In classical music circles the string quartet enjoys iconic status. More expansive in structural elegance than the instrumental recital, yet more pithy and lean than orchestral textures, the string quartet strikes that happy balance of richness, coherence, and architectural brilliance that the serious listener never tires of embracing. To paraphrase Goethe, the best encounters with string quartet literature result in the singular pleasure of hearing “four rational people conversing.”
Devotees of this form know the conventions of string quartet performances as well as sports fans know the ground rules of their favorite games. Buy a ticket to hear the Juilliard Quartet perform and you’re generally treated to three compositions. Two will typically be from the pen of the acknowledged masters — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms – while the third will delve into less traveled realms. The ensemble will have its reasons for the selection of works offered to its audience. Sometimes they’ll disclose the plan, either with spoken commentary or notes printed in the program. In other instances the several works are offered without a stated plan of coherence, with the listener free to discover whatever worlds of connection or divergence the works themselves may evoke on their own merits.
The spring concert season has brought two intriguing examples of enterprising ensembles intent on exploding these preset expectations and inviting their listeners into far richer worlds of musical exploration that lie beyond the typical string quartet recital. The example most clearly in the public’s eye at the moment is the brilliant “Perspectives” series devised by the Emerson String Quartet for presentation at New York’s Carnegie Hall: “The Complete Beethoven Cycle: The Quartets in Context.”
A less visible venture in contextualization was offered earlier this spring by the Ying String Quartet, in partnership with Tod Machover, the enterprising director of the MIT Media Lab, where he is professor of music. The Yings choice of Machover as composer was somewhat surprising, given the far larger prominence of his work as a cutting edge pioneer in electronic music. He has brilliantly ridden the microchip revolution, always with musical values at the forefront of his teaching and experimentation. Many will know him best through his creation of “Hyperinstruments,” the most famous of which is perhaps the electronically equipped cello he devised for fellow Bostonian Yo-Yo Ma. Machover is widely regarded as a software tinkerer and wizard of electronic music. The Los Angeles Times dubbed him “America’s most wired composer,” and he cut his chops in the 1980s as the first director of musical research at Pierre Boulez’s esteemed IRCAM in Paris. His MIT Media Lab continues to push the envelope, with next-generation ventures in video and sound technology. Vastly ambitious projects for wired theme parks in development with Machover’s MIT students may soon leave Disney World experiences in their wake. He currently heads MIT’s new Center for Creativity and Invention and was recently appointed Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
In a program premiered at New York’s Symphony Space and subsequently heard at Lafayette College (PA) and Boston’s new Institute of Contemporary Art, the Yings performed a new work by Machover commissioned by them for their New York season, not in itself an especially radical act. Like most chamber music ensembles, the Yings have an active history of introducing new works by contemporary composers, and the commissioning award to Machover seemed like business as usual. As plans developed, however, the project took on a radically different form, with a coherence of other works for the program selected and arranged by Machover to complement his own composition. He also created electronic segues that would guide musical transitions from piece to piece, casting himself as full concert collaborator, “performing” on his laptop computer even as the Yings performed on stage. With ambient amplification, Machover discreetly shaped the sounds intoned acoustically by the members of the quartet and drew musical interludes of his own creation from his computer. He also supplied a set of program notes projected on a screen above the stage, so that the entire program might transpire seamlessly in a darkened hall, as the audience moves from one musical encounter to the next, in a concert hall qua iPod.
For this audience member, the performance recalled a listening experience from a decade ago, when the Kronos Quartet played a concert version of their brilliant new Nonesuch project, Early Music, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts in lower Manhattan. Here some 20 brief works from the last 1000 years were coherently grouped in musical clusters that enthralled the mind and evoked spiritual and aural connections that reached from the worshipful worlds of Hildegard von Bingen, Perotin, and Machaut to contemporary meditations by composers as diverse as John Cage, Arvo Pärt, Alfred Schnittke, and Harry Partch. The sequence and ordering of the works reflected the knowing hand of violinist David Harrington, who provided the concept and inspiration for the project, and the audience heard an effortless flow of enthralling music, quietly aware of gradual shifts in historic style and compositional authority, all the while surrendering to the larger tapestry of sound.
The “…but not simpler…” performance, the Yings on stage and Machover in the rear of the hall at his laptop, cast a similarly bewitching spell. The opening movement of Beethoven’s F-Major Quartet laid out musical themes familiar and welcoming. But in place of the usual shift to subsequent movements, a Machover interlude and projected titles smoothly transitioned ear and eye to two different settings of J.S. Bach’s iconic St. Matthew Passion chorale, “O Mensch bewein dein Sünde gross.” A second interval by Machover then ushered the audience into music by Elliott Carter (Machover’s teacher and mentor) and John Cage. The journey continued through the worlds of William Byrd (a section of Mass in Four Voices), Lennon-McCarthy (A Day in the Life), and Machover himself, whose composition “…but not simpler…” elided smoothly into the evening’s final musical statement — the concluding movement of the same F-Major quartet heard at the beginning of the program. As Beethoven’s final musical statement for string quartet, this closing Grave-Allegro returned the audience to a familiar acoustic world, but with lingering thoughts about how the whole I-Pod scramble ensued.
