Human civilization is at present much more aware of and pre-occupied with the past than ever before. From the scholarly pursuits of paleo-anthropologists who are busily pushing back the frontiers of knowledge about our very origins as a separate and distinct species, to the ever-renewing waves of nostalgia for the sometimes quite recent past, the human race is leaving the present century (and millennium) with many a fond glance backwards at itself. In the realm of music, the twentieth century has witnessed the rapid expansion of the discipline of musicology in North America and its concomitant validation and even exaltation of the music of the past. Indeed musicology could on one level be considered the ultimate justification for musical conservatism during this century, from the neo-classical works of the early 1920s to the neo-conservatism of the 1980s. As more and more Kleinmeister are dignified with scholarly editions and detailed studies and the great figures of the past are processed through a second or third complete works edition, the modern composer could be forgiven for casting a jealous eye at all this activity. One reaction of many contemporary composers to this all-pervasive preoccupation with the past has been to emulate the musical techniques and styles of earlier periods. This process has reached a kind of reductio ad absurdum with the creation of new compositions for period- or early-instrument performance groups: in these cases the composer can literally be said to be pouring his new wine into old bottles to improve the vintage.

Leonard B. Meyer has pointed out that "every act and every artifact that is not an exact replica of an existing one is in some way different and, in that respect, novel."¹ In other words, every composition consists of a unique combination of sounds and consequently is innovatory to some degree.² The degree to which a musical work could be considered conservative therefore depends on the extent of its indebtedness to earlier techniques, styles or even specific compositions. Certain composers have, either consciously or unconsciously, preserved the cultural legacy of past generations more than others and they have also been influenced to a greater degree by the historical traditions of the string quartet repertoire. Indeed some have embraced the past so wholeheartedly that their influence and reputation are intimately bound up with their musicological enthusiasms. Meyer notes further that

it is not so much the past that shapes the present but the present that, by selecting from the abundant possibilities of the past, shapes the past as we construct it. The present chooses what will influence it and, in so doing, "decides" what its past will be.³

The present section of this thesis is devoted to an examination of the various ways that Canadian string quartet composers have selected from the past in order to construct their present.

The roots of Canadian string quartet composition lie in the late nineteenth century, and the earliest works are squarely within the conservative camp, upholding a traditional view of the string quartet medium. The progressive stream of European music in the nineteenth century, which is considered to have been led by Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, cultivated orchestral and operatic music to the almost total exclusion of chamber music. Chamber music in the later nineteenth century was the almost exclusive preserve of such Romantic Classicists as Mendelssohn, Brahms and Dvorák, together with other lesser figures (such as the Boston Classicists) who followed the lead of these composers. The two earliest Canadian string quartets, by Guillaume Couture (1875) and Luigi von Kunits (1891), fall within this late-nineteenth-century classicizing movement and they reflect the influence of Beethoven and Brahms respectively.

The epigram by Verdi which heads this chapter was written upon the occasion of the reorganization of the conservatories in Italy in 1871, just four years before the first Canadian string quartet composition. Verdi felt that music students would have to turn back to the time-tested fundamentals of compositional technique, such as harmony and counterpoint, in order to pave the way for the future progress of musical life in Italy. This was just one manifestation of the musical retrenchment that set in during the second half of the nineteenth century in many parts of Europe. There was a widespread feeling, and not just in Italy, that the renewal of music would have to come about through the study of fundamental compositional techniques combined with a thorough knowledge of the classic masterpieces of the musical literature. Guillaume Couture no doubt absorbed these ideals in his studies with Théodore Dubois at the Paris Conservatory, and he gave concrete expression to them in his Quatuor-Fugue, Opus 3.

Théodore Dubois (1837-1924) was a French organist, church musician and composer who was quite well known in his day for his pedagogical manuals on fugue, harmony and solfège. He was appointed to the Paris Conservatory as professor of harmony in 1871 and two years later Couture began his studies with Dubois. Alix de Vaulchier notes of Contant that

[i]n one year he covered a program normally spread over three, and by the end of the second year he had mastered counterpoint, fugue, and orchestration and had begun composition.⁴

The collection of Couture materials at the Université de Montréal contains 155 pages of counterpoint studies, including both tonal and real fugues.⁵ No doubt most, if not all, of these studies were done by Couture under the direction of Dubois. The Quatuor-Fugue may have been one of the first actual compositions that Couture completed for Dubois, for it is a work written precisely to demonstrate a finished proficiency in fugue together with the basic principles of writing for string instruments.

