A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 30 (I)

II - Scherzo 'Ve chvále lásky - In Praise of Love': Dolce con moto - Trio: Allegro con brio

III (06:20) - A tempo libero - Lento Cantabile ('Písně - Songs')

IV (14:02) - Finale: Largo - Allegro Agitato - Presto stringendo

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 30 (II, III and IV)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 31 (I - Capriccio Classico: Allegro Vivace)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 31 (II - Capriccio Cantabile: Dolce Andante)

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

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 31 (III - Capriccio Serioso: Tempo di Menuetto)

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

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 33 (II: Molto Adagio)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 33 (III: Scherzo - Allegro agitato; Trio: Meno agitato)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 33 (IV: Allegro precipito)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 35 (II)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 35 (IV)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 35 (I)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 35 (III)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 35 (V)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 34 (I: Largo con calore - Allegro giovanile - Quasi tempo primo)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 34 (II - Scherzo: Presto furioso)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 34 (III - Tempo di Menuetto)

The Christachoral und Präludium was written as a gift for Christa Bevilacqua, the first organ scholar at the cathedral of St. Magnus, Kirkwall, to mark the end of her year's tenure in April 2023.  My original intention was to compose both a valedictory chorale and an organ chorale prelude based upon it.  My greatest difficulty was that I simply do not know the instrument well enough to know how to organise a sufficiently interesting level of contrast between the chorale passages and the interludes.  In the end, I solved the problem by prefacing the prelude with a verse of chorale, then following it with an organ episode and a variant restatement of the chorale again for SATB choir, while leaving the interludes and coda to the organ.  The opening line of the chorale itself is constructed from a musical cryptogram on Christa's name: C-B-D-(G)-Eb-A, the B, D and Eb being H, Re and Es in German, Italian and German respectively,  and the G being a simple filler note.

My Sibelius software being somewhat elderly these days, and voices being among the synthesised sounds that quite simply refuse to play back, I have recast the choir for the purposes of the present track as a string quartet.

The Christachoral und Präludium is dedicated to Christa Bevilacqua, with love and best wishes for the future.

Christachoral und Präludium (2023)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 36 (I: Allegro amabile)

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 36 (II, III and IV), Audio File

I: Allegro maliziosa

II: Largo mesto, segue III: Tempo di menuetto

Arranged October-December 2016, as a Christmas present to the Stromness Academy.  Re-posted 16/12/2017 with a few small corrections to the drums, which I neglected to make before posting the first time!

Re-posted December 2018 on the school Facebook page as a leaving present to the students and staff of Stromness Academy in perpetuity, with love from Mr. Bell.

And offered in the same spirit December 2021 as a Christmas present in perpetuity to the staff and students of the Kirkwall Grammar School.

A.M.Bell - Twelve Pipers Piping, Eleven Drummers Drumming (2016)

The Twenty-Second String Quartet, in B major, was composed in Belgrade during January-February 1995, with minor revisions in 2014 and 2017.  It was written at the end of a twenty-month period of musical inactivity (due in large part to my new role as primary home parent), and impelled by a slightly millennial desire to achieve something additional before I turned thirty.  In the event the quartet was completed at 1:15 in the afternoon of my birthday (the MS erroneously has 1:15am, but I remember very clearly finishing it in the early afternoon and feeling rather pleased about it.  I turned thirty in the early evening, so that just about counted).

The opening Allegretto Amabile must be one of the most care-free pieces of music I have ever penned.  It is less Austrian and more Italianate than my usual music, perhaps reflecting to an extent my love of the music of Luigi Boccherini.  The irregular metre grew out of the opening phrase (as did the unusual key of the quartet), which was conceived in early 1989 during the great wave of string quartet enthusiasm.  My intention was to set the entire movement so that the final chord would land on a respectable downbeat, but my arithmetic was out of joint, and the original short-score manuscript is signed off "serves you right!".

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 22/1)Allegretto Amabile

I am particularly pleased with the Romanza, a kind of organic rondo-variation movement in which, but for a brief interlude in the relative minor, the material is in constant development as it goes along.  The second violin is directed to re-tune the fourth string of the instrument from G to E for the duration of the movement.

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 22/2) Romanza (Lento Andante)

A high-spirited and slightly drunken Austrian Landler, whose metric irregularities I managed to square with the basic three-in-a-bar rather better than in the first movement.

