Robbie vs String Quartet

After many attempts at many different combinations of instruments I decided to go with the string quartet for the final assignment. The closest thing that I've come to writing for something like this was last year when I wrote my cliche piece for violin, cello and piano, so it should definitely be a learning experience.

Since I haven't studied, or have ever been a part of, a string quartet before I tried to get myself more familiar with the concept by listening to Beethoven's string quartets op. 131 and 135, six of Bartok's, and Webern's for inspiration. I particularly liked Bartok's no. 4 mvt. IV Allegretto, which was entirely pizzicato, and this sparked my main inspiration for my next piece.

At first I tried to dive right in and write the piece using mainly pizzicato however my sense of melodic direction was lacking. I didn't want to write a purely tonal piece but I had no idea how to approach it otherwise. I could grab a chord and rhythmically manipulate it but other than that I was stuck. Dr. Staniland suggested that I completely forget about every other method of writing melody, harmony and rhythm and focus one specific interval to write my piece. If I were to become stuck in any situation, just pick use the interval to help me out. Go up by an interval, down by an interval, have a chord repeat by that interval, have the passage start on the interval in that bar, etc.

So for this assignment I went with the interval of a 6th. I've also taken the approach of not listening to the playback on the computer. The recreation that sibelius makes in nowhere near the actual sound of what the instruments make (especially when you're using extended techniques) and this becomes very discouraging. It is very beneficial to have musicians play through your pieces as much as possible. "mom, I want a string quartet for christmas to put in my closet!"