’s mystical rapture, the reunion (or the recognition of unity) with the Holy Fire and the Holy Voice.

Among those composers who have emulated Schoenberg by adding a soprano voice to the medium were Milhaud, whose Third Quartet is based on verses of the poet Léo Latil and is dedicated to his memory, Sculthorpe (No. 13), Rochberg (No. 2) and Ferneyhough (No. 4). Betsy Jolas even substitutes a soprano for the first violinist in her Second Quartet.

Music theatre

Theatre music has been a logical offshoot from the new-found freedom of open-form music and graphic scores of the 1960s. As early as 1959, Carter’s Second Quartet set out to achieve an ‘auditory scenario for the players to act out with their instruments’, each instrument being assigned a different ‘vocabulary’ of characteristic intervals (melodic and harmonic), rhythms and expressive gestures, and the parts evolving not in terms of constant themes against varied backgrounds, but rather in terms of constant fields of possibilities realised in continually varied foreground shapes – as it were the same tones of voice uttering ever new sentences.³²

Performers have been increasingly required to act, move, sing, narrate or make other vocal sounds. The score of Kagel’s Quartet looks more like a script for a play than a piece of musical notation, particularly its first movement, in which much is made of the players’ normal seating arrangements and of various eccentric alternatives. Near the beginning, for example, the cellist plays in his usual seat while the violist walks across the hall playing, then sits in a corner, and the two violins are heard from offstage. All is scrupulously notated. Similarly, Sylvano Bussotti’s I semi di Gramsci (string quartet and orchestra, 1962–71, revised for string quartet as Quartetto Gramsci) includes the instruction (Adagio) ‘While performing this piece, walk round’.

Some works require the performers to produce vocal sounds in addition to instrumental ones, including humming, singing, whistling (Penderecki No. 2), whispering, speaking, shouting, tongue clicking. popping sounds (with lips), grunting, hissing and blowing. The violin body is used as an amplifier for whispers and tongue-clicks in Crumb’s Black Angels, offering a dual aural and visual effect. The players are also required to speak, in specified rhythms, as if in invocation or religious ceremony, the numbers from one to seven, or seven and thirteen, in French, German, Russian, Hungarian, Japanese, and Swahili. Among other examples of quartets with significant vocal effects are Kagel’s work and Ferneyhough’s Fourth.

Electronics and computers

One of the most radical innovations in quartet scoring has been the incorporation of electronics, generally involving the amplification of traditional instruments which are then manipulated by an engineer, as in Crumb’s Black Angels for ‘electric string quartet’. The instruments may have contact microphones attached, but Crumb’s preference is for real electronic string instruments, with built-in pickup microphones. He prescribes an array of special violin effects such as harmonics and sul ponticello, which are transformed through amplification, as well as whispering or other vocal effects mentioned earlier. On other occasions composers such as Ferneyhough, Souster, Kevin Volans (Nos. 5 and 6) and Steve Reich (in his twelve-part Triple Quartet) have prepared electronically generated tapes to accompany live musicians in performance.

Lejaren A. Hiller, in collaboration with Leonard M. Isaacson, is said to have composed the first work to make use of computer technology – his ILLIAC Suite (1957, later retitled String Quartet No. 4), so called because it was composed using the digital computer at the University of Illinois. Chance dictates the process of composition, using the ‘so-called Monte-Carlo method of multiple probabilities’ to control ‘the selection of notes, rests, durations and dynamic intensities’.³³ Xenakis also used computers as compositional tools in his ST/4-1,080262, the numerical part of this title signalling the piece as one for four instruments computed on 8 February 1962. This work incorporates very detailed technical markings and effects in constant and rapid flux, causing complex performance problems and giving the intentional impression of ‘hectic activity over the widest possible spectra of pitch and sonority’.³⁴

The British music critic Hans Keller wrote in 1984 of the ‘degeneration’ of the string quartet in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blaming this on the medium’s ‘transfer to large concert halls’. He suggested that ‘it was not until Schoenberg that true quartet sound was creatively recaptured; otherwise, the quartet had lost much of its raison d’être – its communication to the players rather than to an audience’.³⁵ The French composer, conductor and theorist Pierre Boulez had clearly thought similarly when, in the 1960s, he declared that the string quartet was dead. Indeed, it cannot be denied that the twentieth century has witnessed much sterile experimentation in the medium that has yielded little expressive fruit. Nevertheless, the pioneering work of quartets such as the Juilliard, Composers, New Music, LaSalle, Parrenin, Lydian, Arditti and Kronos, and their laudable objectives of encouraging and commissioning composers to write new music, working with them and formulating interpretations according to their intentions, have given renewed life to the medium; indeed, their work and achievements in the field were probably the prime cause of Boulez rescinding his controversial comment in the 1980s.

The volatile union of composer and performer in creating new work has always sparked innovation of some kind or other; but Stockhausen’s Helikopter (1993) for four helicopters, four television cameras and four members of a string quartet was beyond the realms of expectation even of the Arditti Quartet, for whom it was written. It requires each player to perform to a click-track in a separate flying helicopter;³⁶ sound and vision are transmitted to the concert hall, where the audience watches the performers on stacked television monitors (three or four for each player), placed roughly where the players would normally sit if playing in the hall.

The twentieth century has witnessed a metamorphosis of compositional language coupled with the transformation of instrumental techniques and sound ideals. The string quartet has remained a relatively economic and intimate medium for thorough exploitation of such changes and has thereby won new territories in expression. Whatever direction its future takes, it will probably be the result of a creative symbiosis between composers and instrumentalists and will incorporate innovations in scoring, content, style and form. Many believe that non-Western or ethnic chamber musics will play a significant role in challenging ‘accepted’ conventions of what constitutes serious art music, just as an unmade bed and a sophisticated arrangement of vehicle tyres have done in exhibitions of contemporary art. If Stockhausen’s most recent contribution to the genre is anything to go by, the term ‘spatial effects’ may assume a very different meaning during the course of the current millennium.