In addition to intimacy, the string quartet is a medium capable of remarkable levels of austerity. It’s no surprise, then, that John Cage turned to the quartet as the vehicle for a work in which, “without actually using silence, I should like to praise it” (as Cage wrote to his parents, prior to starting the piece). A few years earlier, in 1947, Cage had composed his first orchestral work, The Seasons, using a technique that he described as a ‘gamut’. This involved the pre-composition of a collection of materials—chords, gestures, solitary sonic moments—that had no relation to each other. These would then become the entire repertoire for the compositional act, Cage choosing from this collection of materials as the mood took him. The gamut technique was an important step towards the aleatoric methods Cage would explore in the next stage of his output, and it’s heard with perhaps the greatest clarity in the work he wrote next, the String Quartet in Four Parts, composed in 1950. Here, Cage created a library of chords, and then a melodic line; to harmonise this melody, Cage called upon whichever chords supported the melody’s current pitch (the same chords always fixed to the same pitches). In addition to use of the gamut, the work also draws on the seasons for inspiration, being in four movements each of which is dedicated to one season. The reference to silence in the above quotation is arguably as much about motion as the actual presence or otherwise of sound itself. Indeed, the titles of the first three movements indicate a gradual tendency towards motionlessness: ‘Quietly Flowing Along’ (summer), ‘Slowly Rocking’ (autumn), ‘Nearly Stationary’ (winter). But another kind of silence evoked in the work is that of self-expression. By drastically restricting the composer’s palette to a small pool of disjunct fragments, the gamut technique to no little extent confounds most conventions of what might otherwise pass for “expression”. This is mirrored in an instruction to the players that they not only avoid vibrato but use minimal weight on the bow, resulting in a cool, detached, rather other-worldly sound, often sounding poised to evaporate.
Studied piano, organ, violin, and viola, but it became increasingly clear that what he liked to do. John Cage (1912-1992):: “Nearly Stationary” from String Quartet in Four Parts. His opus 1, Passacaglia for orchestra, were abruptly replaced with almost skeletal remains. The Arditti Quartet are one of the most recognized string quartets of the '80s and '90s for the interpretation of avant-garde music, and in this series for Mode, recorded at Wesleyan University in 1988, the ensemble tackle the rarely performed string quartets, a format in which Cage composed and off for over half a century.
Yet the music is very far indeed from expressionless; on the contrary, the unrelenting flat demeanour of the quartet demonstrates surprising emotional capacity. The first movement is tantalisingly allusive, initially giving the impression (as in Jörg Widmann’s Second Quartet) that something very familiar is hovering at the fringes of perception. But that sense lasts barely a few seconds, brushed aside in the movement’s central occupation, the four players wanting to move together at an icy distance from the listener. As if by magic the music keeps falling into cadential moments, briefly conjuring the spectre of a viol consort. But it’s the musical equivalent of a trick of the light, and it becomes an increasingly distant memory through the second movement, on the one hand growing more tranquil yet shot through with unexpectedly harsh accented chords that scar the milder texture beneath. The lengthy third movement presents a music that by now seemingly wants to hibernate. The chord progressions have slowed almost to a stop, and even calling them “progressions” is false, as they idly rotate around a common central point. However, the way Cage renders the gamut here gradually makes the quartet seem more deliberate, more active, as though something is being attempted even while the players—to switch metaphors—are practically turning to stone (or should that be ice?). The presence of pizzicato notes—the first appearance of a non-bowed, percussive element—to some extent breaks the spell, and the movement ultimately becomes intensely focused almost entirely on harmony and the juxtaposition of its chordal elements, sounding like an experiment in progress. Perhaps due to the subtle changes wrought here, the short, vernal fourth movement, labelled ‘Quodlibet‘, is faster and more obviously melodious, drawing heavily on the allusions only touched upon at the start. It builds on the apparent introduction of conscious purpose in the preceding movement, at the last becoming boisterous and forceful.
