Jonathan Harvey - String Quartet No. 3 (1995) (with score)
In Harvey's 3rd quartet written in collaboration with the Arditti Quartet the players produce transformations of sounds similar to those that might otherwise be achieved electronically: “an immense variety of special playing techniques... inflect basic sounds through different tunings, harmonics, types of vibrato and playing positions, and even orchestrate the breathing of the players at one point.” (Arnold Whittall)
Jonathan Harvey himself wrote of it:
“In Quartet no. 3 there is a dialectic between a surface texture which is fleeting and fragmented and an underlying structure which is very strictly repetitive. A number of ‘themes’ (ten, or twenty when they combine to make ‘doubles’) are constantly juxtaposed in different ways; they are only developed at a few special moments. But each of theses 'themes’ is somewhat insubstantial. It is as if the normal solid string tone is put under a microscope, or a solid beam of light is diffracted by a prism and scattered. Often the material moves into the borderlands of silence, only half-heard. There are themes, for instance, on bounced bow glissandi, harmonic trills, ‘col legno battuto’ [struck with the wood of the bow] and (the nearest to solid pitch) an octave G constantly inflected with microtones, this latter theme deriving from an improvisation I recorded with the cellist Francis-Marie Uitti on the CD ‘Imaginings’.
The form could be described thus:
Exposition of most of the themes, with silences
Repeat of exposition over tritone pedal in the cello, becoming increasingly
developmental
Climax
Two new themes combine with the old themes (double-stop glissandi theme and pizzicato theme)
Dance-like conclusion with the col legno battuto theme dominant.”