The String Quartet No. 4 by Béla Bartók was written from July to September, 1928 in Budapest. Béla Viktor János Bartók (March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a composer, pianist and collector of East European folk music. ... Budapest (pronounced BOO-dah-pesht, IPA ), the capital city of Hungary and the countrys principal political, industrial, commercial and transportation centre, has more than 1. ...

The work is in five movements:

1. Allegro
2. Prestissimo, con sordino
3. Non troppo lento
4. Allegretto pizzicato
5. Allegro molto

This work, like the String Quartet No. 5, and several other pieces by Bartók, is in a so-called "arch" structure - the first movement is thematically related to the last, and the second to the fourth with the third movement standing alone. Also, the outer four movements feature rhythmic sforzandos that cyclically tie them together in terms of climatic areas. The playing time for the movements are [generally] 5, 2, 5, 2, 5 minutes respectively, a display of the mathematical logic behind this quartet. The String Quartet No. ...

The quartet employs a similar harmonic language to that of the String Quartet No. 3, and like that work, it has been suggested that Bartók was influenced in writing this by Alban Berg's Lyric Suite (1926) which he had heard in 1927. In acoustics and telecommunication, the harmonic of a wave is a component frequency of the signal that is an integral multiple of the fundamental frequency. ... The String Quartet No. ... Alban Maria Johannes Berg (February 9, 1885 – December 24, 1935) was an Austrian composer. ... Lyric Suite is a string quartet written by Alban Berg from 1925 to 1926 and (publically) dedicated to Alexander von Zemlinsky . ...

The quartet employs a number of extended instrumental techniques; for the whole of the second movement all four instruments are played with mutes, while the entire fourth movement is played pizzicato. In the third movement, Bartók sometimes indicates held notes to be played without vibrato, and in various places he asks for glissandi (sliding from one note to another) and so-called Bartók pizzicati (a pizzicato where the string rebounds against the instrument's fingerboard). Extended technique is a term used to describe unconventional, unorthodox or improper techniques of playing musical instruments or singing. ... A mute is a device which alters the timbre or reduces the volume of a musical instrument. ... Pizzicato is a method of playing an orchestral string instrument. ... Vibrato is a musical effect where the pitch or frequency of a note or sound is quickly and repeatedly raised and lowered over a small distance for the duration of that note or sound. ... Glissando (plural: glissandi) is a musical term that refers to either a continuous sliding from one pitch to another (a true glissando), or an incidental scale played while moving from one melodic note to another (an effective glissando). ...

The work is dedicated to the Pro Arte Quartet but the first public performance of the work was given by the Waldbauer-Kerpely Quartet in Budapest on March 20, 1929. It was first published in the same year by Universal Edition. Universal Edition (UE) are a classical music publishing firm. ...

Béla Viktor János Bartók (March 25, 1881 – September 26, 1945) was a composer, pianist and collector of East European folk music. ... The String Quartet No. ... The String Quartet No. ... The String Quartet No. ... The String Quartet No. ...

External links

• An Analysis of the first movement of the Fourth String Quartet (1928) (http://home.earthlink.net/~akuster/music/bartok/quartet4.htm) by Andrew Kuster

Further reading

• Leo Treitler, "Harmonic procedure in the Fourth Quartet of Bartók" in the Journal of Music Theory (November 1959)