A Concert by the Iowa String Quartet, (March 20, 1966)

From a concert given at San Francisco State College on March 20, 1966, the Iowa String Quartet perform works by Henry Purcell and Gunther Schuller. The Schuller piece, his “Quartet No. 2” was commissioned by the Iowa String Quartet and is in three movements. According to the composer the first movement “contrasts clusterish, densely harmonic ensemble passages with brief lyric or quieter melodic sections, usually featuring just one of the four instruments, lightly accompanied by the others. In the second movement, the textural and characterological contrasts of the first movement are further exploited and expanded...The form and texture of the third movement is based on the systematic use of the six basic intervallic categories in our Western chromatic scale. Each of the five subdivisions of the movement emphasizes certain of these intervallic characteristics, both harmonically and melodically. The movement’s five subdivisions are broken down further into twenty-one smaller subsections, exploiting the various ensemble combinations possible in a string quartet...Quite beyond these technical considerations, the work hopes to exploit the inexhaustibly rich sonoric and expressive capacities of the string quartet.”