Variations (1999)
for string quartet
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The Amabile Quartet
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Variations, for string quartet, was commissioned in 1999 by the Amabile Quartet (a graduate-student ensemble at Rutgers University coached by Arnold Steinhardt and Michael Tree of the Guarneri String Quartet). The work comprises seven short movements lasting a total of about six minutes. The first six movements are variations of the seventh, modified by transposition, octave displacement, and various sorts of time-stretching schemes that affect—in patterns of varying degree—only certain segments of music, resulting in non-linear motivic augmentation/diminution.