Update Title: 23A68DA7-8BD8-42C4-AF78-1697140EB5AF

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When the Friends of the Stanford String Quartet commissioned me to compose a new work for their tenth anniversary season, I wanted to write a piece that was in some way a celebration of their wonderful achievement; in other words, I wanted to write a vibrant, joyful kind of piece.  The first movement of String Quartet No. 2 is marked Allegro vivo, giubilante and is full of outgoing gestures: noisy chords, bustling thematic material and a joyous melody sung by the first violin and cello in widely separated octaves.  The movement is even in (hyper-extended) C major!  Virtuosity in all four instruments is featured.  At the end of the movement, the energy dissipates, and the music ends quietly, spent.  The second movement presents a quiet melody (a lullaby) which begins in muted cello.  After a small chaconne with solo first violin singing above it, the cello tune returns in a version for string trio.  The third movement, Allegro vivo, features pizzicato in the first large section, then moves to additive ostinato with twelfths in the viola as the single unchanging feature.  This ostinato coalesces into an Allegretto grazioso melody in the cello before returning to another version of the pizzicato music, ending (arco) with the "C major" chords of the first movement.

I had another reason for composing this celebratory piece.  My dear friends, Stephen Hartke and Lisa Stidham, were expecting their first child, and I wrote this piece as an imaginary character study of their boy, Alexander, and their new life together.  Alexander's birth and the completion of my quartet occurred, not too far apart, in late 1993.  String Quartet No. 2 is a double celebration and is, you might say, program music squared. --Donald Crockett

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