First String Quartet - 3 movements. Advice? What to do for the fourth?

Dorico
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I’ve written three movements so far for my first String Quartet. If you are in the mood, I’d love to pick your brain.

The first movement has a joyful, spirited momentum. I added a cadenza in the exposition, which I know is unconventional, especially in a string quartet, but I’m thinking about keeping it. Is that a good idea?

The second movement is slower than the first, though excitement does creep into the middle of it, and reminds me a bit of a heartbeat and measured breathing at night as someone wrestles with despairing thoughts while hope gently seeps into every corner of the soul.

I am just now finishing the first draft of the third movement. After a wandering intro, it is a mix of leisurely and energetic moments as it moves through different scenes, like following a thought path or flashbacks interspersed with reflective analysis. Does it feel like it is lacking something?

I haven’t started the fourth movement yet. I’m wondering if I should aim for an Adagio with a Presto ending since my second movement was only Andante and not Adagio, but I’m not sure about this. I think my comfort zone is Allegro Moderato, and maybe I have not provided enough contrast within the first three movements. I was originally thinking the fourth movement should be an Allegro, but as I have a lot of Allegro in the first three, maybe it would be too much of the same. I also notice that I tend to put an intense section in the middle of each piece. Maybe I need to change up this pattern for variety? My greatest fear is creating something boring.

If you have any impressions to share, advice for me for how to improve, or ideas for the fourth movement, please let me know! I have so much to learn from you.

And I’m really hoping you can hear past the MIDI-sounding rendering to imagine the score as it would sound played by real musicians, as I don’t have the bandwidth to pour into learning VSTs and programming at this point. This is the Noteperformer 4 rendering of the Dorico score - seems the first fraction of a second is cut off, sorry! You can listen here.

First movement (9:15): Allegro, 4/4 metre (cadenza at 2:55)
(Keys: Fmaj-Dm-Fm-Cm-Am-Dmaj-Amaj-Dmaj-Bm-Dm-Dmaj-Cmaj)

Second movement (8:06): Andante, 6/8 metre
(Keys: Dm-Am-Fmaj-Gm-Dm-Dmaj)

Third Movement (10:44): Allegro, 3/4 metre
(Keys: Cm-Fmaj-Gm-Bbmaj-Gm-Bbmaj-Bbm-Bbmaj-Fmaj-Bbmaj-Cmaj)

Or all three (28:13) in one click here if you just want to let it all play in the background as you work.

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Stunning. Enchanting, captivating and richly melodic from start to finish. It’ll be brilliant live.

You’re way above my pay grade so I wouldn’t dream of giving advice other than to say that I’d encourage you to continue with this by yourself. The answers will come, I’m sure.

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Oh, wow, you just made my day! Thank you so much!

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My $0.02 as a composer: don’t worry about fast-slow-fast-slow or any other concepts like that. Compose as you want to compose and what works for you. Shostakovich wrote an entire string quartet, his fifteenth and last that has six movements, all of which are adagios. It’s a really incredible work, but yes, every movement is slow. And that’s ok. Same with a lot of music that is all relatively fast.

As far as the audio, I use NP a lot (as well as Reason, Pianoteq and, until I ditched Finale, Garritan Personal Orchestra 5) and have released a lot of string works on recordings using it. So good for you-I think it sounds great.

Here’s one work for string quintet I did in NotePerformer combined with Garritan (where NP fell short), and another for piano and string orchestra. It will never be perfect (and in some cases I had to add in the Garritan sounds since NotePerformer’s celli don’t always sound that good in some works, and I’ve never understood that). NP’s string harmonics are just so much better than those I had been using with the Garritan samples, so it was worth the effort to get NP to do what I needed it to do.

But anyway, don’t worry about whether or not it’s “boring.” If it isn’t boring to you, and isn’t clearly self-indulgent, then it’s fine. Trust your creative judgment.

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Thanks for the encouragement and vote of confidence. I agree that in the end, whether or not the music satisfies me is really the most important thing. I really enjoy composing and I don’t want to bother making any music that isn’t pleasing to my own ears and in some way meaningful to me.

That said, I see value in challenging myself to learn conventions, since they developed for a reason, and I think it will help me to know the difference between deviating from conventions for my own artistic reasons versus writing poorly out of ignorance or lack of skill development. Then I will have confidence that my creative judgment is coming from a place of understanding. So I really value the shared knowledge of this community, especially tips from those who have studied classical music more than I have so that I can keep learning. But thanks for reminding me that in the end, it is up to me.

Thanks for sharing your work and pointing me to the Shostakovich quartet No. 15. It is certainly different from my style, which helps me to appreciate different styles and to continue to inform and define my preferences! I’m a sucker for a strong melody!

