Writing a String Quartet

As I have tiresomely repeated a few times, I am writing a string quartet to be premiered in Vancouver next season. In great contrast to my last piece, Dark Dream for violin and guitar, the structure of the new piece was clear from very early on. Dark Dream I re-wrote several times from the ground up because I was trying to figure out the structure. Here is how the new quartet is organized:

String Quartet No. 2

I Mountain

II Forest

III Ocean

My inspiration stems from where the piece will be premiered. The Vancouver area is dominated by mountains, forest and ocean--where there aren't people that is! I spent much of my youth on Vancouver Island and sometimes in very remote parts of it. For a while I worked a few miles from the highest mountain on Vancouver Island, the Golden Hinde.

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Vancouver Island and coastal British Columbia generally has a lot of old growth forests and the second movement is "about" them in the way that Bartók's "night music" movements are about the sounds of the night. The third movement depicts the ocean as if La Mer had been written by Prokofiev instead of Debussy!

The first movement is proving the trickiest from a structural point of view and I haven't worked out the overall plan yet. Here is the first page, though:

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Those red arrows indicate the speed of the glissando. Going up means you start slow and speed up. Going down is the reverse.

The second movement is in moment form and I will put up a sample when it is further along.

UPDATE: But here is the first page of the third movement, Ocean:

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