String Quartet No. 5 A Year in the Country by Peter Schickele String Quartet - Sheet Music

SKU: PR.164002960

ISBN 9781491139073. UPC: 680160695881. 9x12 inches.

STRING QUARTET NO. 5, “A YEAR IN THE COUNTRY” is an 8-movement suite inspired by a five-season, summer-through-summer retreat from New York City life to the composer’s second home in the Catskills. A feeling of restfulness and rejuvenation pervades the work, with slow drone movements interrupted only by birds, bugs, leaves, and folk musicians. Schickele’s music is absolutely charming and calming. .
In 1997-98, I took a sabbatical from touring, and my wife and I, for the first time in the more than 20 years we had owned the house, spent an entire year in our Woodstock, NY home. I actually took off both summers (before and after the regular season) so the “Year in the Country” of the fifth quartet’s subtitle was in reality a period of over fifteen months during which I pretended to be a composer who could make his living composing.Long after I finished writing my second string quartet in 1987, a passing theme played by the cello early in the first movement lingered in my mind, signifying its intention to become a major player in a later work. That work turned out to be neither the third nor the fourth quartet, but the melody kept percolating in the back of my mind and in the pages of my sketchbooks until it became not only the opening theme of the fifth quartet, but the work’s unifying element.In the first movement, Summer Dawn, the theme is presented in very close and strict imitation, producing a somewhat hypnotic and kaleidoscopic effect which lasts well into the movement.This is followed by two scherzos, Birds and Bugs, the second of which is a perfect example of the slipperiness of programmatic concepts in music: with its skittering plucked notes and scurrying bowed phrases, it’s perfect bug music, but in point of fact the title didn’t occur to me until I had finished the movement.One of my favorite spots in the Catskill Mountains is John Burroughs’ grave on a hillside above Roxbury, NY. There is a big boulder, perfect for sitting on, bearing a metal plaque commemorating the naturalist and author, and across the valley lies an extensive piece of property that used to be an unofficial game preserve called Wake Robin; it was run by a lively and strong-willed old couple who took care of injured animals (the animals were free to leave when they were healed). My wife and I used to time visits to Wake Robin carefully when our kids were young, because there was a fawn who would often come out of the woods at about two o’clock in the afternoon to be fed by bottle, and if you were on hand, you could do the feeding. I try to visit Burroughs’ grave at least once a summer. The long melody presented by the viola in the middle of the fourth movement came to me while I sat on that boulder, and the coda of the last movement had occurred to me at the same place a couple of years earlier.I think of this quartet as being like a novel that, in addition to chapters, is divided into Part I and Part II. The keys of the movements are actually based on the cello theme at the opening of the quartet, and the fifth movement, Leaves, begins the progression back to the opening key.Three Fiddles celebrates the exhilarating variety of classical, jazz, and folk music found in the Woodstock area. So many fine classical violinists have played at the Maverick concert series that I didn’t have a particular one in mind when I named this movement, but when it comes to folk fiddling I think of Jay Ungar, and of Betty MacDonald when it comes to jazz.Jay, by the way, wrote Ashokan Farewell, the lovely melody used as a theme song for Ken Burns’ TV series on the Civil War. I often take walks by the Ashokan, which is a large lake south of Woodstock, at the foot of the highest peak of the Catskills, that serves as a reservoir for New York City drinking water. Being a western boy at heart, I love the broad vistas provided by the Ashokan.The last movement, Winter Goodnight, returns to the opening theme and brings the quartet to a calm, perhaps slightly melancholy, close. Time to go back to the city. (If the ending is indeed a bit wistful, it may be because, in what is undoubtedly part of a lifelong tug-of-war within myself, the invigorating adrenaline-rush of city life seems these days to be losing ground to the country’s steadier pace and less cluttered thoughts.)The work was commissioned by Maverick Concerts, a terrific chamber music series that has been going on since 1916 in a funky wooden concert shell set back in a Woodstock forest. It was written for the Audubon Quartet, and premiered by them on September 6, 1998.