String Quartet No. 2, also known by its other title ''Company'', is a

string quartet The term string quartet can refer to either a type of musical composition or a group of four people who play them. Many composers from the mid-18th century onwards wrote string quartets. The associated musical ensemble consists of two violinists ...

by American composer

Philip Glass Philip Glass (born January 31, 1937) is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimal music, minimalism, being built up fr ...

. This composition was finished in January 1983 in New York City, and was expected to be a piece of instrumental music for Fred Neumann's adaptation of

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic expe ...

's 1979

novella A novella is a narrative prose fiction whose length is shorter than most novels, but longer than most short stories. The English word ''novella'' derives from the Italian ''novella'' meaning a short story related to true (or apparently so) facts ...

with the same name.

Composition

After withdrawing his first sketch of a string quartet in 1963, Philip Glass composed his ''String Quartet No. 2'' seventeen years after his first quartet, even though it was not initially conceived as

chamber music Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small numb ...

, but for theater. This work was composed as a result of Glass' collaboration with the Mabou Mines quartet, of which he married JoAnne Akalaitis, one of its members. Glass himself decided to extract the music he had written for Samuel Beckett's ''Company'', and wrote a score thought to be a concert work on its own.

Structure

This composition consists of four movements and takes approximately nine minutes to perform. The movements are listed as follows: The main theme of this work is subjugated to

arpeggio A broken chord is a chord broken into a sequence of notes. A broken chord may repeat some of the notes from the chord and span one or more octaves. An arpeggio () is a type of broken chord, in which the notes that compose a chord are played ...

s in minor keys all along the four movements. All of the movements of this monochrome work are highly and closely related to each other. This composition is written for string quartet, but has been performed by

string orchestra A string orchestra is an orchestra consisting solely of a string section made up of the bowed strings used in Western Classical music. The instruments of such an orchestra are most often the following: the violin, which is divided into first ...

Notable recordings

Notable recordings of this composition include:

References

External links

*, ReDo Quartet, 2011 {{Authority control String quartets by Philip Glass 1983 compositions