Hadyn's Themes and Variations is one of 12 string quartet pieces for intermediate strings included in Richard Young's Comprehensive String Pedagogy & Curriculum. A portion of the proceeds of sales for all CSPC music goes to support free music education at The People's Music School.

Why is structure so essential in music? Why are forms like fugue, rounded binary, theme and variations, rondo, and sonata form so important? After all, they're so intellectual, technical, and premeditated! Isn’t music supposed to be about our emotions, our intuition, our imagination, and our passion? The answer is that in music there is an inherent balance between the intellectual and the emotional, the pragmatic and the impulsive, the knowable and the unknowable, and even the rational and the irrational – a balance that nourishes both the mind and the heart. When composers sit in front of a blank piece of manuscript paper, they face a daunting challenge to somehow notate their souls’ deepest stirrings and yearnings. For this they almost always rely on forms that have been used for centuries. And not just "classical" composers. Those who write pop, jazz, folk, and religious music invariably rely on some of the very same forms – forms which provide familiar and stable frameworks within which composers can then express themselves with more freedom, not less.
 A similar balance between the mind and heart exists in all of us on many conscious and subconscious levels. There are even spiritual implications. In the bible, the first verses of the book of Genesis describe a formless void. A Greek word, chaos, is used to portray what God had to work with when dividing light from darkness, day from night. There is an even more mystical-sounding Hebrew word for this: tobubebobu. Today chaos is what all of us face as we strive to fill the daunting and sometimes dangerous voids in our own lives. Intentionally or unintentionally, we tend to embrace those things that can provide a reassuring sense of order and stability, even as we cherish the unleashed freedom that our souls ultimately long for.
 -Richard Young

Full program notes are included with the score. There are fingerings and bowings in all the string parts of every one of CSPC's pieces. These "cooked-in" technical solutions target the particular levels of the students. They are not just pragmatic but "musical."

Please note that due to a loss of source files, the PDF files of the music have been generated from scanned copies of printed parts. While every effort has been made to produce high quality parts, the limitations of scanning will result in some degradation of print quality.