Antonín Dvorak was born into a poor family in rural Bohemia. He decided to study at the Prague Organ School despite his family's financial difficulties. In Prague, Dvorak endured hardship while pursuing his musical education and career. He worked as a viola player and gave lessons while dedicating much of his time to composition. His early works were influenced by Czech folk music and classical forms. One of his first attempts at vocal composition was a set of 18 love songs inspired by his feelings for a student named Josefina, though the songs were not initially successful.

1. Antonín Dvorak was born into a poor family in a rural Bohemian village. His
decision to leave home and study at the Prague Organ School was a bold one
in view of his family’s meager financial resources. Dvorak endured considerable
privation during his first years in Prague, sharing a cramped and unheated room
and living on very little. His schooling should have prepared him to work as a
church organist. But Prague had revealed new possibilities to the young
musician from the provinces. In addition to classes at the Organ School, Dvorak
attended opera and symphony performances and heard such distinguished
performers as Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt.
Determined to become more than a church musician, Dvorak remained in
Prague, eking out a small income as a viola player and by giving occasional
lessons. He might have increased his earnings were he not determined to
devote as much time as possible to composition. Dvorak had been writing music
since his adolescence, but he now cultivated this activity with new diligence.
Eventually his compositions were shaped by two influences: Czech nationalism,
expressed largely through references to folk music; and classical forms and
procedures, especially those used by Beethoven and Brahms.
But music was not quite the only thing on Dvorak's mind during his youthful
years in Prague. Among his pupils was a young woman named Josefina
Cermáková, with whom he fell in love in the summer of 1865. Inspired by his
feelings for her, Dvorák set to music a group of romantic poems by one Gustav
Pfleger-Moravský. The result was a collection of 18 love songs, to which Dvorák
gave the collective title Cypres s e s.
It would be pleasant to report that this tender composition swayed Josefina
Cermáková to return Dvorák’s affections, but her heart remained unmoved. Nor
did these songs, Dvorák’s first attempt at vocal composition, prove any more
successful musically than they did romantically. Dvorák played them to a trusted
friend and advisor, the composer and conductor Karel Bendl, who observed that
they poorly conveyed the cadence of Pfleger-Moravsky’s verses and were
difficult to sing. Dvorák soon came to share his opinion, and he made no effort
to have the songs performed or published.
In 1887, more than two decades after he originally composed them, Dvorak
reworked 12 of the 18 Cypres s e s songs, arranging them for string quartet,
where they have found great appreciation. undoubtedly pieces of true Dvorák
charm and individuality . . . .
Incandescent, my third quartet, was composed in 2003 for the Emerson Quartet under
a joint commission from the South Mountain Concerts and Bard College.

2. The score is cast in a single movement and a duration of about 18 minutes.
There are basically five ideas(or actions) in the work that develop, interact and
gradually change "temperatures" as the work progress. First is a single note that
is "embroidered" by an upper and lower neighbor; second, a clustered thick and dense
chord
that repeats: third, falling consonant arpeggios: fourth, a climbing scalar motive
that tends to build up energy and finally a melody with giant leaps in it that first appears
in
the violin solo and later in the viola solo.
The word "incandescent" is an image for something that lights up from the inside. I tried
hard to do this in this work.
-Joan Tower
Dmitry Shostakovich belongs to the generation of composers trained principally
after the Communist Revolution of 1917. He graduated from the St. Petersburg
Conservatory as a pianist and composer, his First Symphony winning immediate
favour. His subsequent career in Russia varied with the political climate. The
initial success of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District (later revised as
Katerina Ismailova) was followed by official condemnation, emanating apparently
from Stalin himself. The composer's Fifth Symphony, in 1937, brought partial
rehabilitation, while the war years offered a propaganda coup in the Leningrad
Symphony, performed in the city under German siege. In 1948 he fell foul of the
official musical establishment with a Ninth Symphony thought to be frivolous, but
enjoyed the relative freedom following the death of Stalin in 1953. Posthumous
information suggests that despite appearing to conform with official policy,
Shostakovich remained very critical of Stalinist dictates, particularly with regard
to music and the arts. He occupies a significant position in the 20th century as a
symphonist and as a composer of chamber music, writing in a style that is
sometimes spare in texture but always accessible, couched as it is in an
extension of traditional tonal musical language.
In Shostakovich's musical life, his entry to the string quartet world
was rather late. While his first symphony was written at nineteen, he
did not write his first string quartet until thirty-one.
The quartets by Shostakovich are actually symphonies for four
instruments with a deep emotional content, broad phrases, and
intense climaxes.
String Quartet No. 3 in F major (Op. 73) was composed in 1946 after his
Symphony No. 9 was censured by Soviet authorities. It was premiered in
Moscow by the Beethoven Quartet, to whom it is dedicated, in December 1946.
The work was furiously denounced due to the horrors the music portrays and

3. because it ends on a very ambiguous, inconclusive, fashion. Some critics went
as far as accusing Shostakovich of hiding coded subversive messages against
Stalin within it.
The quartet is composed of 5 movements:
I. Allegretto
II. Moderato con molto
III. Allegro non troppo
IV. Adagio
V. Moderato
For the premiere, most likely so that he would not be accused of "formalism" or
"elitism," Shostakovich renamed the movements in the manner of a war story:
I. Blithe ignorance of the future cataclysm
II. Rumblings of unrest and anticipation
III. Forces of war unleashed
IV. In memory of the dead
V. The eternal question: Why? And for what?
-Lau Chun Bong