Boosey & Hawkes
The string quartet, as composers love to say, is a heavy medium. Sturdy; imposing. Daunting. Going back to Haydn, it’s been a realm and repository of big, serious ideas. For some, it served as the proving ground for their most radical (or depending on one’s perspective, poetic) thoughts [Beethoven, Bartók, Dutilleux]. For some, it was a playground for refining techniques and a place to assert one’s aesthetic priorities [Brahms, Schönberg]. For some [Debussy, Ravel], their music for string quartet is simply the perfect, distilled essence of the full breadth and depth of their work, nothing more and nothing less.
For my (well, now: First) string quartet, written exactly ten years ago, in 2005, this was my chance to dump everything I’d ever thought or known about music into one sprawling piece. 32 minutes of lots and lots of stuff. Sadly(?), the young group I wrote it for disbanded the week before the scheduled premiere, and I was left feeling as though I’d poured my heart into the bottom of a bucket. I never heard the piece performed live, and always felt that I really missed out on a big chance to experience it and to learn from what I did. But as the years passed, I realized that growth was in the stretching, and that I had actually applied those lessons to other works with much better acumen and result. I also learned that setting out to say something important can be presumptuous once one realizes that the artist is often not the best judge of what’s really important in their work. I’m now glad I missed hearing that piece; it made it much easier to cut the wild hedges back to the one movement, the eleven minutes that I’ve let remain.
For my second quartet, I decided to take a different tack. My head was full of ideas from the start, but I aimed very directly toward design, toward abstraction, toward the notions of absolute music that, for many, is the essence of the medium of the quartet. I’ve taken this part of the namesake of the piece, the number two, and used it in broad and simple ways to plan the arc and structure: two movements; two sections in each: slow/fast, then fast/slow.
—Sean Shepherd