01
2009
Like the Alvin quartet, and all of my other quartets, this composition incorporates a person's name. Ralph Matson is a virtuoso violinist, married to Barbara Scowcroft, the conductor of the Utah Youth Symphony.
"Ralph Matson" becomes: D A E B A F A F E♭ A G.
Roy Lisker (1939–2019) — author, mathematician, violinist, composer, sound poet, playwright, visual artist, busker, Francophile, draft resister, jailbird, fierce and opinionated critic, and God only knows what else. A unique and totally unforgettable man. May he rest in peace.
The name on his birth certificate was Leroy Savery Weber the Third. After his mother's remarriage, he was adopted by his stepfather and renamed Roy Lisker. Both names are used in this quartet, as well as the probability distribution of the notes in both names taken together. This, the longest of my quartets, was composed in the spring of 2019 shortly after Roy died. It was premiered Sunday 10 November 2019 at The Buttonwood Tree, Middletown, Connecticut.
With the exception of the quartet dedicated to Sumarsam, all of the performances of my quartets have been done by the West End String Quartet. Marianne Vogel, one of the WESQ violinists, is a music theorist as well as a performer — keenly interested in my procedure of turning names into fugue subjects. I turned her name into a fugue subject and began to write a fugue for string quartet. I thought it would be fun to write fugues on the names of the other members of the WESQ as well. Thus the idea for this quartet was born.
Each fugue is longer than the one that precedes it. Re-enamored of Beethoven — it was 2020, a big Beethoven year — I shamelessly composed the Shameless Beethovenian Scherzo.
The composer Stephen Soderberg, senior consultant for contemporary music at the Library of Congress, found a 12-tone row and sketches for a string quartet — in one of the last boxes, put together shortly before Copland's death. He has an informal project to encourage composers to write pieces using this row. I learned of "Copland's last row" through Daniel James Wolf, who posted it on Facebook. I was captivated by the notion: an important scrap of manuscript paper, lying on the deceased composer's desk, pregnant with possibility.
This four-movement work shares a row with my piano piece "Homage to Aronchik" — Serge Koussevitsky's nickname for Copland — but is otherwise totally different. Both are rigorously serial, using only materials derived from this row.
"Aaron Copland" emerges as: A A D A G C A B E A G A.
Tatyana Igorevna Kramarevskya was my sister-in-law. We never met. My wife Elena spoke regularly with her, via FaceTime calls to Vladivostok. She died suddenly in 2020. Her passing affected me deeply.
The great American visual artist Sol LeWitt had a voracious appetite for music — 3,937 cassette tape mixes, dubbed personally from the radio and his vast LP collection. His favorite composer was Johann Sebastian Bach. He had eight different performances of The Art of Fugue, and even more of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
This string quartet is an aural analogue to one of LeWitt's enormous wall drawings. A line of quite specific curvature is copied at the top of a white wall with a magic marker; a second member of the team copies the line with a different color; similarly, lines fill in the entire space of the wall, making a giant multicolored ribbon of considerable visual density. As the listener will hear, the musical lines of the four musicians have strong visual implications.
This quartet was composed in the white heat of inspiration shortly after Bill Wasch's passing. The second movement, in a modified sonata allegro form, introduces a dance-like tune based on the letters in his complete name, William Karl Wasch, Senior.
The finale is a set of variations, culminating in a quadruple fugue, based on an early nineteenth century fuguing tune, MORNING by Amos Pilsbury — found in The Sacred Harp, page 163. Long a personal favorite of mine, MORNING is characterized by powerful dissonant chords based on fourths and an underlying harmonic stasis. The editorial assistance of Alex Waterman, who knows far more about string instruments than I ever will, is gratefully acknowledged.
Aymeric died in an automobile accident on Sunday 29 May 2022. He was 49 years old — on the way to play a church service. The last time I heard him play was in the Wesleyan Chapel, the previous December. He played the difficult, musically obscure Four Duets of J. S. Bach. It was some of the most beautiful harpsichord playing I have ever heard. As soon as I received the phone call, I knew I had to write a string quartet in his memory: a tribute to a friend, but also a protest of his sudden, pointless death.
