Merion Music, Inc. / cf / 144-40218S
String Quartet No. 2
(after Zurbarán)
$41.00
James Primosch
Custom Print, allow up to 1 extra week for delivery
The concerts and exhibits of the Cleveland Museum of Art were an important formative influence for me during my student days. So when the invitation came to create a new work celebrating this institution on its seventy-fifth anniversary, I was not only happy to accept, but knew immediately that I wanted to write a piece that would somehow relate specifically to the museum. I decided to make the work a reflection on a painting in the museum’s collection: Zurbarán’s “The Holy House of Nazareth.” My quartet is not program music in a narrative sense, but rather a kind of meditation that takes its tone from this painting’s remarkable integration of intense affect, mysterious repose and secret geometry.Besides Zurbarán’s painting, the piece is occupied with a purely musical object of contemplation: the hymn tune “Picardy,” best known with the text “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.” This tune permeates the harmonic and melodic life of the quartet, sometimes appearing in a very simple, straightforward fashion, but often hidden amidst more complex structures. I was attracted to the melody for its musical qualities, but later realized that the hymn’s text also resonates with the mood of the painting; the words speak of a reverent awe, of “cherubim with sleepless eye,” and of the mystery of the Incarnate Word who must suffer: “King of kings, yet born of Mary…”
Voicing/Instrument: Violin 1, Violin 2, Violoncello , Viola - Full Score
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