String Quartet no. 3 "Alma" 2024

Program Note by Samuel Adams

I wrote this work for the Alma Quartet, with whom I first collaborated in 2022 when I was composer in residence with The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. We worked together on Sundial, a piece for string quartet and percussion, and that experience led naturally to conversations about a new string quartet for them.

This is my third quartet and a departure from my second (2019), which subtly weaves electronics into a more expansive, colorfield texture. Alma is purely acoustic, though my work with electroacoustic music has certainly shaped my approach to acoustic writing. The title references the quartet's name, but I was drawn equally to the Spanish meaning of alma—soul or spirit.

The form of the work is in the shape of the word “alma” itself. The first and fourth movements share the same material, though the fourth movement is an unfinished transformation of the first—the piece thrusts into an unknown, new space at its close. The second movement is virtuosic and demanding, built as a set of double variations: two contrasting ideas evolve in parallel before colliding about two-thirds of the way through the movement. The third movement serves as the emotional core. It begins with a hushed melody—quiet and gnomic, like a whispered medieval chant—and traverses an arc toward music of tremendous intensity. The open notation here gives the first violinist breathing room to freely shape a melody that is bright, harsh, distorted, ecstatic, with immense bow pressure, and slow slides, like slowed down fiddle music played at full volume.

The world premiere recording of this work will come out on Challenge Classics this November.

-Samuel Adams

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