Quartet for Piano and Strings No.2

At first astonished that it had been five years since my first piano quartet, I then remembered the 23 months just before and after my father's death in 2013 was a period when no music whatsoever was produced.

Kudos to the inimitable Mozart for kicking off this form with two perfect jewels of imagination and spirit.

The tonal centers here - as has been my wont for quite some time now - slavishly follow the original row in root position: (1) C-Db-E (2) G-A-Gb (3) Eb-F-D (4) B-Bb-Ab. Purely by apparent coincidence, each of the movements features a minor third somewhere in the root relationships, while the first movement offers both major and minor thirds. It would be deceitful in the extreme for me to suggest all that was by conscious design, since in truth I only noticed the fact after writing the first sentence of this paragraph. Six years ago, however, I did write a monstrous script that analyzed and categorized some 40 million potential tone rows; and that script highly recommended this particular row for nicely balanced melodic and consonant harmonic potentials, as well as for the absence of any tritones in its potential melodies; so I will accept some credit for the niceties in the row's construction.

Responsibility for any errors in the voice-leading of the final product, however, are entirely mine to own.