"The road to hell is paved with unperformed string quartets"—quote attributed to Frederic Rzewski. This ancient MIDI piano realization of my STRING QUARTET NO. 1, Op. 12 was recently transcribed digitally (in February, 2023) from an ancient cassette recording (dating back anywhere from the late 1980s to the early 1990s). The score of this quartet (my Harvard dissertation) is almost 200-pages in length and has been sitting on a shelf for almost 34 years (at the time of this writing). To this very day I still consider it one of my most important works (if "important" is the right word for it). The first movement was once read by the Arditti String Quartet back in ca. 1990 or thereabouts. Unfortunately, the string sounds using MIDI back in the late 1980s justified the use of the digital piano sound as a means of representing it, as the MIDI string sounds were absolutely wretched in those days. The MIDI piano sound, though far from great, enables the notes to be heard with some semblance of clarity. Naturally, the tempo in a live performance by a breathing string quartet would end up being considerably slower than this MIDI realization would lead one to imagine, extending the work into the two-hour+ zone. The quartet is in four movements: 1. Introduction, 2. Adagio, 3. Waltz, 4. Fugue. The parts only exist for the first movement. I have considered re-copying the score so that all the parts can be easily extracted. Moreover, some edits and revisions to the original score might be necessary. It is a daunting project that would take considerable time away from the creation of new works. What might be best for me would be to apply for a grant (if there is one) that would enable me to hire a copyist who would use a modern notation software program (this score was written using Professional Composer back in 1989).

STRING QUARTET NO. 1, Op. 12 (1989, ancient MIDI piano realization)

Resides in Portland, Oregon. Grew up in Berkeley, CA. Born in Seattle.  PhD, Harvard. “Gary Noland is one of the great composers of the 21st century.”—JACK RUMMEL, KGNU 88.5 FM, Boulder CO, “...iconoclastic, stylistic potpourri standards of giddy humor, no holds barred soup to nuts and high spirits.”—ROBERT LEVIN, pianist, musicologist, composer, "...a fleet-fingered, ebullient performer ... bright, witty and engaging.”—CHRISTIAN CAREY, SPLENDID MAGAZINE, “...distinctive, inventive ... subversive ... You can hardly be indifferent to Noland’s music and so I would urge you to try it.” —ROGER BLACKBURN, MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL, “...set in a dizzying harmonic language that loops uncontrollably through a wide-ranging gamut of possible and impossible tonalities ... The general effect is like watching wet paintings of 19th Century musical memorabilia drip into frazzled 21st Century oblivion...” —ALLEN GIMBEL, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, “Mr. Noland writes as a ‘time traveler’ in styles long abandoned by most composers as well as styles so new as to not have been imagined but by him. This he accomplishes naturally, convincingly, with originality and true passion. His command of all musical languages and his ability to traverse musical time is nothing less than remarkable. Listen!”—DONALD MARTINO, Pulitzer Prize winning composer, “...mind-bending spiraling of focus which is truly breathtaking ... spectacular...”—CHARLES AMIRKHANIAN, composer, sound poet & radio producer, “I'm amazed at your harmonic skill. Haven't seen or heard anything like it from any one else—except yours truly—certainly not from your generation. It falls somewhere between Strauss and Mahler. Especially like how you are able to slip in and out from the tonal to the atonal—or near atonal...”—GEORGE ROCHBERG, American composer, Pulitzer Prize finalist, “...court jester to the classical establishment...”—PAYTON MACDONALD, AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE, “...florid and juicy...” —RICHARD BUELL, THE BOSTON GLOBE, “...an incredible aural web ... a great ostinato of American kitsch. Sul pont never sounded so good.”—RUSSELL STEINBERG, composer, conductor of the LOS ANGELES YOUTH ORCHESTRA, “...I am bowled over by the expertise of your music: you use certain elements from the 19th century and from jazz, etc., and just at the moment when I am about to say, OK, what else is new?, you do a number of things, such as speeding up, becoming wildly dissonant, modulating to a distant continent, stopping completely and throwing some kind of total surprise ... you seem to know exactly when to do what and how much. I don’t know anybody else who can do it!” —ANDREW IMBRIE, American composer, Pulitzer Prize finalist, “... remarkable stuff...”
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