Water Music

A 1937 string quartet by a composer perhaps better known as arranger/orchestrator of some 300 Broadway and London productions, Water Music uses the folk tune Sailors' Hornpipe as a starting point. But, as the publisher points out, it "soon becomes a witty compendium of modernist techniques, though omitting 12-tone. Not very far into the piece, for example, Bennett puts each player in a different key. He fragments and reassembles the tune to dramatic effect well beyond what one would expect from an essentially trivial folk melody."