Description

C. F. Peters Corp No. 6525 [Published Date: 1964]. EX-LIBRARY. Sheet Music, includes four 1- page Parts, in score format (with all instrument parts printed on each copy) one each for 1st and 2nd violin, viola and cello, laid-in to original pale green folder. Good shape. Clean and unmarked except for library markings. Light bumping and creasing to edges. Includes introduction, bio, and essay by Lester Trimble entitled "Mayuzumi - in his Music East Meets West" printed on inside cover of folder. [From inside front cover] The fascinatingly original use of the string quartet, for instance, is amazing: Toshiro Mayuzumi managed to instill completely new effects into his Prelude for String Quartet by an entirely personal approach to such time-honored devices as pizzicato and glissando. Oriental sources may have been responsible for his melodic or motivic inspiration: a small, ostinato-like embryonic idea is continually expanded in tonal and dynamic range as it is repeated; the pizzicatos provide the connecting, or if you like the dividing, sections. The music consists of a remarkably delicate texture reminding one at times of certain passages in Bartok (cf. the muted "scherzo" in String Quartet No. 4) and even in Debussy. But the thematic content of Mayuzumi's Quartet is modelled on strange intervals and melodic turns; nor do his rhythmic schemes have anything like the resolute directness that characterizes Bartok, for instance. On the showing of this music Mayuzumi's is a totally new voice, exciting yet discreet, immensely well formulated yet refreshingly unpredictable, and strikingly confident in its methods - John S. Weissman