MacMillan, James: Three Little String Quartets

This publication gathers together three miniatures for string quartet, all composed 'in memoriam' a particular individual. Memento (4 minutes) was written in memory of the composer's friend, David Huntley, the representative of Boosey & Hawkes in the USA, who died in 1994. It was premiered at his memorial concert in New York by the Kronos Quartet. The music is slow, delicate and tentative and is based on the modality of Gaelic lament music and the Gaelic heterophony of psalm-singing in the Hebrides. For Sonny (5 minutes) was written in memory of a little boy, the grandson of a friend, who died a few days after his birth. Throughout, the first violin plays a simple fragment, like a nursery rhyme, repeating over and over again, pizzicato. The other instruments provide an ever-changing context for this little tune, sometimes accompanying it with easy harmonies, sometimes straying into stranger territory. First performed in 2012 at Peterhouse, Cambridge, by the Edinburgh Quartet. The title of Ein Lämplein verlosch (‘A little lamp went out’) (5 minutes) is a reference to a line in Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (‘Songs on the death of children’, after Friedrich Rückert). The song ‘Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n’ (‘Now the sun will rise again as brightly’) ends ‘Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt, heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt’ (‘A little lamp went out in my life, Blessed be the light of joy in the world’), and the strings’ mysterious harmonics and shimmering glissandi reflect the atmosphere of Rückert’s lament for the dead. "Spare melodies hang in the air against floating harmonies, punctuated by gulfs of silence that seem to embody distilled grief" (The Times). First performed in 2018 in the Mendelssohn-Saal at the Gewandhaus, Leipzig, by the Gewandhaus-Quartett.