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String Quartet No. 3 (1993)
| composer |
John Harbison (b. 1938) |
| performers |
Lydian String Quartet:
Daniel Stepner, violin
Judith Eissenberg, violin
Mary Ruth Ray, viola
Rhonda Rider, cello |
| publisher |
Associated Music Publishers (BMI)http://www.schirmer.com
|
| label |
Musica Omnia 0110http://www.musicaomnia.org
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| duration |
21:01 |
String Quartet No. 3 is a single 22-minute movement based on a hymn-like theme stated boldly in the opening measures of the piece. The theme evokes the tradition of American hymn singing and echoes the much older tradition of plainchant. It is elaborated throughout the work and presented much of the time in the kind of unison or near-unison rhythms of speech or hymnody. The dramatic movement of the piece is broken at two points by interludes of more melodic, relaxed, and less dramatic music -- composed separately from the main body of the quartet and coming from quite a different world. The contrast these interludes provide emphasizes the single-minded nature of the quartet across its remarkably long and otherwise unbroken sweep. The quartet was commissioned by Brandeis University for the Lydian String Quartet.
John Harbison (b. 1938) is among the most prominent composers working in the United States today. A prolific composer of orchestral, operatic, and chamber works, Harbison is also an active conductor, teacher, administrator, and promoter of the work of other composers and performers. His music is distinguished by its expressive blend of many styles, including aspects of jazz, pre-classical forms of Bach and Schütz, and post-tonal techniques of Prokofiev and Stravinsky.
Harbison was born in Orange, New Jersey into a musical family. He learned a variety of instruments at an early age; his accomplishments as a jazz pianist led him to form a jazz band at age 12 and to perform in Italy and Germany by age 15. Harbison began his formal compositional training with Walter Piston at Harvard University. He continued his studies in Germany with Boris Blacher at the Berlin Musikhochschule, then returned to the US for graduate work at Princeton University, New Jersey, studying with Milton Babbitt, Earl Kim, and Roger Sessions. Harbison's own teaching career included positions at Harvard, Brandeis, and Boston Universities (all in Massachusetts), as well as Reed College (Oregon). Since 1969 he has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and was named Institute Professor there in 1996.
Harbison's extensive catalog of works includes three symphonies, three operas, and numerous concerto, choral and chamber works. Much of his violin music has been composed for his wife Rose Mary, with whom he runs the Token Creek Music Festival in Wisconsin. As a conductor, Harbison has led a number of ensembles including the Boston Symphony, Emmanuel Music, Cantata Singers, Collage New Music, Handel and Haydn Society, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra.
Harbison has been composer-in-residence with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Academy in Rome, and the Marlboro, Santa Fe, and Tanglewood Music Festivals. In 1987 his cantata The Flight into Egypt (1986) received the Pulitzer Prize in music; his numerous other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and the Heinz Award. He was one of 12 composers invited to compose a section of a Requiem commemorating the victims of World War II, performed on the 50th anniversary of V-Day, August 1995, by the Stuttgart Bachchor and the Israel Philharmonic, conducted by Helmut Rilling. Other recent premieres include The Great Gatsby (1999), an opera based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel commissioned and premiered by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Abraham, a motet commissioned for The Papal Concert of Reconciliation at the Vatican and performed there in 2004.
Recordings of Harbison's work can be found on many labels including Albany, Bridge, Centaur, CRI, Decca, First Edition, innova, Klavier, Koch International Classics, Music & Arts, Musica Omnia, New World, Nonesuch, and Northeastern.
related websites
http://www.schirmer.com/Default.aspx?TabId=2419&State_2872=2&composerId_2872=627
Formed in 1980, the Lydian String Quartet performs traditional repertoire as well as contemporary music by United States composers such as Martin Boykan, Peter Child, Irving Fine, Charles Fussell, John Harbison, Lee Hyla, Leo Ornstein, William Schuman, and Yehudi Wyner. The quartet has performed extensively throughout the US and on major concert series in the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Russia and Armenia. They have won ensemble prizes at international competitions in Canada, France, and England, as well as the Naumburg Award for Chamber Music. The quartet recently completed a five-year project entitled "American Originals," during which they performed or recorded over 60 works of composers from the United States, often accompanying their concerts with lectures, workshops and discussions. In the fall of 2001, they began another five-year project entitled "Vienna and the String Quartet," which will juxtapose works of two and a half centuries from Haydn and Brahms through Webern, Schoenberg and beyond. Currently artists-in-residence at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, the quartet has recorded for the Centaur, CRI, Harmonia Mundi, Koch International Classics, Musica Omnia, Neuma, New World, and Nonesuch labels.
related websites
http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/music/lydian.htm
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