String Quartet No. 1

The score to Jonathan Harvey's String Quartet No.1

Jonathan Harvey’s first string quartet, cast in one continuous movement, was written for the Arditti Quartet in 1977. It is a piece that explores the diaphanous, haunting character of the very sounds stringed instruments make; a 15-minute essay on uncanny, luminescent sonorities that bloom and decay. The piece signals Harvey’s fascination with the nature of sound and presages his experimental work at IRCAM in the 1980s, as well as the mysterious radiance that characterises so many of his works  - what the New York Times called “a world of shimmering sounds and unusual moves.”