• Bent Sørensen
  • Schreie und Melancholie (1994)
    (String Quartet no. 4)

  • Edition Wilhelm Hansen Copenhagen (World)
  • str4tet
  • 23 min

Programme Note

Schreie und Melancholie is dedicated to the Arditti Quartet and was commissioned with support from the Danish Arts Foundation. In the summer of 1993 I worked briefly on some sketches for a choral suite with texts by Georg Trakl. The project was abandoned, but the moods from Trakl’s poetry, in which ‘scream’ and ‘melancholy’ are key words, stuck in my mind when I began working on my fourth string quartet. This is music full of high siren-like wails and almost infinitely descending glissandi which permeate a landscape of warped tonal harmony.

Schreie und Melancholie is in four movements, played attacca. The third movement is a barcarole – a memory of an autumn in Venice.

- Bent Sørensen