String Quartets 1–3

Infobox Album
Name = String Quartets 1-3
Type = studio
Longtype =
Artist = Michael Nyman and Balanescu Quartet


Cover size = 200
Caption = art by Paul Richards
clockwise from top left: Balanescu, Musker, Hinnigan, Carney
Released = June 14, 1991
Recorded = November 1990, Church Studios, Crouch End using B & W Loudspeakers
Genre = Contemporary classical music, Chamber music, string quartet, minimalist music
Length = 63:17
Language =
Label = Argo
Director =
Producer = Andrew Cornall
Reviews =
Compiler =
Chronology = Michael Nyman
Last album = La Sept
1989
This album = String Quartets 1-3
1991
Next album = Prospero's Books
1991
Misc = Extra chronology 2
Artist = Balanescu Quartet
Type = Studio
Last album =
This album = String Quartets 1-3
1991
Next album = Byrne/Lurie/Moran/Torke
1992 Extra album cover 2
Upper caption = 1991 Alternate Cover
Type = Studio


Lower caption = Extra album cover 2
Upper caption = 2002 Decca Reissue
Type = Studio


Lower caption =

"String Quartets 1-3" is a 1991 album by the Balanescu Quartet (Alexander Balanescu, Jonathan Carney, Kate Musker, and Tony Hinnigan) and the fifteenth release by Michael Nyman. It is the second album of his music (after "Out of the Ruins") on which he did not perform or conduct, though he does provide liner notes. "String Quartet No. 3" is built out of "Out of the Ruins" and became a fixture in numerous Nyman film scores in the 1990s.

The album was issued by Argo Records with two different covers. Decca Records reissued the album in the UK on July 8, 2002, as part of a The British Music Collection, giving it yet a third cover.

Nyman's four string quartets are the subject of chapter 7 in Pwyll ap Siôn's "The Music of Michael Nyman: Texts, Contexts, and Intertexts". [Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate Publishing, 2007]

The album is the first of several recordings of the Nyman string quartets. The Lyric Quartet would also record String Quartets 2 and 3, and sections of "String Quartet No. 4" on "String Quartets 2, 3 & 4/If & Why" (2002). The Nyman Quartet (Musker and Hinnigan with violinists Gabrielle Lester and Catherine Thompson), according to the liner notes of "Acts of Beauty • Exit no Exit" (2006), is set to record all four some time in the future.

tring Quartet No. 1

The "String Quartet No. 1" (1985) is built out of three distinct and diverse pre-existing music sources: John Bull's "Walsingham Variations", Arnold Schoenberg's "String Quartet No. 2", and Alex North's "Unchained Melody". The use of Bull is an homage to his professor, Thurston Dart, who presented Nyman with the "Musica Britannica" edition of Bull's keyboard works as a graduation present. "Walsingham" was a popular song in Bull's time, and Nyman's use of "Unchained Melody" (originally written for a 1955 prison film titled "Unchained" and famously covered by The Righteous Brothers, and the favorite song of Nyman's wife, Aet) is a contemporary equivalent. As noted by Pwyll Ap Siôn, [p.165] "Unchained Melody" is musically related to "Walsingham," as its opening three-note pattern of C-D-E is a slight variation of the melody of "Walsingham." "Unchained Melody" enters in section H (measure 274) over a bass line of variation 9 of "Walsingham" that previously appeared in section E.

Schoenberg's "String Quartet No. 2" is notable in two ways--first, it broke with convention by adding a part for a soprano vocalist, and second, it broke away from the tonal language standard and paved the way for modernist music. Nyman incorporates the Schoenberg material beginning in section B, and it does not return until section I. The material Nyman uses is an eight note (two measure) phrase for the cello transcribed by Nyman for first violin. Siôn notes [p. 166] that Nyman compresses the nearly two octave phrase into one octave. When it returns in section I, Nyman has added tremolo, as well as syncopation more characteristic of his own style.

tring Quartet No. 2

"String Quartet No. 2" (1988) was commissioned for a dance work called "Miniatures", choreographed and performed by Shobana Jeyasingh, who dictated the rhythmic structure of the piece, based on the South Indian Bharata Natyam tradition. Melodically and harmonically, it is Western classical music, while structurally it is Karnatak music.

tring Quartet No. 3

"String Quartet No. 3" (1990) is based on Romanian folk music, along with material from his choral work "Out of the Ruins", via a process Nyman describes as "translation." It affected much of Nyman's composition throughout the 1990s--riffs, in particular, a seven-note scalar ostinato, from it appear in "À la folie", "Carrington" (in which it was used as a temp track and ultimately was transformed into a theme for Lytton Strachey), "Practical Magic" (not used in the finished film), "The End of the Affair" and "The Claim". The translation is not as simple as it may sound, as Pwyll ap Siôn notes, [p.173] the first violin has new melodic material higher than the highest notes of the soprano melody, which is largely for the second violin. In addition, he elides caesuras and makes use of the stringed instruments' ability to sustain far longer than a human voice. Among the passages new to the string quartet are measures 17-24, 125-126, and a cello part beginning at measure 63.

Some cause of the variation is that the quartet is a celebration of the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu, whereas "Out of the Ruins" is an expression of the hopelessness after an earthquake. Siôn [pp. 174-175] describes numerous places where the accents and descriptors of the work indicate a very different feeling and approach to the music, with the quartet being much more aggravated, while the choral work reflects sorrow without indignation.

Track listing

"String Quartet No. 2"
#I
#II
#III
#IV
#V
#VI
"String Quartet No. 3"
#beginning
#fig. D
"String Quartet No. 1"
#beginning
#fig. B
#C
#D
#E
#F
#G
#H
#I
#J
#K
#L

Personnel

*Michael Nyman, composer and liner notes

*Balanescu Quartet:
*Alexander Balanescu: violin I
*Jonathan Carney: violin II
*Kate Musker: viola
*Anthony Hinnigan: cello

*Producer: Andrew Cornall
*Engineer: John Dunkerley
*Tape editor: Simon Bertram
*Publisher: Kelly Music
*Series design: Joe Ewart at Assorted Images
*Art direction: Ann Bradbeer
*Cover art: Charcoal Drawings of the Balanescu Quartet by Paul Richards

References