Diabelli Project 085 - String Quartet

The Diabelli Project is about offering my weekly flash-composition sketches freely to all. Like Antonio Diabelli's theme these sketches aren't great music. But perhaps (as in Diabelli's case) there's a Beethoven out there who can do great things with them.

Last week's flash composition was a quintet for clarinet and strings. This week, it seems I just dropped the clarinet and went with a standard string quartet. I say "seems," because these are indeed flash compositions. I sit down, scribble out some staves, and while I'm doing that decide for what forces I'm going to write, and what the character of the sketch will be.

I actually just drew a two-staff system, thinking I was going to write a piano piece. Nope. Once it got going, it just seemed to split out into four parts -- and parts that couldn't comfortably be played by one set of hands. So a string quartet it is. (click on image to enlarge)

This is the third string quartet sketch I've done for the Diabelli Project (see parts: 079 and 056). They're all a little different, but not too different. It's possible they might be separate movements of the same work. That's how I would approach this sketch if I wanted to develop it further, but you don't have to. Use this material any way you like -- just share the results!