Although string quintets (string quartet plus another string instrument) has been a common instrumentation since the classical era, the combination of voice with string quartet was a 20th-century innovation. As far as we know, Arnold Schoenberg was the first composer to explore this scoring in his String Quartet No. 2 Op. 10 (1907–08), and later examples can be found in the works of his students, Alban Berg (the Lyric Suite from 1926, with its final movement including soprano) and Egon Wellesz (Sonnets by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from 1934). Other appealing results using this texture can be found in the work of Samuel Barber (Dover Beach, Op. 3, 1931), Virgil Thompson (Stabat Mater, 1931), George Rochberg (String Quartet No. 7, 1979), Arvo Pärt (Pilgrim’s Song, 1984), and John Zorn (Pandora’s Box, 2013).

Jennifer Higdon’s In the Shadow of Sirius (2012) is a setting of five poems from the 2008 collection of the same name by the revered American poet W.S. Merwin (1927–2019). (Merwin won the Pulitzer Prize for this collection in 2009 and was the United States Poet Laureate in 2010.) The poems Higdon selected all share references to music, natural sounds, and listening, and she explores each with the same abounding lyricism and vocal variation that would later be heard in her 2015 opera Cold Mountain. The work is in six movements, including two contrasting settings of the poem “The Nomad Flute” as the first and last movements.
—Christopher Mossey

Commissioned by the Cypress String Quartet for the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress and dedicated to the memory of Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky

This project is supported in part by a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works

All poetry by W.S. Merwin, from his collection The Shadow of Sirius, published by Copper Canyon Press. Copyright © 2008 by W. S. Merwin, used with the permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC.

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