In the Shadows of Song: Birtwistle’s Nine Movements for String Quartet

Birtwistle’s Nine Movements for String Quartet have a complicated compositional history. They emerged, not as a single incorporated work, but piecemeal over a period of five years, in response to various different commissions.¹ Their identity as a cycle has additionally been blurred by their eventual combination with Birtwistle’s settings of the poetry of Paul Celan, under the collective title Pulse Shadows. It was in this form that the quartet movements received their first complete performance in April 1996. The Celan settings themselves emerged in a similarly protracted manner. Figure 4.1 summarizes the complex evolution of both cycles.