Quartet Quartet In music, a quartet or quartette (, , , , ) is an ensemble of four singers or instrumental performers; or a musical composition for four voices or instruments. In Classical music, the most important combination of four instruments in chamber music is the string quartet. String quartets most often consist of two violins, a viola, and a cello. The particular choice and number of instruments derives from the registers of the human voice: soprano, alto, tenor and bass. In the string quartet, two violins play the soprano and alto vocal registers, the viola plays the tenor register and
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