String Quartet No.4 (“A Little Book of Prayers”)

for the Belcea Quartet, in memory of Laura Samuel (1976–2024)

I. Petition
II. Speaking in Tongues
III. Contemplation
IV. The Gospel Truth (“A Closer Walk with Thee”)
V. Lament

I first met and played as a guest violist with the Belcea Quartet at the Sydney Festival in 2001. Though still a young group, they were already well-established stars in the chamber music firmament. Their commissioning of my new string quartet is a very welcome reunion with these wonderful musicians, including the two founding members, Corina Belcea and Krzysztof Chorzelski, with whom I performed Mozart quintets a quarter of a century ago.

I was very saddened however to learn of the recent passing of the quartet’s former second violinist and founder member, Laura Samuel. My new work is dedicated to the memory of this very special person. In writing it, what has emerged is “A Little Book of Prayers”, the work’s subtitle.

Certainly the prominent moments throughout the work for the second violin have been written in homage to Laura, who I last encountered in her later career as the warmly unifying concertmaster of the BBC Scottish Orchestra. But these passages also serve as a gesture of welcome to the quartet’s new Australian member, Suyeon Kang, whose great playing I first encountered whilst she was still studying in Melbourne in 2007.

My book of prayers includes three different models of traditional Christian prayer as the work’s reflective first, third and fifth movements: wordless prayers of petition, contemplation and lament respectively. These pieces found their inspiration not only in traditional words and sentiments of sacred prayer and comfort but also in secular prayers, for example from the contemporary British poet Carol Ann Duffy and the Australian cartoonist and writer, Michael Leunig.

In between these slower sections stand two faster scherzo movements that explore other rituals of prayer or adoration. The second movement, Speaking in Tongues, looks at the Pentecostal practice of glossalalia in which people utter words or word-like phrases, often very rapidly and supposedly in tongues unknown to the speaker. This highly rhythmic music culminates in a fast-cut of compositional styles, signatures and the briefest of quotations as I endeavour to speak in “string-quartet-tongues other than my own”.

The fourth movement looks at a 19th-century gospel number, Just a Closer Walk with Thee, in glassy harmonics as if through a kaleidoscopic lens. In late 1800s New Orleans, this highly adaptable song was known to be used both as funeral dirge and dance tune.
Brett Dean, August, 2025