Quartetset

Quartetset is an extended seven movement work, for string quartet, which creates a dialogue between the past and present. Each of the movements explores this relationship in a different way: in the first movement, "Divided," 18th century gestures melt away into contemporary practice; in the last movement the second violin plays a diatonic set of variations while the other instruments create a foreign world around it. Only two of the seven movements will be heard tonight, the first, "Divided" and the fourth, "Scatterbrained," which once again interweaves 18th century harmonies and gestures with idioms 20th century quartet writing, but here as a wacky, ironic scherzo.