1 by American composer Elliott Carter is a work for string quartet written during a year spent in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson, Arizona from 1950–51.
Although he was not the first composer to use this device (such as Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments, (1920)) he was seemingly the first to develop such complex transformations.
The two cadenzas—the first for cello and the concluding for first violin—frame the piece conceptually, as Carter explains:Like the desert horizons I saw daily while it was being written, the First Quartet presents a continuous unfolding and changing of expressive characters—one woven into the other or emerging from it—on a large scale.
The general plan was suggested by Jean Cocteau's film Le Sang d'un poète, in which the entire dreamlike action is framed by an interrupted slow-motion shot of a tall brick chimney in an empty lot being dynamited.
But the movements are all played attacca, with the pauses coming in the middle of the Allegro scorrevole and near the beginning of the Variations.
Specifically, Carter claims that he was guided by an all-interval tetrachord in the development of this work.In all my works from the Cello Sonata up through the Double Concerto I used specific chords mainly as unifying factors in the musical rhetoric—that is, as frequently recurring central sounds from which the different pitch material of the pieces was derived.
For example, my First String Quartet is based on an "all-interval" four-note chord, which is used constantly, both vertically and occasionally as a motive to join all the intervals of the work into a characteristic sound whose presence is felt "through" all the very different kinds of linear intervallic writing.
This chord is not used at every moment in the work but occurs frequently enough, especially in important places, to function, I hope, as a formative factor.
According to another American composer, Virgil Thomson, this quartet enjoyed a remarkable "reputation success."