Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Performed by the Colorado String Quartet.
I - Moderato - Più mosso - Meno mosso - Più mosso - Tempo I - Con spirito: 0:00
Cowell's String Quartet No.2 (originally titled as "Movement for String Quartet") was composed in 1928 (some sources incorrectly state that it was in 1934). It was probably premiered at the Masaryk University in Brno on June 8 of 1929, performed by the Moravian Quartet in a concert s organized Cowell's honour, who was on his third European recital tour at the time. Afterwards it was performed at the Chamberlain Studio in Berkeley on November 15 of 1930, performed by the Berkeley Violin Club Quartet. The score wasn't published until 1965, the year of his death.
Cowell became quite ambivalent towards the piece, on one hand stating that the movement "... begins promisingly; nonetheless, after a while it gets stuck in lengthy exercises of procrastinating passages." On the other hand, on "The Musical Quarterly" he stated the following: "The Quartet belongs to the integrated American school in which several factors, not as a rule so closely related in European music, are brought together....in an interwoven fabric....it has excellent, Solid technique and genuine musicality." The composer would orchestrate the quartet in 1960 as the sixth movement of Symphony No.15.
At the time its then-extreme dissonance provoked controversy because dissonant counterpoint was automatically associated with ultra-chromaticism and its atonal consequences; on the other hand, the atonalists strongly disapproved of dissonance based on diatonicism. In the context of the 1960’s however, the idiom is so familiar that one can hardly imagine any longer the sense of shock with which most hearers first reacted to this piece. Today its diatonic dissonant counterpoint is the obvious precursor of the treatment afforded the hymn sections of Cowell’s later hymn-and-fuguing-time pieces. It is one of the much-admired, solidly-constructed "abstract" works by Cowell, of which the Sinfonietta and the 6th, 11th and 12th Symphonies are more familiar examples. These are among some dozen works which use in a highly concentrated form the dissonant secundal counterpoint—whether diatonic, chromatic or atonal—which Cowell devised for himself from his early tone-cluster piano
pieces.
Picture: "Girl on a Hill" (1928) by the Canadian painter Prudence Heward.
Sources: tinyurl.com/2dxxcbxf and tinyurl.com/2xrqssas
To check the score: tinyurl.com/23ch6zut
Performed by the Colorado String Quartet.
I - Moderato - Più mosso - Meno mosso - Più mosso - Tempo I - Con spirito: 0:00
Cowell's String Quartet No.2 (originally titled as "Movement for String Quartet") was composed in 1928 (some sources incorrectly state that it was in 1934). It was probably premiered at the Masaryk University in Brno on June 8 of 1929, performed by the Moravian Quartet in a concert s organized Cowell's honour, who was on his third European recital tour at the time. Afterwards it was performed at the Chamberlain Studio in Berkeley on November 15 of 1930, performed by the Berkeley Violin Club Quartet. The score wasn't published until 1965, the year of his death.
Cowell became quite ambivalent towards the piece, on one hand stating that the movement "... begins promisingly; nonetheless, after a while it gets stuck in lengthy exercises of procrastinating passages." On the other hand, on "The Musical Quarterly" he stated the following: "The Quartet belongs to the integrated American school in which several factors, not as a rule so closely related in European music, are brought together....in an interwoven fabric....it has excellent, Solid technique and genuine musicality." The composer would orchestrate the quartet in 1960 as the sixth movement of Symphony No.15.
At the time its then-extreme dissonance provoked controversy because dissonant counterpoint was automatically associated with ultra-chromaticism and its atonal consequences; on the other hand, the atonalists strongly disapproved of dissonance based on diatonicism. In the context of the 1960’s however, the idiom is so familiar that one can hardly imagine any longer the sense of shock with which most hearers first reacted to this piece. Today its diatonic dissonant counterpoint is the obvious precursor of the treatment afforded the hymn sections of Cowell’s later hymn-and-fuguing-time pieces. It is one of the much-admired, solidly-constructed "abstract" works by Cowell, of which the Sinfonietta and the 6th, 11th and 12th Symphonies are more familiar examples. These are among some dozen works which use in a highly concentrated form the dissonant secundal counterpoint—whether diatonic, chromatic or atonal—which Cowell devised for himself from his early tone-cluster piano
pieces.
Picture: "Girl on a Hill" (1928) by the Canadian painter Prudence Heward.
Sources: tinyurl.com/2dxxcbxf and tinyurl.com/2xrqssas
To check the score: tinyurl.com/23ch6zut
