Michael Nyman String Quartet No. 3 (1990)

Michael Nyman
String Quartet No. 3 (1990)
Balanescu Quartet
beginning
fig. D

Alexander Balanescu, violin I
Jonathan Carney, violin II
Kate Musker, viola
Anthony Hinnigan, cello

Painting: Lucian Freud, Boy Smoking, 1950-1951

String Quartet No. 3 (1990), commissioned by Alexander Balanescu, is based on Romanian folk music, along with material from his choral work Out of the Ruins, via a process Nyman describes as "translation." It affected much of Nyman's composition throughout the 1990s—riffs, in particular, a seven-note scalar ostinato, from it appear in À la folie, Carrington (in which it was used as a temp track and ultimately was transformed into a theme for Lytton Strachey), Practical Magic (not used in the finished film), The End of the Affair, and The Claim. The translation is not as simple as it may sound, as Pwyll ap Siôn notes, the first violin has new melodic material higher than the highest notes of the soprano melody, which is largely for the second violin. In addition, he elides caesuras and makes use of the stringed instruments' ability to sustain far longer than a human voice. Among the passages new to the string quartet are measures 17-24, 125-126, and a cello part beginning at measure 63.
Some cause of the variation is that the quartet is a celebration of the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu, whereas Out of the Ruins is an expression of the hopelessness after an earthquake. Siôn describes numerous places where the accents and descriptors of the work indicate a very different feeling and approach to the music, with the quartet being much more aggravated, while the choral work reflects sorrow without indignation.
Like the first String Quartet, the piece is a reflection of Nyman's postgraduate work with Thurston Dart, who sent him to Romania in 1965 to gather folk music. The Romanian folk melodies that have been added to Out of the Ruins were all gathered on that trip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Quartets_1%E2%80%933

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