Many years ago, when I was younger than my sons are now (22, 19), I listened to this album (Forever Changes) day after day after day.
Arthur Lee and Love, “Alone Again Or,” “A House Is Not A Motel,” England (London), 2003
two takes
This just in from my older (22-year-old) son Alex:
Have you heard the new Arcade Fire? It’s incredibly good, totally different from their older stuff—poppy and catchy.
Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs”
The Suburbs (8/10)
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live, New York (Madison Square Garden), 8/5/10
More? Here.
Sheer beauty—sometimes it seems like more than enough.
Ingram Marshall, Fog Tropes II (String Quartet and Tape)/Kronos Quartet
*****
what a world
Until yesterday morning, I’d never heard of this guy. I happened upon him while looking up someone else (in Kyle Gann’s American Music in the Twentieth Century). Intrigued by what I read, I did a search on YouTube, which led to this piece. Mesmerized by what I heard, I listened to it several times over the course of the day. Today I’m posting it here. So the last 24 hours, in relation to this music, have gone like this: utter ignorance —> chance encounter —> first listen —> sharing with others.
I was about 16 when I had an experience that I recollect in nearly Proustian detail, listening for the first time to the String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131. I was sitting in a friend’s living room when her father put a recording of it on the hi-fi. I remember everything about those three-quarters of an hour back in 1961 or ’62: the room in which I was sitting and the direction in which I was facing; the single, exposed Bozak speaker vibrating like an exotic organism in the unfinished wooden box that Mr. L. had built to contain it; the quickly dawning realization that the first movement was the most overwhelming piece of music I had ever heard—a feeling that comes back to me whenever I listen to it, in real sound or mentally, as at this moment; and I remember (but this memory comes also from countless later listenings) the mysterious, throbbing sound of the first violin’s statement of the opening subject in that recording, made by the Budapest Quartet in the early 1950s.
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I am now several years older than Beethoven lived to be. I still think of him as my alpha and omega, but in a different sense: as the author of music that transformed my existence at the onset of adulthood and that continues to enrich it more than any other music as I approach what are often referred to as life’s declining years. His music still gives me as much sensual and emotional pleasure as it gave me 50 years ago, and far more intellectual stimulation than it did then. It adds to the fullness when life feels good, and it lengthens and deepens the perspective when life seems barely tolerable. It is with me and in me. A thousand or 5,000 or 10,000 years from now, Beethoven and our civilization’s other outstanding mouthpieces may still have much to communicate to human beings—if any of our descendants are still around—or they may seem remote, cold, obscure. But what matters most in Beethoven’s case is his belief that we are all part of an endless continuum, whatever our individual level of awareness may be. In the Ninth Symphony, he used Schiller’s words to tell us explicitly what many of his other works, especially his late works, tell us implicitly: that the “divine spark” of joy and the “kiss for the whole world,” which originate “above the canopy of stars,” must touch and unite us all. The spark is there, he said, and so is the kiss; we need only feel and accept their presence.—Harvey Sachs
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Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, op. 131/1st Movement
Budapest Quartet, 1943
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Busch Quartet, 1936
Originally, Morton Feldman was commissioned to compose the score for the film [Something Wild], but when the director heard the music, he promptly withdrew his commission, opting to enlist Aaron Copland instead. The reaction of the baffled director [Jack Garfein] was said to be, ‘My wife is being raped and you write celesta music?’
Morton Feldman, “Something Wild in the City: Mary Ann’s Theme,” 1960
Composed almost a century ago, these tiny pieces—haiku-like in their compression—still astonish.
Anton Webern (1883-1945), Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9 (1911-13)/LaSalle Quartet
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lagniappe
The 15th of September 1945, the day of Anton Webern’s death, should be a day of mourning for any receptive musician. We must hail not only this great composer but also a real hero. Doomed to a total failure in a world of ignorance and indifference he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had such a perfect knowledge.—Igor Stravinsky
intimate, adj. 1. Relating to or indicative of one’s deepest nature. 2. Essential; innermost. E.g., Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, op. 132.
