String Quartet No. 2

Following the première of my opera An American Tragedy at the Metropolitan Opera, the President of the Manhattan School of Music, Robert Sirota, called me and told me that the American String Quartet had asked him to commission me as part of the school’s 90th anniversary celebration. I was very excited because this meant that the first new music I would compose after my largest piece ever would be a string quartet for my alma mater. I embraced the chance to return to chamber music with gusto because I saw this not only as an opportunity to incorporate everything I’d learned writing four grand operas into an intimate yet profound genre but also as the starting point of a new direction in my compositional thinking. 20 years separate my first and second quartet and it is not difficult to hear the evolution between the two. Tobias Picker