Martin Bresnick

String Quartet No. 4

Based on Wallace Stevens' poem 'The Planet on the Table' this string quartet's world is made of the music and sounds of remembered times or of something heard that the composer, Martin Bresnick, liked. The quartet has five movements, each headed by a quotation from one of Stevens' poems as a point of departure or pathway into those remembered sounds and music. 'What matters is that my music, like his (Stevens') poetry, should bear some lineament or character, some affluence, if only half perceived in the poverty of its sounds, of the planet of which it was part.'