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on string quartet no. 6 String Quartet no. 6 was composed for the New World Quartet on the occasion of their winning recognition from the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation . It has required not only more than usual care and creative partnership from within the quartet but also, during the rehearsal period, from me. Without a spirit of true collaborative participation in realizing and projecting the artistic aims of the work, a convincing performance would not have been possible. I am permanently grateful to these four men for their understanding, dedication, and hard work. Since this quartet explores the extended (microtonally more-than-chromatic ) reaches of a harmonic and modulatory system using the same numerical raw materials as Harry Partch’s “monophony” but not his modal restrictions, it can be said to be tonal in a new sense: radically new in this case. It is, however, not centric, since it also employs twelve-tone technique by the device of considering the octave to contain not twelve notes but twelve regions. Then with one pitch assigned to each region, the exact pitch class changes as the complex common-tone modulations proceed. The semicombinatorial properties of the row are made the yoke to link intonation to serial process: hexachord equals Partchian hexad, Otonality alternating with Utonality,the two hexachords related by inversion.The rows are linked in a cyclic chaining using all forty-eight forms: the entire quartet, a single movement, is a giant palindrome with respect both to pitch and to rhythm. This makes an arch form with a chordal section at its keystone position. The surrounding sections each consist of four lyric solos, one each for the four instruments. Compositionally my aim was to conceal most of these techniques as skillfully as possible. ...

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