Growth and Other Platitudes

Consider Béla Bartók. The worse things got, for and around him, the more brightly and warmly his music glowed. Of whom else can that be said? His antithesis in that respect was Shostakovich, subject of perennial and voluminous disputes about exactly how and why he stuck crosswise in the plumbing of history. The only point I would like to make about those disputes is that in their presence, any appreciation of Shostakovich's body of work is necessarily selective. One must cherry-pick, and then the rest is which are the cherries and which are the pits.

I may not compare myself to either of those two masters, masters in particular of the string quartet, small and respectful echoes of whose voices may be heard in my latest quartet. But I certainly do not think that I have achieved what Bartók did, in finding clarity and serenity in a world that was going to shít -- as, at the extremely predictable lapse of a human lifespan, ours is as well.

Technically, the new quartet is a step towards stretching the range of my voice. Again predictably, it croaks a bit here and there. Rhetorically, there is some bleakness and grimness about it. When first casting about for a suitable tempo marking for the beginning, on a whim I looked up the Italian for "not fuçking around". To my glee, the first suggestion was "non scherzando"; the fact that this formulation included a musical term settled the matter at once!

The quartet's form is based upon principles that have come to be associated with the work of Franz Liszt. It is a sonata movement, with a slow movement in place of the development; and then a scherzo is wodged in between the second and third sections of the slow movement's ternary form. The whole ends in A, but I really do not know what is going on tonally before that -- I could see if I looked, but I haven't looked. Someday I will, but it is not a high priority for me right now. I am trying to work more intuitively, and I think that approach is paying off, but I also see that there is much more work to do.

(Oh, you say there is a twelve-tone row? Quit picking my trash.)