String Quartet No. 4

String Quartet No. 4 may refer to:

String Quartet No. 4 (Babbitt)

String Quartet No. 4 is the fourth of six chamber-music works in the string quartet medium by the American composer Milton Babbitt.

Babbitt’s Fourth Quartet was written in 1970, almost immediately after the Third Quartet. It is in a single movement, divided into twelve sections marked by (amongst other things) five different metronomic tempos, distributed 1-2-3-1-4-5-1-2-5-3-4-1. In contrast to its predecessor, the Fourth Quartet makes extensive use of coloristic instrumental effects, such as col legno, sul ponticello, and pizzicato glissando. Octave relations are especially important in this work. Contrasts of register, instrumental setting, timbre, duration and dynamics serve to articulate modes of set partitioning (Swift 1977).

The basic pitch structure of the Fourth Quartet is an array containing 77 statements of the aggregate (Mead 1984, 325). It is the first of Babbitt's works to employ weighted aggregates (Mead 1984, 320).

Discography

String Quartet No. 4 (Carter)

The Fourth String Quartet by American composer Elliott Carter was composed in 1985–86 in New York and Rome, and completed in June 1986. It was premiered on September 17, 1986 at Festival Miami, University of Miami, Florida by the Composers String Quartet.

Form and content

In contrast to the collage forms employed by Carter in the 1970s, the Fourth Quartet (similar to the nearly contemporaneous Triple Duo and Penthode) begins with an opposition of instrumental forces and then moves toward a rhapsodically accelerating finale that draws these opposed instruments into a continuous melodic line. The quartet can be heard as "an intensifying dispute, accompanied by a rising sense of intoxication". Each instrument has its own repertory of pitch intervals and its own structural speed. A polyrhythm of 12:126:175:98 governs the structure of the entire composition, usually resulting in rhythmic relations of 8:6:5:7 (the cello plays septuplets nearly all the time).

Movements

No. 4

No. 4 may refer to:

No. 4 (album)

№ 4 (sometimes referred to as No. 4) is the fourth album released by American hard rock band Stone Temple Pilots, released on October 26, 1999, by Atlantic Records. The album was a return to the band's earlier hard rock roots, while also blending elements of heavy metal, psychedelic rock, and alternative rock. Despite the lack of promotion due to singer Scott Weiland's one-year jail sentence shortly before the album's release, No. 4 was certified Platinum by the RIAA on August 7, 2000, and by the CRIA in August 2001. The song "Down" was nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance at the Grammy Awards. The album also produced one of STP's biggest hits, "Sour Girl", which charted at #78 on the Billboard Hot 100, their only song to appear on that chart. The CD was originally released as a digipak, then later changed to a standard jewel case.

Musical style

No.4 displays a deliberate effort by the band to return to a more hard rock-oriented sound featured on its first two albums. Allmusic cited the album as STP's "hardest effort" since Core, remarking that "it's as if STP decided to compete directly with the new generation of alt-metal bands who prize aggression over hooks or riffs." Stephen Erlewine also wrote that No.4 "consolidates all [of STP's] strengths."

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.

List of string quartets by Béla Bartók

The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók wrote six string quartets, each for the usual forces of two violins, viola and cello. Notable composers who have been influenced by them include Benjamin Britten, particularly in the Sonata in C for Cello and Piano (Rupprecht 1999, 250; Whittall 2013, 189), Elliott Carter, who refers in the opening of his own First String Quartet to Bartók’s Sixth Quartet (Schmidt 2012, 172), Chen Yi (Wong 2007, 237), Edison Denisov, whose Second Quartet is closely related to Bartók’s Fifth Quartet (Čigareva 2007, 231), Franco Donatoni, who was deeply impressed when he heard a broadcast of Bartók's Fourth Quartet (Osmond-Smith 2001), Robert Fripp, who mentions them as an influence upon King Crimson (Tamm n.d.), Miloslav Ištvan (Němcová 2001), György Kurtág, whose Opp. 1 and 28 both owe a great deal to Bartók's quartets (Sallis 2014, passim; Sanderson [2013]), György Ligeti, both of whose string quartets owe a great deal to Bartók’s quartets (Iddon 2014, passim; Satory 1990, 101–103), George Perle, who credits the Bartók Fourth and Fifth Quartets as precedents for his use of arrays of chords related to one another by different types of symmetry (Lansky 2001), Walter Piston (Donahue 1964, passim; Manheim n.d.), Kim Dzmitrïyevich Tsesekow (Shcherbakova 2001), Wilfried Westerlinck (Volborth-Danys 2001), Stefan Wolpe, who explained in a public lecture how he had derived ideas from Bartók’s Fourth Quartet (Babbitt n.d.), and Xu Yongsan (Wong 2007, 238).