57-404 The String Quartet: A Social History

9 units, Carnegie Mellon University

The string quartet is at once a medium and a genre, even a form which for more than two hundred years has had a special, unparalleled place in Western music. This course examines the development of the string quartet from its function as an intimate and conversational social setting for amateurs, to its role as a secret repository of composers most daring thoughts. The string quartet repertoire under discussion spans the first attempts at string quartet writing in the 17th Century, to serialism and microtonal disintegration in the 1960s, to contemporary PopRock fusion experiments. This course also deals with the social and personal histories of four individuals who freed themselves from hegemonic orchestral rules in favor of an instrumental democratic microcosm.

Prerequisites: none listed

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