Sonata for string quartet was written in 1968 when I was a postgraduate student at Cambridge. It is an early piece of work which owes much to the models I was studying at the time - the string quartets of Bartok, Berg, Britten, Tippett and Nicholas Maw (who was my composition teacher). But it has glimmerings of a personality of its own; so I have included it in my list of work and allowed it out on its own. There is also a sentimental reason for keeping it: I remember the exact moment when the theme of the first movement came into my head. I was sitting with my parents, bored and mutinous during Sunday evening Mass in the cold and depressing crypt of Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral. The first bars of the piece popped into my head exactly as they appear in the score today; and I scribbled them on the back of an envelope. There are three movements: a driven and intense Allegro vivace in sonata-form (a subconscious reference, perhaps, to the inherent tension between Catholic dogma and seething sexuality), a rapid Scherzo, and a slow Finale in ternary form, in which a simple chorale in C major, with a variation attached to it, frames a quicker and more varied middle section.

Giles Swayne
2025