Like many Frenchmen, Aymeric had a glorious, elaborate name — Aymeric François Esprit Dupré la Tour. The Courante is slow, the tempo of the French court dance — "very pale, a ghost of courante, as it were." The Badinage is quite literally a joke: vif et facétieux. The bass line of the final Chaconne is derived from a litany in the Orthodox Church: Lord, have mercy. It is a prayer for Aymeric's repose.
Ever since I discovered "Nude Descending a Staircase" in high school I have been a fan. Wesleyan has one of his ready-mades in its collection; John Cage delighted me with stories about Duchamp. When I discovered "Erratum Musical," the artist's unique foray into aleatoric composition, the die was cast. I had to write a quartet on his name. Maybe I'll write other quartets based on the names of visual artists I love. Who knows…
John Jackson was my next-door neighbor for many years — a complicated man, and in many ways quite the curmudgeon. He had very few friends. When he was terminally ill and in assisted living, I was one of the three people who visited him. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the immediate area, and a sly sense of humor. When he died, I wanted to remember him in music. Almost no one was going to remember him otherwise — and he was a character to be remembered.
There are all those glorious fiddle tunes with "Jackson" in the title: "Jackson's Walk to Limerick," "Jackson's Stranger," "Jackson's Sport," "Jackson's Bottle of Claret," "Jackson's Bottle of Brandy," "Jackson's Night Cap." These and many others find their way into the last movement. The optional seventh movement, "Jackson's Victory Revisited," invites the four musicians to improvise over a collage of three pre-recorded versions of that irresistible tune — also known as "The Eighth of January" and "The Battle of New Orleans."
Sumarsam and I have been friends and colleagues for a bit over 50 years. At this point he is the only member of the Music Department faculty who has been here longer than I have. When I came to Wesleyan in 1974, I knew next to nothing about Javanese music. I still know precious little about this magnificent, subtle tradition, but I am a big fan.
The entire final section — call it the last three and a half minutes — uses only the pitches of pelog: C# B A♯ A F# E D. These pitches create their own sound world. The chords don't sound particularly Indonesian, but they don't sound like a typical Western harmonic palette either. The four instruments slow down incrementally, dropping one click of the metronome per phrase — from quarter = 72 down to quarter = 54 — with a smooth ritard into the final chords marked Molto lento, quarter = 38. The fermata on the last note is to be held as long as possible. Hopefully I have invoked at least a bit of the profound satisfaction resulting from the magnificent relaxation of tempo that characterizes gamelan music.
Sean Curley was my grandson. He lived with me and his grandmother, my wife Phyllis, for several years. He was a smart and engaging young man — but from his teenage years onward he was involved with various self-destructive behaviors. He was only 36 when he died in a hospital room, unable to speak. Many people tried to help him in various ways, over the years, but for whatever reason, no one was able really to help him.
In South Indian music, the teacher "takes the journey with the student." This collection was written over about five years as my response to the assignments I give in "Twentieth Century Composition Techniques" — compose a modal piece, a pandiatonic piece, a free chromatic piece, a serial piece, a random piece, a minimalist one. In these brief pieces I literally took the journey with my students.
This Album tells a story, not just about pedagogy, but about style and technique; the nature of history; and the juxtaposition of wit and seriousness as life goes on.
My longest piece of string chamber music — five substantial movements clocking in at 35½ minutes; longer than Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (my favorite string sextet) and longer than the first Brahms sextet, but not the second. The first movement, an expansive sonata form, is one of my most Brahmsian conceptions — perhaps it's the medium. "Braided Variations" is modeled on the magnificent two-themed variations of Haydn. The title of the finale is a nod to Benjamin Carr, whose "Paddy Carey, arranged as a rondo" is one of my favorite early 19th-century American piano pieces.
My first string quartet was composed in honor of Alvin Lucier and was premiered on Sunday 6 November, 2011 by the West End String Quartet in Crowell Concert Hall at Wesleyan University. This concert was the final event in a festival honoring Alvin on the occasion of his retirement from Wesleyan University. There were also compositions in his honor by Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, and Christian Wolff, all of whom were present. Alvin and I were friends and colleagues for 37 years. Much of the material in this quartet is based on the letters in his name.
"Alvin Lucier" becomes: A E A B G E G C B E D.