Stephen Montague - String Quartet No. 1

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String Quartet No. 1 - in memoriam Barry Anderson and Tomasz Sikorski (1991)

String quartet, live electronics and tape - 22'

Commissioned by The National Studio for Electronic Music with funds provided by the Greater London Arts Association.
First performance: 4 June, 1989 by the Mistry Quartet, Purcell Room, South Bank Centre, London, Sonic Arts Network series, Points of Contact.
First performance of the final version: 23 March, 1993 by The Smith Quartet, Purcell Room, South Bank Centre, London, Stephen Montague 50th Birthday Concert.
Compact disc recordings: (1) Continuum CCD 1061, "Stephen Montague Orchestral and Chamber Music" (2) Mnemosyne Musique Media, Bourges, France LCD 278058/59, 1995: Bourges 1994 Magisteres et Prix

In May, 1987 one of my closest friends, Barry Anderson (52), died tragically in Paris a few hours after the premiere of his new IRCAM commission, Arc (bass clarinet, string quartet and tape). The following year another friend, Tomasz Sikorski (49), lost his long battle with alcoholism sadly dying alone (and undiscovered for over a week) in his dreary Warsaw flat. Their deaths struck me deeply. Both men were fine composers of growing international stature, but I could not help thinking that their best work was still ahead of them.

Barry Anderson's music was firmly based in the post-Webern idiom, dissonant but elegantly crafted, and at its best, brilliantly orchestrated with computer generated sounds. Anderson was refined, urbane and dapper. Tomasz Sikorski was not. He was well known as a difficult character. His personal life and his music were battlefields with considerable collateral damage. The idiom he used was "minimalism", but in his hands repetition was more to bludgeon than to entertain.

String Quartet No. 1 was inspired by my close friendship with these two men and uses short thematic and harmonic material from their works: Barry Anderson's Arc (1987) and Tomasz Sikorski's Holzwege (1972) for orchestra. The opening bars of Holzwege ("Paths to Nowhere") are quoted in the closing bars of my work.

Although the work was premiered by the Mistry Quartet in 1989 it underwent considerable change and development with subsequent performances by The Smith Quartet before reaching its final version in 1993. The tape part was realised in the composer's London studio with a generous loan of equipment by Yamaha/Kemble UK Ltd. A version entitled, In Memoriam Barry Anderson & Tomasz Sikorski, adding two percussion parts was commissioned by the Milwaukee 20th Century Music Ensemble (Director, Pavel Burda) and premiered in 1991.

String Quartet No. 1: in memoriam Barry Anderson & Tomasz Sikorski won First Prize at the 1994 22eme Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique, Bourges, France, and a Distinction at the 1996 Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria.