Bent Sorensen: Adieu For String Quartet

Study score to Bent Sorensen’s Adieu for String Quartet. The slow choral-like music which initiates Adieu was the result of an image or almost a dream that I had. Without being able to explain why, I imagined a procession of people, maybe medieval monks, wearing large gray mantles with Ku-Klux-Klan-like white cowls on their heads, something like a funeral procession. The title Adieu is partly a comment on this funeral procession, but also used because the piece is split up by three slow-ascending glissandi, a kind of farewell glissandi which removes the intervening music. The first absorbing glissando is soft and removes both the slow funeral choral and the agitating figures in the first half of the piece. The second glissando is given only to the cello and crawls out from the elegiac melodies in the middle part. The third and final glissando is intense and agitating, and prepares the way for the end of the piece. This end primarily deals with the relationship fast – slow. This relationship is turned topsy turvy: the music gets faster and faster until it is so fast that it suddenly becomes slow, so slow in fact that it is very quickly able to become extremely fast again. Bent Sørensen

Additional Information

SKU: 14001159
UPC: 888680792657
ISBN-10: 8759805528
ISBN-13: 9788759805527
Series: Music Sales America
Page Count: 28