7/16 The Compleat String Quartets for Guitarists and Experimental Music Lovers

Picasso: "Bottle, Guitar, and Pipe" Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany

I've posted about my sequenced "rock" transcriptions of Beethoven's string quartets a couple times before but this time I've gone back and remixed/remastered them a bit, with some simulated "turntable" visuals.  Basically I added more drums, reverb and compression.  They'll probably still drive any purists insane with cries of sacrilege, but for anybody with a background in rock and avant-garde music approaching my own, these might be entertaining and perhaps even illuminating.

While arranging/transcribing Beethoven's various types of music (quartets, concertos, symphonies, etc...) into these somewhat similar rock arrangements, I could more clearly see the different composing approaches he used between these genres.  The concertos seem the most straightforward from a melodic and structural standpoint, though the solo part gets all the "adventurous" stuff.  The quartets have the most complex and labyrinthine horizontal/melodic material, and the symphonies take a middle ground of having dense vertical constructions but simpler thematic material.  These are just gross generalizations of course...

String Quartet 10 in Eb, Op 74 "Harp" (1809)



String Quartet 11 in Fm, Op.95 "Serioso" (1811)

Full Quartets Below:

Early Quartets: Opus 18

Middle Quartets: Opus 59, 74, 95

Late Quartets: Opus 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135

Symphonies tomorrow....