String quartet Violini, Violetta [viola], e Violoncello senza Cembalo" (Sonata for four instruments: two violins, viola, and cello without harpsichord), this was a natural evolution from the existing tradition. The string quartet in its now accepted form came about with Haydn. If the combination of two violins, viola and cello was not unknown before Haydn, when it occurred in chamber music it was more likely through circumstance than conscious design; certainly the string quartet enjoyed no recognized status as an ensemble in the way that two violins with basso continuo – the so-called 'trio sonata' – had for more than a hundred
String Quartet No. 14 (Villa-Lobos) String Quartet No. 14 (Villa-Lobos) String Quartet No. 14 is the one of a series of seventeen works in the medium by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and was written in 1953. A performance lasts approximately seventeen minutes. Villa-Lobos composed his Fourteenth Quartet in Rio de Janeiro in 1953 on a commission from the University of Michigan for the Stanley Quartet (Gilbert Ross and Emil Raab, violins; Robert Courte, viola; Oliver Edel, cello), to whom the score is dedicated. The Stanley Quartet gave the first performance in Ann Arbor as part of the sixty-ninth concert of the University of Michigan