The String Quartet No. 1 by American composer Elliott Carter is a work for string quartet written during a year spent in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona from 1950âÂÂ51. To some extent, it can be said that this was his first major breakthrough work as a composer. The piece was premiered on 26 February 1953 at Columbia University, performed by the Walden Quartet of the University of Illinois.
A primary compositional technique used in the quartet is the principle of metric modulation (temporal modulation)âÂÂone for which Carter was to become particularly renowned. Although he was not the first composer to use this device (such as Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, (1920)) he was seemingly the first to develop such complex transformations. It is said that Carter assigned to tempo the structural role that earlier composers gave to tonality.
The string quartet is composed of three movements.
The quartet embeds four movements in three sections, all contained between two solo cadenzas acting as bookends at each end of the quartet. The two cadenzasâÂÂthe first for cello and the concluding for first violinâÂÂframe the piece conceptually, as Carter explains:
Within these bookends Carter composes four different sections, which he considers proper movements. However, the movements are not differentiated by pauses, instead bleeding into one another for an integration that pauses would only distort. Carter elaborates on this point:
In its treatment of vertical pitch space, the First String Quartet falls relatively early within Carter's development of a harmonic procedure involving sets of pitch classes. Specifically, Carter claims that he was guided by an all-interval tetrachord in the development of this work.
Elsewhere he notes that this chord is "one of the two four-note groups that joins all the two-note intervals into pairs, thus allowing for the total range of interval qualities that still can be referred back to a basic chord-sound. This chord is not used at every moment in the work but occurs frequently enough, especially in important places, to function, I hope, as a formative factor."<br />
The horizontal elementâÂÂtimeâÂÂmore explicitly occupies Carter's attention in the First String Quartet. Carter's primary means of maintaining motion while also varying that motion is a technique penned by Richard Franko Goldman as "metric modulation." In this process the music continuously changes meters in such a way that either the subdivision of the beat or the beat itself stays the same. In the former case the tempo will change as the number of micro-pulses (which maintain their rate) within the beat change; in the latter (signaled in the score with doubled bar lines) the subdivision will change while the macro-pulse stays the same. Within the progression of modulations different voices behave as though they are in different meters as different voices either prepare, result from, or resist meter changes, not in congruence with each other. This allows Carter to move smoothly between asynchronicity and synchronicity of voices. As musicologist Joseph Kerman summarizes, "Simultaneous speeds give Carter novel possibilities of texture; successive speeds give him novel possibilities of musical movement."
His Second Quartet is far more fragmentary in style.
According to another American composer, Virgil Thomson, this quartet enjoyed a remarkable "reputation success." Initially, Carter had to wait more than a year after finishing the composition before an ensemble was willing to perform it. Through this work, Carter was awarded a prize from the jury of the International quartet-writing competition then held in Belgium in 1953, to which Carter had submitted the score. This allowed this work to be performed in Europe by the Paris-based Parrenin Quartet, and hence performed in Rome in April 1954.