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Beethoven composed his string quartet, Opus 132 in A minor, in the winter of 1824-5. He was 54 and recovering from a serious bowel condition from which he had nearly died. As a result, he entitled the central movement “a song of thanksgiving … offered to the divinity by a convalescent”, and the second section of this movement bears the inscription: “Feeling new strength.”
Over 100 years later, in March 1931, TS Eliot, aged 47, wrote to Stephen Spender: “I have the A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.”
Eliot began the Four Quartets in 1935 and worked on it for years, finishing it in 1941. Whereas the composer wrote one quartet, with five movements, the poet wrote four pieces, each divided into five sections. Like Beethoven’s work, Eliot’s poem was triggered by personal suffering, although not of a physical nature. It was probably connected to his separation from his wife, Vivienne, in 1932; her mental illness; and the rekindling of a platonic relationship with his first love, the American university teacher Emily Hale.
The first poem in the series, Burnt Norton, opens with an image of a couple walking in a rose garden and is full of regret for what might have been. At this point, Eliot’s concerns appear personal. However, in 1939, when he was working on the second poem, East Coker, war had broken out and by 1940 Eliot was working in London as an air-raid warden during the Blitz. The climactic verse of the final poem, Little Gidding, is set at night in a London street just after a raid. By the end of the four poems, Eliot had moved from the personal to addressing what he described in the poem as the “distress of nations”.
If suffering is the trigger for both pieces, then faith offers the shared antidote of “reconciliation and relief” that Eliot wrote to Spender about. Both men were practising Christians, and their belief underpinned much of their later work. Beethoven was a Catholic, and Eliot famously converted to Anglicanism aged 38, nine years before writing Four Quartets.
In 1933 Eliot said he wanted to get “beyond poetry, as Beethoven in his later works, strove to get beyond music”. I am sure that it was Beethoven’s religious aims in the long and intense central movement of the quartet that Eliot had in mind when he wrote these words. Beethoven had been studying liturgical music – Palestrina in particular – while he was working on his Missa Solemnis, which he completed two years before starting work on the quartet. This study influenced the central movement of the quartet, which is based, unusually, on an ancient chorale melody and mode. Similarly, Eliot’s poem had a strong religious purpose and referenced Christianity in many forms – from direct quotations of the medieval mystic Juliana of Norwich, to the setting of the final poem in the village of Little Gidding, which was the site in the 17th century for a persecuted religious community.
Interestingly, however, both men were also drawn to the philosophy of eastern religions, with which they supplemented their own Christianity. Eliot quotes from the Hindu text, the Bhagavad-Gita, in Four Quartets. Beethoven was influenced by the older Hindu scripture, the Rig-Veda. In his diary the composer jotted down a line from the Rig-Veda commentary about the idea of God being “free from all passion and desire”. Eliot expresses similar sentiments in his poem when he writes about:
The inner freedom from the practical desire
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving.—Katie Mitchell, “A Meeting of Minds,” Guardian
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Beethoven, String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, op. 132/Takacs Quartet
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Why take a straight path when you can take a crooked one?
Sheila Jordan (with Steve Kuhn, piano; David Finck, bass; Billy Drummond, drums; Mark Feldman and Barry Finclair, violin; Vincent Lionti, viola; Harold Birston, cello), “Autumn in New York,” live, 2008, New York (on her 80th birthday)
Last week a recording of his complete works for solo piano (so far), Oppens Plays Carter (on Chicago-based Cedille Records), was nominated for a Grammy.
This week he celebrated his 101st birthday.
Next week?
Elliott Carter, Quintet for Piano (1997), Ursula Oppens, The Arditti Quartet, live
Part 1
Part 2
Want more? Here.
When’s the last time you heard a string quartet play music from Iraq?
Kronos Quartet, “Oh Mother, The Handsome Man Tortures Me,” live, London, 2008
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lagniappe
I’ve always wanted the string quartet to be vital, and energetic, and alive, and cool, and not afraid to kick ass.—David Harrington (Kronos Quartet, violin [far left in this clip])
music clip of the day 