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Listen to extracts from several of
Tim Benjamin's works...

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Works: String Quartet No. 1 (1997)

I composed my String Quartet in 1997 (my second Quartet was composed in 2006). This Quartet was intended as a purely musical exploration, to offer music simply "about" music, and without a linear narrative. The work is comprised of my responses to several major 20th century works for the string quartet and also, perhaps incongruously, a technique used by David Bowie for writing lyrics. That is not to say that the Quartet is a straightforward scrapbook collection of quotations and obscure references; rather, it takes up the themes of these works - most importantly, Bartok's fifth quartet and Berg's Lyric Suite - and takes off in a variety of directions, here evocations of the atmosphere of the early 20th century, and there responses in my own musical language.

Three lively movements (I, III and V) act as pillars around the second and fourth movements, which are contemplative in character. The fourth movement is built directly from the second movement, adding the whole second movement again - backwards, and upside down - over the top, resulting in some rich and spicy harmonies. The centre of the work is a fast and playful scherzo, perhaps reflecting the sometimes tongue-in-cheek evocation of other works in this Quartet.

The aforementioned technique of David Bowie appears most obviously in the final, fifth movement of the Quartet. For his album Outside, Bowie used a method for devising lyrics in which he took many disparate sources, cut them up into small sections, then rearranged them almost at random, selecting and reselecting assemblages that offered the most potential. Bowie's collaborator Brian Eno compares Bowie's strategy to evolution: "Natural selection, you know, throws out all these mutations, and a few of them get saved. The lyrics that got saved here, they would get fed back into the computer. So the brew kept getting enriched. It was the most amazing thing to see." In my fifth movement, I take as my sources all the music from the first four movements, which itself is consciously assembled and re-assembled from many sources. This music is cut up and woven together again around and through the one section of new music in the fifth movement, a fugue. The subject of this fugue, which opens the movement, is a 12-note row, upon which the whole work is based. Both stylistically and technically, this is not the strict serialism of Schoenberg or Webern, but the more liberal, permissive serialism of Berg, or perhaps late-period Stravinsky.

1. Vivace
2. Grave
3. Allegro con brio - Scherzo - Tempo I
4. Lento
5. Vivo

The recording below is by the Rivoli String Quartet.

Further Information / Downloads

Premiere:	(Movement 4 only) The Nossek Quartet, RNCM, Spring 1998; first complete performance by the Navarra String Quartet on 24th March 2005.
Duration:	25 minutes
Instrumentation:	String quartet
Available files:	cello part (SQ1_cello.pdf) 1st violin part (SQ1_violin_1.pdf) Full score (sq1.pdf) 2nd violin part (SQ1_violin_2.pdf) viola part (SQ1_viola.pdf)
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Tim Benjamin is a member and supporter of the following organisations: