Joel Eric Suben

String Quartet

Composer's Note:

String Quartet was begun in March 2013, substantially sketched in its entirety, and halfway completed during a family holiday in the Adirondack Mountains before being totally abandoned for nine years in favor of performances, recordings, and a variety of pressing matters both professional and personal. During those years I composed four Adrienne Rich cycles (11 songs for solo voice and piano, seven settings for chorus a cappella), five rhapsodies for violin and orchestra, a cycle of lullabies in three versions (high voice/guitar, low voice/harp, chorus a cappella), five impromptus for piano, and other works, mostly of short duration.

Reading through the unfinished Quartet nearly every day, I planned"”and failed---to execute its completion, primarily out of concern that working on it would lead me into an endless expansion of the motivic germ heard at the very start of the work. The inevitable creep of Quartet material into the other music I was composing troubled me not at all. When, in late May 2022, I finally returned to the Quartet"”in the very middle of a phrase"”the working out of the piece proceeded quickly, and the entire work came to completion in little more than two weeks. It was as though I had been composing the rest of the Quartet during my long abandonment of it.

String Quartet might well be called "Quartet No. 3," preceded as it is by a very early work for soprano and string quartet and a work from the 1980s for tenor, speaking chorus, and string quartet. Having played violin professionally (including an extended stint in a faculty string quartet), I enjoy a love of the quartet genre combined with a veneration of the canon of string quartet repertoire and have waited long until daring to add my own work to a list filled to abundance with well known masterworks.