for violin, viola, cello, and piano, 1984, duration: 10 minutes.
Quartet Jove, for violin, viola, cello, and piano, was commissioned by Le Nouveau Chamber Ensemble and was completed at the same time as my younger son, Jordan Oliver, was born, on the Vernal Equinox of 1984.
The structure can be described as a series of freely composed sections alternating with twelve-tone canons. In the free sections there is considerable attention to note or event ordering according to mathematical permutations while the twelve-tone sections are strict canons although each is strict in a unique way.
While the preceding paragraph would seem to suggest that Quartet Jove has a decidedly "academic" or "scholastic" approach, I consider the compositional decision making to have been dictated more by whether the "music" represents the expression that I, as composer, most want.
Le Nouveau Chamber Ensemble