FELDMAN, MORTON - String Quartet II

Excerpt from liner notes by Sebastian Claren: "When Morton Feldman wrote his second string quartet -- or String Quartet II, as he titled it in the score -- in 1983, he found himself at the height of his career: prior to this, his long form compositions, of which the majority lasted around one and a half hours, had not isolated him or let him disappear from concert and festival programming, as he had expected, but were on the contrary celebrated as a major 'breakthrough' and a big 'step forward' . . . Like the long pieces that preceded it, Feldman's String Quartet II consists of repeated patterns, which usually surface at a certain point in the composition without preparation, are maintained over a given period, and then abruptly abort to possibly return later. In this context, Feldman has always emphasized the interplay of 'reiteration' and 'change' in his music -- two aspects that in his mind had been decisive criteria of the music of the twentieth century as 'repetition' and 'variat