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 22/3) Scherzo (Vivace) - Trio (Allegretto Leggiero)

The String Quartet No. 21 was conceived in the late 1980s and composed during 1992 (with minor revisions in 2017)as part of a portfolio of works for a Master's Degree in Music on which I was working at the time.  It is, to date, my only quartet to have striven consciously for a post-19th-century idiom; and even within such a framework it remains fairly traditional, drawing its principal influence from Shostakovich and Khachaturian.  Most of the work is general rather than specific in its inspiration.  It is in eight movements, the first five of which are very brief:

1) Song (Lento Risoluto, a Tempo un' Poco Libero) (0:00).  The song melody presented at the opening of the work, and reiterated at various points throughout, was part of the great quartet outpouring of 1988-89.  It owes something to my memories of Meteora, in northern Greece, which I had visited in 1984, and of a bus journey taken through the breathtaking gorges of Bosnia during a tour with the Coventry Youth Orchestra two years later. 

2) Landscape (Molto Adagio) (0:39).  The second movement was conceived very much later, mere weeks before the completion of the quartet, by which time I had experienced some pretty stunning landscapes among the Altai mountains in central Asia.  The material attempts, within a short time frame, to give a general impression of space but also a suggestion of detail.

3) Stick Dance (Presto) (2:10).  The third movement is actually a back-formation from the corresponding passage in the seventh movement, which was the earliest part of the work to be conceived.  The stick dance melody came a little incongruously into my head during a rather wet night walk from Bishop's Stortford railway station to Saffron Walden in October 1986, about three months after the Yugoslavia tour.

4) Serenade (Tempo di Recitativo Lento, tanto Libero) (2:52).  A movement without any specific geography, but which reflects rather wistfully upon the opening Song and (at a very much more ponderous pace) the previous Stick Dance.

5) Notturno (Molto Vivace, ma sempre Leggierissimo) (5:12).  Neither a somnolent nor an amorous Nocturne, but rather a fleeting sound-picture of the minute movements and rustlings of nature during the hours of darkness or semi-darkness when human activity has temporarily ceased.

A.M.Bell - String Quartet No. 21, 'Impressions of a Traveller' (I - V)

The Pirates In The Deep Green Sea is a children's musical, dramatised by Ragnhild Ljosland from the Eric Linklater children's novel of that name, for which I composed a dozen or so musical numbers, realised on Sibelius computer software.  It was first performed in early May 2018 at three venues in Orkney by the Orkney Children's Theatre Club, for which it was written.

The story begins on a beach on the fictitious Orcadian island of Popinsay.  Two boys, Timothy and Huw, discover evidence of the legendary pirate ship of their 17th-century ancestor Captain Aaron Spens.  Neglected by a splenetic father and an absent enterprising mother, the boys are in the care of their tutor Sam Sturgeon and housekeeper Mrs Matches.  As Sturgeon and the boys reminisce about an earlier adventure at sea, they are surprised by two old friends:  Gunner Boles, a sprightly and improbably-ancient seaman; and Cully, a cultured but lovelorn octopus.  The opening fragments of hornpipe indicate the proximity and eventual appearance of the two friends; while, in the subsequent song, Cully lists his excellent qualities (demonstrating along the way his ability to play upon four grand pianos quite neatly) and laments his bachelorhood.  The third verse of Cully's song is essentially a whistle-stop tour of Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, with a nod at the Eroica.

1) Introduction And Cully's Song

The Millennium Rag stands a little outside my usual territory.  The very first seeds were sown in late January 1987, as I listened to a Winifred Atwell tape at a student party (the exact moment is probably not all that hard to detect in my own Rag!), but did not begin to germinate until four-and-a-half years later, when the whole of the final section and a little of the quieter Bb melody came to me at another party.  Nothing was ever written down, but the piece had pretty much reached a finished form in my head by 1999, when I began to attempt actually to play it.  I never got anywhere near the full score that the Sibelius computer software has now made possible for me (and which would certainly be playable by a better pianist), but my five-year- and eighteen-month-old daughters were gratifyingly taken with the rather scratchier version that issued from their father's piano.  The elder of them was also rather fascinated by the big calendar events of the time; and, for no other reason than that, the little piece was christened The Millennium Rag (not to be confused with the alarming if ultimately inconsequential Millennium Bug, which Kathleen also found rather interesting).  It is dedicated to my daughters Kathleen and Maria.

A.M.Bell - The  Millennium Rag (1999)

5'' Run - Off

Born 1965, lifelong lover of music.  Have been picking out little tunes from 5, and attempting seriously to compose since 12.  Generally (although not exclusively) happiest writing in the manner of late-18thC/early 19thC, but very happy to listen to pretty nearly any music.  String quartets a speciality, although not entirely sure why.  No plans to give up the day job (secondary school Support for Learning Assistant) or the weekend job (Choirmaster at St. Magnus's Cathedral, Kirkwall).

Michael Bell

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