Schreie Und Melancholie - String Quartet No.4

Premiered by the Arditti String Quartet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts ICA London 22nd October 1995. Programme note: SCHREIE UND MELANCHOLIE is dedicated to the Arditti Quartet and was commissioned with support from the Danish Arts Foundation. In the summer of 1993 I worked briefly on some sketches for a choral suite with texts by Georg Trakl. The project was abandoned, but the moods from Trakl's poetry, in which 'scream' and 'melancholy' are key words, stuck in my mind when I began working on my fourth string quartet. This is music full of high siren-like wails and almost infinitely descending glissandi which permeate a landscape of warped tonal harmony. SCHREIE UNDMELANCHOLIE is in four movements, played attacca. The third movement is a barcarole - a memory of an autumn in Venice. (Bent Sørensen)