String Quartet No. 6 - "Canticle" (2017)

Program Notes:

String Quartet No. 6 - "Canticle" was commissioned by the Chiara String Quartet, with generous support provided by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska and its Hixon-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts and the Glenn Korff School of Music at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It consists of seven movements, highly contrasting in character, with movement I and VII serving as similar bookends to the overall arch of the work.

The piece opens with the quartet members striking various crotales, producing bell sounds that eventually blend with the string quartet - evoking the title, Canticle. The faster, pulse-oriented music has the members of the quartet using glass rods on their instruments and at one point quickly moves back and forth between alternating rhythmic sub-divisions, producing extremely rapid metric modulations. The last movement blends the string quartet with the bowing of the crotales to produce an ethereal, other-wordly finale to the canticle.

-- Pierre Jalbert