3-Minute Quartet #1

A short-form — very short-form — string quartet in one movement, focused on energy, angularity, and tension.

Generated using Finale and Garritan Personal Orchestra 5. 

This recording is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC 4.0). You may share the recording with others and/or use it in derivative works as long as you explicitly credit me and do not use the recording for commercial purposes. In addition, you may not alter the metadata in the audio file identifying the title, composer, artist, or licensing information. The license pertains only to the audio recording and not to the underlying musical work or public performances. This recording, the underlying musical work, and score are © Thomas S. Statler. If you are interested in performing this work, please contact me.

Listener's Notes

The direct impetus for this piece was a comment made by the Brazilian composer Tom Zé at the “Composer to Composer” festival in Telluride, Colorado in 1991. In an open discussion, several early-career composers remarked on the difficulty of getting good music played on radio, because so many radio stations operated in a three-minute format geared to popular songs. “Instead of complaining,” Zé said, “why don’t you go write some good music that’s three minutes long?”

Indirectly, the piece was influenced by other music that was in my head at the time I was writing it, particularly Béla Bartok’s 5th Quartet and The Bobs’ a capella cover version of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”.