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With this in mind, since this is your first String Quartet, my advice is to follow the conventional structure found in Haydn, Beethoven, Dvorak, etc. (fast–>slow–>Menuetto/Scherzo–>fast Finale). Hence, based on your description, I’d make your current 3rd movement your 4th movement and write a Menuetto/Scherzo-type 3rd movement instead. Once you have the fundamentals down, you can start being more experimental in your structure.

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Agreed, and good for you. For sure, it’s helpful to study some basics (and admittedly I never got beyond second or third species counterpoint when I was a kid). But the way I really learned composition wasn’t from my teacher but from taking out 5-10 scores, mostly orchestral scores, and following them while listening to the records (we didn’t have CDs or an internet back then LOL). This way one learns from the best (Bartók, Berg, Dallapiccola, etc) but also eventually figures out how to sound relatively unique.

Early Reich was influenced by Terry Riley. Feldman was influenced by Cage and Webern. We all have our influences and that’s fine. At the very least, listen to a wide range of music. My tastes are different from when I was young; I initially didn’t like minimalist music (true story: my dentist as a kid knew Reich as they had both gotten herniorrhaphies at the Shouldice Clinic and struck up a friendship, so I knew of some of the early works by SR before he was much known outside of lower manhattan but just didn’t gravitate towards minimalism). Then I heard the radio premiere of Einstein on the Beach on WKCR-FM that somehow reached my radio in north Jersey and it really hit me. After that I listened to as much as existed back then, which wasn’t much, but it expanded my taste beyond 12-tone music (which I composed then, and I still occasionally let some rows creep into my “minimalist” works). Had I not listened to a ton of different music in the 70’s and subsequently and studied every score I could get my hands on, I doubt I would be doing anything like what I’ve done over the past several decades.

And while I certainly want others to listen to and hopefully like my works, I honestly write what I personally want to hear. So you’re clearly on what I think is the ”right path”based on your comments.

I’d also suggest finding a way to stay connected with musicians. That’s the one thing that was really lacking once I graduated high school, since I had been going into NYC on weekends from 9th-12th grade to study music and once I started college as a bio sci major, that level of frequent interaction with performers went away. It’s much better for a composer to have regular contact with musicians and also learn from their deep experiences with their instruments. I’ve learned things that have affected a few works I thought were all good and ended up revising some things based on feedback that was serendipitous. So try to stay in touch with musicians. It’s always a good thing.

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Hmm, that’s a thought. Does the fact that my third movement is written in 3/4 matter? I was thinking that the finale ought to be in 4/4.

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IMHO, no. None of that matters.

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If you want to learn conventions, then your 3rd movement should be in 3/4. It doesn’t matter what time signature your 4th movement is.

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Okay, that was why I chose 3/4 for my third movement in the first place, but although my original intention was to write a scherzo, it got away from me. :blush:

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What convention is this? I’ve never heard of any requirements that a string quartet in any number of movements must have specific time signatures unless a movement uses a specific form (eg waltz). I’ve really never heard of anything like this. In thr Classical era there were forms that were typical for specific movements like sonata form for a first movement, but we are not living in the time of Haydn or Mozart nor did those older forms generally require a third movement to be in 3/4 etc unless I’m misunderstanding just curious. Thanks.

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As I recall from my (rudimentary) research, conventionally, string quartets have four movements:

  1. Allegro (in sonata form)
  2. Adagio/Andante
  3. Menuetto/Scherzo/Waltz (which are usually in 3/4)
  4. Allegro for a dramatic finale

Of course, there are umpteen examples of quartets that break from this form, and if the adagio/andante is not found in the second movement, it is found in a later movement. Most fast movements have 4/4 time, but not all. And as you pointed out, we are not living in the time of Haydn or Mozart.

I could be wrong, but this is what I have gathered so far.

So I was somewhat on pace to follow that structure with the first and second movement. The second movement is Andante, but there’s a question mark in my mind about whether or not it provides enough contrast to the first and third movements. And then the third didn’t end up being a scherzo. There is a playfulness to the last section of my third movement (starting at 9:25 - a section which I had written early in the process of writing the third movement but stopped after I got stuck for a long time). That was my “scherzo-esque” idea that remained just a sketch for a long time until inspiration with the slower, more chordal sections came to me, and I enjoyed those parts too much to part with them. So since my original direction with the types of movements has shifted a bit, I need to decide whether I want to write a new third movement and make the current third movement the finale as @TradViolin suggested (it doesn’t feel like a finale to me yet… but maybe I can tweak it more in that direction) or whether to write the next movement as my finale. And what tempo to choose?

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Interesting. I am more of the school of “let’s start with an idea or two or maybe a few tones or a rhythmic idea and see where it goes.” So I generally don’t have things architected like that before I start composing a work. But I also don’t write works with movements, although certainly there are often sections that are demarcated by a few measure of silence or a different metronome marking.

