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Composer: Glass, Philip

String Quartet No. 2, "Company"

Carducci String Quartet

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Playing Time: 00:01:47

Catalogue Number: NVF0094

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The Second Quartet composed in 1983, the music emerged as four short interludes for Mabou Mines' staging of Samuel Beckett's prose-poem Company, a meditation on mortality whose sombre and fatalistic tone inevitably determined the character of Philip Glass's music. Thus the first
movement unfolds as an undulating rhythm on lower strings, over which violins pursue a doleful melodic idea. The second movement is appreciably more animated in its outlining of related melodic and rhythmic ideas, while the third movement seems more in the way of an intermezzo that wends its wistful though on occasion restive way. The final movement sets the upper and lower strings in purposeful contrast as the music follows an anxious and finally inconclusive course.