String Quartet (Barber)

The String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11 was written in 1935–36 by Samuel Barber. Barber arranged the middle movement for string orchestra as his well-known Adagio for Strings in 1936. Barber continued to revise the piece, particularly the finale, until 1943.

Begun while living in Austria with his partner Gian Carlo Menotti after Barber's Prix de Rome, Barber intended that the quartet be premiered by the Curtis String Quartet, but did not finish the piece in time for their concert tour. On September 19, 1936, Barber wrote their cellist Orlando Cole: "I have just finished the slow movement of my quartet today—it is a knockout! Now for a Finale." Having completed a finale, the string quartet was premiered in its provisional form by the Pro Arte Quartet on December 14, 1936, at the Villa Aurelia in Rome. Afterward Barber withdrew the finale so as to rewrite it, which he did by April, 1937. He rewrote it again before it was published. The final form was premiered by the Budapest Quartet on May 28, 1943, at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

String Quartet (Fauré)

Gabriel Fauré's String Quartet in E minor, Op 121, is his last work, completed in 1924 shortly before his death at the age of 79. His pupil Maurice Ravel had dedicated his String Quartet to Fauré in 1903, and he and others urged Fauré to compose one of his own; he declined, on the grounds that it was too difficult. When he finally decided to write it, he did so in trepidation.

The quartet is in three movements, the last movement combining the functions of scherzo and finale. The work has been described as an intimate meditation on the last things, and "an extraordinary work by any standards, ethereal and other-worldly with themes that seem constantly to be drawn skywards."

History

When Fauré was director of the Paris Conservatoire (from 1905 to 1920) he customarily left Paris for several weeks at the end of the academic year to compose in peace in quiet resorts. After his retirement he continued to retreat from Paris for bouts of sustained composition. The quartet was composed at Annecy-le-Vieux, and in Paris and Divonne-les-Bains between September 1923 and September 1924.

String Quartet No. 20 (Mozart)

The String Quartet in D major, K. 499, was written in 1786 in Vienna by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It was published by – if not indeed written for – his friend Franz Anton Hoffmeister. Because of this, the quartet has acquired the nickname Hoffmeister.

Structure

There are four movements:

This work, sandwiched between the six quartets he dedicated to Joseph Haydn (1782–5) and the following three Prussian Quartets (1789–90), intended to be dedicated to King Frederick William II of Prussia (the first edition bore no dedication, however), is often polyphonic in a way uncharacteristic of the earlier part of the classical music era. The menuetto and its trio give good examples of this in brief, with the brief irregular near-canon between first violin and viola in the second half of the main portion of the minuet, and the double imitations (between the violins, and between the viola and cello) going on in the trio.

Thong (clothing)

The thong is a garment generally worn as either underwear or as a swimsuit in some countries. It may also be worn for traditional ceremonies or competitions, such as sumo wrestling.

Viewed from the front, the thong typically resembles a bikini bottom, but at the back the material is reduced to a minimum. Thongs are almost always designed to cover the genitals, pubic hair, anus, and perineum, and leave part or most of the buttocks uncovered. The back of the garment typically consists of a thin waistband and a thin strip of material, designed to be worn between the buttocks, that connects the middle of the waistband with the bottom front of the garment. It is also used as a descriptive term in other types of garment, such as a bodysuit, bodystocking, leotard, or one-piece swimsuit in the context "thong backed."

One type of thong is the G-string, the back of which consists only of a (typically elasticized) string. The two terms G-string and thong are often used interchangeably; however, they can refer to distinct pieces of clothing. Thongs come in a variety of styles depending on the thickness, material, or type of the rear portion of fabric and are available for both men and women throughout most of the world.

String (computer science)

In computer programming, a string is traditionally a sequence of characters, either as a literal constant or as some kind of variable. The latter may allow its elements to be mutated and the length changed, or it may be fixed (after creation). A string is generally understood as a data type and is often implemented as an array of bytes (or words) that stores a sequence of elements, typically characters, using some character encoding. A string may also denote more general arrays or other sequence (or list) data types and structures.

Depending on programming language and precise data type used, a variable declared to be a string may either cause storage in memory to be statically allocated for a predetermined maximum length or employ dynamic allocation to allow it to hold variable number of elements.

When a string appears literally in source code, it is known as a string literal or an anonymous string.

In formal languages, which are used in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, a string is a finite sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set called an alphabet.

C++ string handling

The C++ programming language has support for string handling, mostly implemented in its standard library. The language standard specifies several string types, some inherited from C, some newly designed to make use of the language's features, such as templates and the RAII resource management idiom.

Since the initial versions of C++ had only the "low-level" C string handling functionality and conventions, multiple incompatible designs for string handling classes have been designed over the years, and C++ programmers may need to handle multiple conventions in a single application.

History

The std::string type is the main string datatype in standard C++ since 1998, but it was not always part of C++, and still is not the only standard string type: from C, C++ inherited the convention of using null-terminated strings that are handled by a pointer to their first element, and a library of functions that manipulate such strings. In modern standard C++, a string literal such as "hello" still denotes a NUL-terminated array of characters and std::string has support for converting itself to such an array.

Římov

Římov refers to the following places in the Czech Republik: