Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music

20 String Quartets

20 String QuartetS The Grosse Fuge When I was a student at Tanglewood in the late Fifties, I met the South American composer Mario Davidovsky, who was a student there also. We were having coffee one morning, and I asked him about his music. Because his English at that time was poor, he took out his music-writing pen and drew a long arc over the nineteenth century. He wrote Beethoven’s name on one side, Schoenberg’s on the other. He said, “For me the history of music goes all the way over the nineteenth century to Schoenberg.” There was nothing in between. The twentieth-century string quartet starts with Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, Opus 133, written in 1825 and published as a separate work in 1827. It was originally the final movement of Beethoven’s quartet, Op. 130, but it was such a tour de force that Beethoven decided it should stand by itself. Beethoven wrote it toward the end of his life. He died in 1827. So this is one of his imaginings, one of his fantasies, as an old man who was deaf already, and who would write the kind of a music that he heard inside himself, somewhat removed from the realities of playing at that time. A performer said about one of his works that it was too hard to play. Beethoven replied, “Do you think I care about your wretched violin when the spirit moves me?” One of the reasons the Grosse Fuge sounds like a twentieth-century work is that at certain points there are three different rhythms going on at the same time: two eighth notes, a dotted eighth and a sixteenth, and a triplet. It’s not as if one follows the other; they are simply superimposed. It was an s t r i n g q u a r t e t s : 183 astonishing thing to have done in 1827. It points to the simultaneous time screens of Elliott Carter and Morton Feldman. What you’re doing with that triplet is squeezing three notes into the time of two. At almost every time point within a measure there is an attack. So it’s hard to determine where this note is going to hit. Because it’s a three, this is a two, and this implies a four, it’s all occurring at the same time. This piece is incessant; it doesn’t have a form that you might identify with a work at that time. The Grosse Fuge is the only nineteenth-century work that can exist on a wholly modern music concert. It’s also the only nineteenthcentury work the Arditti String Quartet will play. Several years ago if you had asked me about the future of the quartet I would have said it didn’t have one, that its days were numbered. Most of the quartets I was hearing those days, with perhaps the exception of those of Elliott Carter, were more or less recompositions of the great works of the Second Viennese School. Franz Josef Haydn said somewhere that he could be most shocking when writing for string quartet and that the form enabled him to let his imagination run more freely than in other forms. String Quartet 1931 Ruth Crawford’s String Quartet 1931 was written in a style best described as dissonant counterpoint. “Dissonant” means unpleasing to the ear. Of course what is consonant and dissonant differs in various periods of history. When the breakdown of tonality and harmony occurred around the turn of the twentieth century with Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, music freed itself from the reliance on harmony. The consonant intervals (fourths, fifths, thirds, and sixths) began to be replaced by the more dissonant ones (seconds, sevenths, and tritones). Composers who didn’t want to base their works on the flow of harmony discovered that if they used enough dissonant intervals, the music would free itself melodically and rhythmically. 184 : m u s i c 1 0 9 Counterpoint occurs when two or more voices or instrumental parts go along relatively independently. Bach’s music was contrapuntal ; related melodies moved along independently. Much medieval and renaissance music was contrapuntal. With the advent of harmony, Western music became rhythmically less interesting. The flow of the chords became more interesting than the independence of the lines. Ruth Crawford often uses a technique known as “crabbing” in her works. It simply...