What makes a good string quartet

The viola, which is pitched a fifth lower than the violin, can sound great higher up within the lower violin range, while all 5 instruments are capable of covering the G3-G4 register. It may look like a large piece of furniture, but this instrument has potential melodic beauty.

Never forget that it has a bow. Having said this, be careful where you put that tune. On all string instruments, the extreme low register can sound wonderfully rich and throaty. Musical sound is, obviously, one of the most difficult things to describe in words. Above and beyond this, there are all manners of musical sound effects available with a live string quartet or quintet.

A keyboard has relatively uniform attack, dynamic and release. Thinking of recording live strings? Find out more. A good string arrangement can also make a few musicians sound like a much larger group. A strong pizzicato line in the cello or double bass, for example, when combined with legato lines elsewhere, sounds beautifully lush. And while vibrato is one of the characteristics of string playing, you can create a strikingly cold, icy effect if you ask the entire ensemble to play N.

Talking of tuning, be careful with the double stops. Wanna take your string arrangement to the next level? Learn more. Muted strings can make a hauntingly ethereal sound, but if you want your string quartet to play con sordini with mutes , give them at least 2 bars rest to put the mute in. Similarly, allow time to change between arco bowed and pizzicato passages or you may end up with bows flying about all over the studio.

The most useful piece of advice about bowing is this: leave it to the musicians. At Supreme Tracks , we help aspiring artist and producers worldwide take their music to the next level. With our support, our clients reached five 1 hits and over million YouTube views. Aside from his production work for Supreme Tracks, Julian is constantly working on his own projects and touring as a side-man with high profile artists, such as Marcus Miller and Snarky Puppy.

Useful for me. Typically, the first violinist in any group holds tight to that first violin chair. In this case, however, you are all musicians interested in learning and growing. For that reason, it will serve the student in you best if the first and second violinists are comfortable being fluid between those two parts, taking turns via pieces or various rehearsals to play those fun, lead parts.

Over time, if your quartet continues to practice and play together, these roles can be more solidified. Some chamber groups are rigid in their roles, others remain perpetually in flux just for fun. Have the same interests and goals for the group. This is where personalities come into play.

The group should be aligned in their overall interest and goals for the quartet. Is this just a summer fun group? Are you interested in eventually performing or making money? Is once a week sufficient, or do some members want to meet every day? Forming a group with similar ideas and compatible personalities makes for a more fulfilling experience. Choose songs by consensus Odds are four different people have varying musical interests and tastes.

Create a clear practice schedule Treat your quartet seriously — and obtain that same verbal commitment from the members you sign up. Be prepared to be great Forming a string quartet for summer may have lasting results. Congratulations on going the extra mile to improve your musicianship this summer.

Share this article. Search StringOvation. A very early example is a four-part sonata for string ensemble by Gregorio Allegri — that might be considered an important prototype string quartet. By the early 18th century, composers were often adding a third soloist; and moreover it became common to omit the keyboard part, letting the cello support the bass line alone.

Figure 2. The string quartet in its now accepted form came about with Haydn. The following purely chance circumstance had led him to try his luck at the composition of quartets. Haydn, then eighteen years old, took up this proposal, and so originated his first quartet which, immediately it appeared, received such general approval that Haydn took courage to work further in this form.

Haydn went on to write nine other quartets around this time. These works were published as his Op. They have five movements and take the form: fast movement, minuet and trio I, slow movement, minuet and trio II, and fast finale. As Finscher notes, they draw stylistically on the Austrian divertimento tradition.

The intervening years saw Haydn begin his lifelong employment as Kapellmeister to the Esterhazy princes, for who he was required to compose numerous symphonies and dozens of trios for violin, viola and the curious bass instrument called the baryton played by Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy himself.

The opportunities for experiment which both these genres offered Haydn perhaps helped him in the pursuit of the more advanced quartet style found in the eighteen worked published in the early s as Opp. These are written in a form that became established as standard both for Haydn and for other composers. Clearly composed as sets, these quartets feature a four-movement layout with more broadly conceived, moderately paced first movements and, in increasing measure, a democratic and conversational interplay of parts, close-knit thematic development, and skilful though often self-effacing use of counterpoint.

The convincing realizations of the progressive aims of the Op. Certainly they offered to their own time state-of-the art models to follow for the best part of a decade; the teenage Mozart, in his early quartets, was among the composers moved to imitate many of their characteristics, right down to the vital fugues with which Haydn sought to bring greater architectural weight to the finales of nos.

After Op. This may be partly because the palette of sound is more restricted than with orchestral music, forcing the music to stand more on its own rather than relying on tonal color; or from the inherently contrapuntal tendency in music written for four equal instruments.

Beethoven in particular is credited with developing the genre in an experimental and dynamic fashion, especially in his later series of quartets written in the s up until his death. Of the late quartets, Beethoven cited his own favorite as Op.