Everyone does it differently. I’ve read that Corigliano carefully architects the structure of a work before moving on to notes. Feldman would focus more on scale, especially in his late and very long works. Fewer notes actually gave him more to work with as he liked to point out. I’m much more of the latter mind but that’s a choice. There is no right or wrong, which is what I’ve been getting at.

I’ve written some things that ended up being very long (as in 2-4+ hours), not because that’s what I planned from the start but because that is just where my music led itself. It’s nice to just see where things go Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t, I try something else.

Composition is hard especially when it’s not based on processes or systems. But it’s also hard when it is based on systems, tonal or serial. It’s just hard, period.

I write mainly through improvisation, which is also more challenging for me since I never learned piano. But it’s also nice to not rely on systems and see where the music takes itself, even works that end up using only 5-6 tones. Oddly, especially over the past 2-3 years, 12-tone rows and serial processes do end up appearing in parts of my work although it’s unusual these days for me to write something that is strictly 12-tone. I do have some works of focused music (my preferred term over “minimalism”) that involve rows, which is a combination that sometimes leads to interesting results. James Tenney has an awesome work that is a 12-tone minimalist canon (his “Chromatic Canon”) and I also have a work for six marimbas (“bs piece” for the percussionist Bill Solomon) that is a pretty strict minimalist 12-tone double canon and actually has been performed. I was just playing around in a hotel room in Palo Alto one night after work and didn’t think it would lead to anything worth keeping. So sometimes it helps to have a formal system but that’s more the exception in my experience. Instinct is generally better than relying on systems but that’s purely my own opinion.

Sorry for a long series of responses but your question deserves a carefully considered reply. Good luck!

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Both ends of the spectrum are important for composing, just like writing words on a page. Stream of consciousness writing can be useful and effective at times, as can outlines, topic sentences, and paragraphs.

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Sure. But perhaps you might try seeing what you can do with less. You might be surprised. Or start with a rhythmic figure and transform it or apply it canonically. Keep in mind as well that systems are made to be broken. And don’t feel restricted by existing structures or conventions. That’s my point.

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Sure, I get it. Thanks.

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the opening has such a wistful charm and an unusually beautiful melody that I finished up listening to everything – twice. And yet I have somewhat mixed feelings overall. I think your fears that the three movements are a bit too similar, both in mood and tempo I would say, have some justification. It’s not a piece with dramatic contrasts, though with the largely classical (at least strikes me as being rather Beethovenian in his more romantic moods!) style, I might not expect it. There’s nothing in theory wrong with having a cadenza – the aforementioned Shostakovich quite often has them in his unsurpassed cycle but here I fear that it broke the momentum a bit that early on.

I would be actually tempted to leave the work at three movements because if you do a fourth, it must be either really vigorous or the piece must take a tragic turn which isn’t really heralded by what has already come. Even if the work as is is arguably a bit too similar, it does have homogeneity with perhaps enough variety and beauty within the movements to make for a largely satisfactory whole. The question is basically “what are you trying to express?”. If you have an answer to that you will know how to finish the work and if you don’t, then consider that’s how for me a work gets real focus (although I admit in my own quartets, the real nature of the work often only becomes apparent later on…) and I’d try to think along those lines rather than formal conventions and past precedent which to me can be safely ignored.

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Oh, thank you for your kind comments. I’m honoured that you listened to it twice, and so pleased that you enjoyed it!

I really appreciate your constructive criticism too. That’s helpful to know that you felt that the cadenza broke the momentum.

And I hadn’t thought about leaving it at three movements, but now I will give that some serious thought and whether or not I can edit the three to feel “finished.” I agree with you that a fourth either has to take a tragic turn or be really vigorous… and I wondered, actually, whether or not I could feasibly pull off both… to start out tragically and end victoriously. But that might be impractical and ineffective to aim for in the same movement.

What am I trying to express? Yes, that’s a good question. I’ve been stewing for the longest time about titles, trying to answer that question. I feel there is something “external” about the first movement, like one is being swept along with momentum as if going about a day in the life albeit with an inner sense of joy, while the second is more an internal journey in the mind or in the heart. The third, feels a bit more random, like different scenes, but somehow there is a thread that leads from one to the next. I don’t exactly know what it’s saying. Maybe that all fragments of one’s experience, no matter what they are, have purpose and belong to the whole.

Thanks for discussing my piece with me. It’s so helpful as I think about what effect it is having and what I really want it to be in the end.

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Personally, I’m partial to a Corigliano-style rondo movement for the finale.
Basically you have a ritournello that is new material, and each intervening episode is thematic material (heavily transformed) from the previous movements, in reverse order (themes from the 3rd movement, then the 2nd, and ending with the 1st.)

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