ABSTRACT
Despite the modern predilection for new ensembles, the string quartet is still Parnassus for twentieth-century composers. It is a challenging and rewarding genre, with four instruments of the same family offering overlapping ranges and an enormous variety of available sounds. It demands thoroughly professional compositional skills. Finally, composers often want to join their colleagues in a conversation of and in music, across time. To join those composers who have addressed themselves to the string quartet, to address oneself to them, to hear what they have to say, is to make a contribution. Lest this sound too mystical, I quote Pierre Boulez:
“Some people,” [Michel Butor] writes, “may think that, while intending to write about Baudelaire, I have only succeeded in speaking of myself. It would certainly be better to say that it was Baudelaire who spoke of me. He speaks of you.” If you question the masters of an earlier period with perseverance and conviction you become the medium of their replies: they speak of you through you.1
