String Quartet No. 8 (2002). Gloria Coates /current preoccupation/

Image by Tonyç via FlickrAlex V. Cook has a post about contemporary composers and his particular interest in string quartets. Related, I've been listening to the music of Gloria Coates for the last week and it's her string quartets that are the most provocative. This in turn led me to this Sequenza21 interview of the composer:

In 1962 in a graduate composition class I had written a string quartet entirely of glissandi. My professor became very upset and wrote on the piece, "A glissando is used once or twice in a piece for color, but the entire piece with glissandos is too...too...."

So far, her music sounds less like anything else I'm listening to but I don't know if this will be a lasting condition.

Comments

[Alex V. Cook]

Thanks to your mention, I took the subject of Coates' string quartets on my new sub-blog venture

http://badasscomposers.blogspot.com/2008/12/string-quartets-of-gloria-coates.html

Thank you for keeping your ear to the ground and telling us/me what you hear.