Peter Maxwell Davies, who commissioned String Quartet No. 1, provides the following note on the work -

String Quartet No. 1 was commissioned by me and was premiered at the Dartington School of Music in England by the Arditti Quartet in 1981. The work has since been revised, and it is in this new version that it is receiving its American premiere tonight.

The first section of this one-movement work was written in New York City, This allegro passage is marked Molto aggressivo and is characterized by biting dissonant chords played by the entire quartet, and knotty, ascending chromatic lines played first by the cello, then by the others as well.

The second section (and the remainder of the piece) was written in the calm, stark beauty of the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, when I lent Caltabiano my house. Marked legato e dolce, this andante section is characterized by gently moving harmony and a sustained descending modal melody shared by all the players.

The main body of the piece is a transformation of these materials to the point where they sound alike. The transformation section begins with three brief allegro sections using material from the opening of the work. As the sections progress, they become somewhat slower and less chromatic, and are interrupted three times by sustained modal chords from the previous dolce section.

The andante section returns, and over the course of its development becomes faster and more chromatic and forceful, while the melody becomes more restricted in range and is often interrupted by sharp chords taken from the allegro section. The following two aggressivo sections become slower, more obviously modal and more constrainedly pivoted, so that the two kinds of music now begin to sound almost identical. At this point, the music reaches its climax on an open fifth, played by all the instruments.

In the three short sections which end the piece, the music again separates into two different sets of material, similar to the first two sections of the work.

The quartet can be heard as having a fixed dominant key area, A (the climactic open fifth), and movable tonics, C, F#, and Eb (the allegro, andante and recapitulation sections, respectively). One tone row is in use for each of the expositional sections, and each starts with 11 pitches, and through a sequence of chromatic transformations uses fewer and fewer notes. This makes for a remarkable concentration of the expressive dimensions of the original material, implicit throughout, but finally movingly explicit.

-- Peter Maxwell Davies