My Thirty-First String Quartet was exactly ten thousand days in the making. The first subject group, a further derivative of the arpeggio device which also generated the 32nd and 33rd Quartets, came to me during a walk around the remains of Venta Icenorum just south of Norwich with my very pregnant wife and her parents in September 1993, and I resolved there and then to dedicate the work - just as soon as it was finished - to our imminent baby.

The notion was to prove rather easier than the practice. For the duration of my wife's maternity leave we shared the home-parenting, and the quartet moved forward in tiny snatches. After four-and-a-half months she returned to work and I became primary home-parent. Home-parenting is, without doubt, the most rewarding experience of my life, but it does not readily make room for any other large undertaking, and for eleven years I managed only one work of any size: the Twenty-Second Quartet, dedicated in February 1995 'to my new family'. And so, for over a quarter of a century, my projected baby quartet lay dormant (three brief revisits in 2005, 2011 and 2017 failed to get the first movement to spark) until, as so many of us have done, I found myself with unscheduled time on my hands in 2020.

I picked it up substantially again that autumn, in conjunction with my work on the later stages of my Thirtieth Quartet. The first movement was finished by late November, and fulfilled a long-nursed ambition to create a variant exposition repeat (which possibly makes up for the fact that it shares a few procedures with the corresponding movement of my other F major quartet, No. 13, currently mislaid). The quartet is gently capricious one way or another in all four of its movements, hence its whole and several subtitles. The first movement is entitled Capriccio Classico.

The second movement, Capriccio Cantabile, sets out as a theme and variations, then has second thoughts and takes a turn instead for the sonata-binary. Its opening bar, and the codetta of the theme, date from the rush of motivic fecundity that I experienced in 1988-89 after reading Paul Griffiths's history of the string quartet.

The slow movement was in essence the last of the four movements to be written, although there remained a few details to be worked out in the minuet (Capriccio Serioso). Essentially, the minuet was composed in December 1993 (I fondly recall outlining the melodically-palindromic trio during a pizza dinner in St. Steven's Street, Norwich, a rare meal out at that time). For years the sketch lay buried in a chaotic loft; it finally yielded to excavation in late January 2021. Meanwhile I had reconstructed and slightly re-harmonised the trio the previous March. The transcription of the minuet, and the modification of the da capo, signalled the completion of the quartet, on February 2nd, 2021.  The palindrome, I noticed subsequently, contained an error just before the double bar; I have corrected it in the the first-time play, but have preserved it in the repeat.

The finale (Capriccio Giocoso) kicked off in late 1993 as a fugue, and immediately put up a fight to which this exhausted new parent was simply not equal at the time. (It was even the occasion of a coming-of-age moment: I was carrying my tiny daughter down to the Lady Dixon Rose Garden during an introductory visit to her relatives in Dunmurry, mulling over the recalcitrant fugue and wondering whether, perhaps, I could ask my father for some help with it; then thinking “come ON, you're a father yourself now; you can't be asking your dad to write a FUGUE for you!”). It continued to put up some resistance on initial resumption, allowing itself eventually to be cajoled into a kind of sonata form over the first three weeks of December 2020.

And so, finally, Kathleen has her string quartet, dedicated to her on her own ten thousandth day with twenty-seven years of love and with a few frets along the journey (compositional frets, not personal ones).

String Quartet No. 31, in F major, 'Capriccio' (2021)

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)

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).

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

Michael Bell