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Over the years I have written many kinds of music from children's songs to opera, and from fiddle tunes to film scores. I am best known as a composer of choral music, which you can see on my website at williamstevens.com. Since that website covers my church music fairly well I decided to focus on other areas on myspace. I recently added my Quodlibet on B-E-C-C-A, which uses the notes in my daughter's name for most of the themes. This piece is for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. Also on this site is my string quartet, "Small Towns".
*** Program notes for the quartet:
This suite for string quartet was written for my mother for her 85th birthday in 2007. The subject of each movement is a small town in western North Carolina which is important to Mom. I used a hymn tune in the first movement and liked the way it worked, so I decided to incorporate a hymn into each of the movements.
Grandin is a tiny town between Lenoir and Wilkesboro where as a boy I enjoyed summer visits on my cousin’s farm. At that time the population hovered around a dozen; currently it is five. But at the turn of the 20th century Grandin was a bustling logging town. This movement opens with mechanical rhythms, interspersed with the music of the Saturday night dance. This is interrupted by a musical image of the great flood of 1916 which wiped out the town, leaving only the little Baptist church standing. The church is represented here by the hymn “What a friend we have in Jesus” – my mother’s favorite hymn.
Boomer, just a few miles up the road from Grandin, is where my grandfather was born. This movement is about the graveyard at Little Rock Baptist Church in Boomer where my grandfather lies, along with my grandmother, father, and many other relatives. The music reflects the serenity of the graveyard and also the view from there of the hills across the valley, the vista which my grandfather loved. The hymn tune is Kingslynn, which is based on an old English folk song.
Lenoir is where I was born and grew up. This movement is not about the town, but about my family. The music is in 6/8 since there were six of us children, and each sibling gets a musical theme which reflects a family joke that I won’t divulge here. The hymn tune is Tallis’ Canon by Thomas Tallis (ca. 1567), not for any reason except that when I was writing this movement it popped into my head.
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