Soon after writing the String Quartet in Four Parts, Cage embraced chance techniques wholeheartedly, which makes the work’s rather mesmeric wandering around the thresholds of active intent all the more fascinating.
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String Quartet in Four Parts is a string quartet by John Cage, composed in 1950. It is one of the last works Cage wrote that is not entirely indeterminate. Like Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano (1946–48) and the ballet The Seasons (1947), this work explores ideas from Indian philosophy.
General information[edit]
Cage began writing the quartet in 1949 in Paris. Prior to beginning to work on the piece, he told his parents that he wanted to compose a work which would praise silence without actually using it; after completing the first movement he was so fascinated with the new way to work that he wrote in a letter: 'This piece is like the opening of another door; the possibilities implied are unlimited.'[1] The piece was completed in 1950 in New York City and dedicated to Lou Harrison. It was premièred on August 12 the same year at the Black Mountain College.
The String Quartet in Four Parts is based partly on the Indian view of the seasons, in which the four seasons—spring, summer, autumn and winter—are associated each with a particular force–those of creation, preservation, destruction and quiescence. The parts and their corresponding seasons are as follows:[1]
- Quietly Flowing Along – Summer
- Slowly Rocking – Autumn
- Nearly Stationary – Winter
- Quodlibet – Spring
The general quietness and flatness of sound in the quartet may be an expression of tranquility, the uniting emotion of the nine permanent emotions of the Rasa aesthetic, which Cage explored earlier in Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. Another aspect of composition which Cage used earlier was the use of counterpoint: the third movement uses a canon for a single melodic line, which repeats itself going backward, in a slightly rhythmically altered form, to the beginning.[2] Cage composed canons from his earliest works, such as the Three Easy Pieces of 1933 and Solo with obbligato accompaniment of two voices in canon of 1934.
To compose the quartet Cage used a new technique, which consisted of dealing with fixed sonorities, or chords. He called those 'gamuts', and each gamut was created independently of all others. After producing a fixed amount of gamuts, scored for each player in an unchanging way,[3] a succession of them could be used to create a melody with harmonic background. Because at any particular point a gamut would be selected only for containing the note necessary for the melody, the resulting harmony would serve no purpose and any sense of progression, which was alien to Cage, would be eliminated. Since 1946 Cage's interest was in composing music to 'sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences', rather than music to express feelings and ideas,[4] and he would later give up control over music altogether by using chance operations, but already in the String Quartet in Four Parts 'the inclusion of traditional harmonies was a matter of taste, from which a conscious control was absent.'[5]
This composition and a lost early string quartet from 1936 are the only quartets Cage wrote that were explicitly labelled as such. Only three more works were composed for the same ensemble: Thirty pieces for String Quartet of 1983, Music for Four of 1987–88 and Four of 1989. Many of Cage's indeterminate works, such as the Variations series, Fontana Mix, as well as the string parts for Concert For Piano And Orchestra and others can be performed by a string quartet as well. Additionally, Cage's 44 Harmonies have been arranged for string quartet by Irvine Arditti.
![Quartet Quartet](/uploads/1/2/6/5/126546666/728002645.jpg)
Editions[edit]
- Edition Peters 6757. (c) 1960 by Henmar Press.
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- John Cage. Silence: Lectures and Writings, Wesleyan Paperback, 1973 (first edition 1961). ISBN0-8195-6028-6
- Richard Kostelanetz. Conversing with John Cage, Routledge, 2003. ISBN0-415-93792-2
- James Pritchett, Laura Kuhn. 'John Cage', Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, grovemusic.com (subscription access).
Notes[edit]
- ^ abCage quoted in Pritchett, liner notes to 'John Cage: Complete String Quartets' (Arditti Quartet'. 1989–1992, released on Mode, Mode 27
- ^Cage quoted in Kostelanetz, 67
- ^Pritchett, Grove
- ^John Cage interview by Johnatan Cott, 1963. Available as streaming audio at the Internet Archive, see [1]
- ^Cage, 25
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