A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 31 (IV - Capriccio Giocoso: Allegretto)

A M Bell - String Quartet No 33 (I: Allegro tenebroso)

Credo

Trio Sonata on 'Old MacDonald' in the style of J.S. Bach, by John Riley.

In this short theme you will hear characteristics of late 18th century galant music.

A Theme in G

My Seventeenth String Quartet began life somewhat abortively in March 1979 as an overture for string trio, intended as a welcoming present for my sister Ruth, who was returning that day from a school field-trip.  The timing of the impulse on the day of her return was not the cleverest; the work ran into the ground half-way through the development section (5:00), remained unperformed and was eventually lost.  Over the next eleven years I made a number of attempts to revive it as a quartet (the original trio contained absurd quantities of double-stopping), and work on the final form of the opening movement was solidly underway by the early summer of 1990.  The music contains a rare moment of expressionist personal suffering; the somewhat morbid passage from 5:12 to 5:23 was conceived under the influence of a rather savage toothache.

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 17 (I - Lento - Allegro con Brio)

The slow introduction to the final movement of my Seventeenth Quartet is essentially a reworking of the introduction to the opening movement.  It preserves at 0:49 a dissonance which appeared in the 1979 trio version of the music, but which I smoothed out in the first movement of the present work.  The finale proper, Allegro Scherzando, originated in 1988-89 with the sketch of the passage at 8:04 - 8:08, and grew out of it largely in back-formation.  The notion of reiterating the first movement introduction was similarly a back-formation; the five-note scale principal motif of the Allegro Scherzando is closely related to the theme of the introduction, but to the best of my memory the finale began life independently and the relationship was fortuitous.

The Seventeenth Quartet was completed on the Moscow Metro on the evening of August 17th, 1991 (with minor revisions in 2014 and 2018), and is dedicated to my sister Ruth, the intended recipient of the abortive String Trio of 1979 out of which it grew.

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 17 (IV - Finale:  Lento - Allegro Scherzando)

A short organ Prelude on the tune of a popular Czech and Slovak carol "Narodil sa Kristus Pán".

Prelude on "En virgo parit filium"

Fughetta Natalizia

Albrechtsberger was born at Klosterneuburg, near Vienna. He originally studied music at Melk Abbey and philosophy at a Benedictine seminary in Vienna and became one of the most learned and skillful contrapuntists of his age. Albrechtsberger's earliest classmates included Michael Haydn and Franz Joseph Aumann. After being employed as organist at Raab in 1755 and Maria Taferl in 1757, he was appointed Thurnermeister back at Melk Abbey. In 1772 he was appointed organist to the court of Vienna, and in 1792 Kapellmeister of St. Stephen's Cathedral.

Interlude No. 58 by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger

Haydn's model for monothematicism can be quite a life-saver when time is as short as this; the initial ten-bar subject of the finale contains the seed for pretty much the entire movement.  Not surprisingly in the circumstances, invention tends to give place to pleasantry(probably more so in this than any of the other movements);  still, I quite like the sauntering second subject variant theme, and the way it evolves as it goes.  It contains something of the most uncharacteristic exuberance I felt as I raced the clock for the final double bar (I am neither a competitor nor an adrenaline compulsive in ordinary life), which I reached at 11:58pm by the bedside alarm clock that had kicked the whole thing off for the 7:00am start.

And there you have it; String Quartet No. 29.  It should have been a companion-piece, but the sad fate of its sister quartet has made it by default one of a kind in my output.  I learned two things in the course of its composition.   First, that it is close to impossible to write anything unhappy in the key of B major (how Wagner and Dvořák managed such tragedy and pathos in the Liebestod and the final pages of the 'Cello Concerto I shall never know).  Second, that if one is steeped in music to the point where one's head is a torrent of notes for much of the time already, and if one's primary goal is fluency rather than quality, then marshalling those notes into order in the space of seventeen hours is not so much difficult as just unbelievably hard work.  But I'm glad to have done it; it feels tremendously worthwhile.  When a creative outlet of some sort is important to you, one of the most persistent anxieties is that at some point the ability to organise the impulses will simply cease.  It's nice to be able to prove it to yourself once in a while that it hasn't happened yet.  And I look forward - although not, it has to be said, with any great urgency - to seeing whether I can make it a hat-trick on day 30,000, by which time I shall be eighty-two.

Credo

davidgleba