For too much of the 20th century, it seemed as if the study of how
one both performs and listens to music was hijacked by an academic
intellectualism that tried to reduce all questions to objective terms to
be resolved through the analytic machinery of either syntactic
structures or formal mechanisms developed for the proof of logical
propositions. Arnold Schoenberg's quest for "the emancipation of the dissonance"
was cast as a logical (if not algebraic, if one considers the
theoretical work of Milton Babbitt) challenge that transcended the need
to raise any questions of an aesthetic nature. Indeed, for those most
preoccupied with emancipating the dissonance, there seemed to be an
unwritten law (which would probably have both amused and distressed
George Orwell) that the word "beauty" should be excised from the working
vocabulary.
I was a student back in those days, and I
remember that the very mention of the name of Samuel Barber was
guaranteed to invoke derisive laughter. Those who mocked him could
quickly rattle off a laundry list of sins; but that list would
inevitably begin with the second (Adagio) movement from his Opus 11
string quartet, which Barber subsequently rearranged for string
orchestra as the "Adagio for Strings." There seemed to be too much
sentimentality in a structure that involved little more than a
generously extended melodic line over a homophonic accompaniment that
kept dissonance under lock and key.
Needless to say, those who
mocked Barber were so obsessed with the sound of their own cant that
they had lost the ability to listen (in Igor Stravinsky's
sense of the word) to what Barber was saying. Had they listened, they
would have realized that Barber had not enslaved dissonance but had
reserved it for limited but special occasions, the most important of
which was the climax of the entire movement. Fortunately, the 21st
century seems to have put most of that 20th-century objectivity in its
place (recognizing that it has a place without dispensing with it entirely); and, by virtue of a new generation of performers
willing to take him seriously, we can appreciate Barber as offering
more than surface-level sentimentality to appeal to a
lowest-common-denominator audience. In today's Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral, the Cypress String Quartet
demonstrated that they are seriously committed to being part of this
new generation. Their performance of Barber's Adagio was the shortest
work on the program, separating Joseph Haydn's C major (Opus 33, Number
3) string quartet from Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 133 "Grosse Fuge;"
but they made it clear that this was music that deserved polished
eloquence, rather than mere sentimentality. They also made a convincing
case that Barber's composition benefits from the clarity of its voices
in the string quartet setting, however dramatic the full dynamic range
of a string orchestra may be.
Ironically, 20th-century
intellectualism seemed to have few problems with either Haydn or
Beethoven. Haydn tended to be viewed as a paragon of syntactic
inventiveness, while Beethoven was a pioneer of dissonance. Indeed,
Beethoven figures significantly in Schoenberg's Structural Functions of Harmony, whose focus on the treatment of dissonances was explored on this site during the San Francisco Symphony's Schubert/Berg Journey last spring; and any attempt to study his later Fundamentals of Musical Composition
demands an intimate understanding of the full canon of Beethoven piano
sonatas. Consequently, a work like the Opus 133 fugue achieved an
iconic status in academe, almost as if all of those intellectuals had
summoned "the Beast" to drive Barber's "Beauty" out his garden.
One
sad consequence of this intellectual arrogance is that Opus 133 became,
itself, an object of derision by those who rebelled against the high
priests of the objective. Composers as radically different as Alfred
Schnittke and John Zorn have quoted Beethoven's fugue subject, leaving
the listener to wonder whether their tongues were lodged in their
respective cheeks or tipped with acid (where that noun "acid" comes with
at least two connotations, which may well be divided between Schnittke
and Zorn). Nevertheless, the work is one of those compositions for
which "awesome" is not a trivialization of sloppy speech. To this day
it is a model of composition that accounts for the low-level intricacies
of contrapuntal voice relations embedded in the high-level framework of
an architecture on a scale that had really not yet been explored.
On
today's program both its size and its detail threatened to overshadow
Barber's more modest effort. Yet the Cypress Quartet recognized the
difference in priorities between these two works. By performing the
Barber first with attention to its composer's conceptions of significant
moments and how they were achieved, they assisted the audience in
attending similarly to Beethoven's sense of significant moments, which I
have felt is the key to listening to Opus 133 with equal attention to
its counterpoint and its sense of architecture. I am reminded that, at
his "Schubertiad"
event at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last spring, Paul
Hersh mentioned that Beethoven had transcribed only one of his string
quartets for four-hand "drawing-room" performance. That quartet was the
Opus 133 fugue, and Hersh declared that it was impossible to play. I
can believe that it would be harder for four hands at a piano to do
justice to Opus 133 than to any of Beethoven's symphonies, but there was
no sense of impossibility in the way in which the Cypress Quartet
approached this work with the proper resources. If the composition was
iconic, then it was for being exemplary in providing one with the
experience of learning how to listen.
A program this intense
clearly needed a light touch, and that touch was provided by beginning
with the Haydn quartet. This one has been assigned the name "The Bird"
(not to be confused with "The Lark"); and the first violin is given a
fair amount of chirping to do in the first movement. However, Haydn
rarely confines himself to a single joke. The chirping returns in the
trio portion of the second (Scherzo) movement; and, to rub things in a
bit more, this "trio" is performed by only two instruments, the first
and second violins! If the four instruments sounded a bit less balanced
than they did during the rest of the recital, that may have just been a
matter of adjusting to the acoustics of the space, even if the Cypress
Quartet had given a recital in this space last June.
Ultimately, it was the sense of touch that would make or break the
performance; and it provided just the right way to raise the curtain on
the more serious explorations offered by the remainder of the program.
No comments:
Post a Comment