Dictionary of Music - Birding America

string quartet 405string orchestra An instrumental group made upentirely of stringed instruments. Today they are usuallythe bowed strings used in the symphony orchestra(violin, viola, cello, double bass). String ensembleshave been used for at least four hundred years.In England, particularly, consorts of viols—smallensembles consisting entirely of viols in differentsizes—were popular during the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. Throughout the baroque and classicperiods (1600–1820) a considerable amount ofmusic was written for string orchestra, and the practicehas continued, although to a lesser extent, to thepresent day. During the baroque period (to 1750) akeyboard instrument, most often a harpsichord, wasgenerally included to perform the basso continuo(continuous bass part; see CONTINUO); today a pianoor harp is added only rarely.The term CHAMBER ORCHESTRA is sometimesused for string orchestra, despite the fact that suchan ensemble does not play chamber music (it usesseveral instruments per voice-part, instead of the oneper voice-part used in chamber music). The latterterm is further misleading because it is also used forsmall orchestras that include woodwinds and brassesas well as strings.string quartet 1 A composition for four stringedinstruments, in which each instrument plays its ownpart (see QUARTET). The traditional string quartetconsists of parts for first violin, second violin, viola,and cello. It is the most popular form of chambermusic, and the repertory includes thousands of compositions.Although music for four stringed instrumentswas written during the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, the history of the string quartet as suchbegins with works written by Haydn during the1750s. These pieces are still largely in the style of aDIVERTIMENTO—light pieces with five movements,including two minuets. In the 1760s Haydn began touse four movements and to develop the style of theclassical string quartet, which is in effect a classicsonata for four instruments (see SONATA, def. 1). Hewrote more than eighty string quartets in all, someof which bear titles in addition to opus numbers.Among the best known of them (the titles here are inEnglish translation) are the Emperor Quartet in C,Razor Quartet, six Sun Quartets, Horseman Quartetin C minor, Hunt Quartet in B-flat, Lark Quartet inD, and Quintenquartett (quint means “fifth”; the titleis not generally translated) in D minor. Mozart wrotemore than two dozen string quartets, some of whichalso bear titles (Hunt Quartet, three Prussian Quartets,Dissonance Quartet in C major, and six HaydnQuartets dedicated to Haydn). The most prolificquartet composer of the classical period was Boccherini,who wrote about a hundred of them; comparedto those of Haydn and Mozart, however, mostof them are mediocre in quality.So far as quality is concerned, some of the sixteenstring quartets composed by Beethoven standalone in the history of the form. The late quartets inparticular, written during the last two years of hislife (1825–1827), carried the form far beyond boththe classical sonata and earlier concepts of writingfor four instruments. Outstanding among these isthe quartet entitled Grosse Fuge (“Great Fugue”),op. 133, which originally was to be the final movementof an earlier quartet but grew, owing to itscomplexity, into a separate work. In it Beethovendispensed with divisions into movements (it consistsonly of an overture and fugue), but it neverthelessfalls naturally into contrasting sections—anoverture, double fugue, slower section, gallopingfast section, and coda.During the remainder of the nineteenth century,the string quartet had an uneven history. Schubertwrote several fine ones, the most familiar of whichis no. 14 in D minor, entitled Der Tod und dasMädchen (“Death and the Maiden”; 1826). Schumann,Mendelssohn, Cherubini, Franck, Smetana,Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, and Chausson allwrote quartets, and Brahms’s three string quartetsare considered outstanding. Debussy and Raveleach wrote one.The composers of the twentieth century turned tothe string quartet with new enthusiasm. Perhapsmost notable in the repertory of the first half of thecentury are the six quartets of Béla Bartók, writtenbetween 1910 and 1939. The three chief composersof serial music—Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—all wrote string quartets. The leading neoclassicistsall used the form—Stravinsky (1914; 1920) andHindemith (seven quartets, between 1915 and 1945),