The rhythmic structure of Couture's fugue subject, together with its general melodic outline and the subsequent contrapuntal treatment, is based on an irreproachable classical model: the second movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in C minor, Opus 18 No. 4. Example 2.1 shows the close relationship between the two subjects:

Example 2.1: a. Beethoven Op. 18 No. 4, II bars 1-7 (violin 2)



b. Couture Op. 3, bars 1-3 (violin 2)

It was evidently the nature of this fugue subject that attracted Couture, rather than Beethoven's treatment of it, for Couture developed it in a much more orthodox fugal manner than Beethoven had done. Couture follows the same order of subject entries as Beethoven (violin 2 - viola - violin 1 - cello) but Couture, unlike Beethoven, introduces the countersubject together with the subject in the exposition, and proceeds according to orthodox fugal procedure. In Beethoven's quartet, on the other hand, the subject is used for the fugato opening of a sonata form movement, rather than a complete fugue. Couture no doubt chose to develop the theme as a fugue in part because he felt that this would make a more suitable one movement work than sonata form would have, but perhaps also in part to demonstrate his skill at contrapuntal techniques. Procedures such as stretto (bar 104) and inversion (bar 118) are handled in a skilful and convincing fashion by Couture in this well-crafted if somewhat uninspired fugal study. The writing for the string instruments, while it is by no means poor, is not terribly idiomatic either, and the work could be played with equal success by any combination of four instruments. The string quartet medium was likely chosen simply out of respect for Beethoven's example rather than from considerations arising out of the nature of the medium itself. Nonetheless Couture does demonstrate that he was aware of the rudimentary considerations of scoring a work for string quartet.

Shortly after Couture's Quatuor-Fugue was written it was published in Paris by the Girod firm. Reference sources give the date of publication variously as 1875 and 1876. It is certain, at any rate, that the work appeared between 1872 and 1876. The publisher's name as it appears on page one of the score ("E et A Girod") was used by that firm between 1872 and 1884,⁶ while the dedicatee of the work, Félicien David, who is called "Membre de l'Institut" in the dedication and thus was presumably still alive at the time the work was published, died in 1876. Furthermore it is not likely that the work was published before 1873, the year in which Couture first arrived in Paris. And finally, two other works by Couture were published as his Opus 2 and Opus 5 by Girod in 1875, so it seems quite likely that this could have been the year in which his Opus 3 was published as well.⁷

Couture's Quatuor-Fugue was premiered in Paris at a concert of the Société nationale de musique on 18 November 1876 which was given in a hall in the Pleyel building.⁸ In addition to the quartet movement by Couture, the concert featured compositions by Franck, Dubois, Massenet, Saint-Saëns and a Mlle Renaud, who was a prize-winning student at the Paris Conservatory in fugue and organ. No record of a performance of the Quatuor-Fugue in Canada during Couture's lifetime has been found. The Canadian premiere of this work seems to have been given by the Dubois Quartet in Montreal on 18 November 1929.⁹ Although subsequent performances have not been very numerous, neither has the work been neglected altogether. Couture's Quatuor-Fugue, Opus 3 continues to enjoy a mild succès d'estime as the first Canadian string quartet and the first published Canadian chamber music composition. It is but a modest work to be sure, but one worthy of its place of honour.

The pride of place which Couture's fugue enjoys as the first Canadian composition for string quartet may one day be challenged if one of the various lost quartets by earlier Canadian composers should reappear. Joseph Quesnel (ca. 1746-1809), James P. Clarke (ca. 1807-1877) and Calixa Lavallée (1842-1891) among others are said to have written chamber music. While the references to quartets by Quesnel and Clarke are not qualified and so could refer to vocal music, Lavallée is said to have written two string quartets.¹⁰ Given the other preserved works by these composers, it could safely be conjectured that if a string quartet by one of them should reappear, it would be a traditional work in both form and content. It would be particularly interesting if a string quartet by Quesnel should materialize, however, for it would be a Canadian contribution to the genre contemporary with the Classic era of string quartet composition in Europe.

One early Canadian string quartet movement which did come to light recently was the Quartet on Ancient Irish Airs by Susie Frances Harrison (1859-1935). An undated manuscript set of parts of this work in the possession of the composer's granddaughter, Mrs. Katherine Vickers of Edmonton, was sent to the offices of the Canadian Musical Heritage Society in 1987. Unfortunately this is the only source for this piece; there is no record of any performance of it, nor is it mentioned in any of the secondary literature. It is a ternary form movement, 111 bars long, based on two Irish folksongs. The piece is of scant musical interest. An exact date will probably never be established for the work, but it nevertheless was written before 1935 and is thus the first extant Canadian string quartet composition by a woman composer. It may be that it was written during the late 1920s, when several folksong arrangements for string quartet by Canadian composers (which will be studied later in this chapter) appeared. Whatever its date of origin, the work is within the conservative tradition of quartet writing and its principal charm was the mild frisson of Entdeckungsfreude which was occasioned by its sudden reappearance over fifty years after the composer's death.

Some fifteen years after Couture wrote his Quatuor-Fugue, a string quartet that came to play an important role in the history of Canadian chamber music was written in Vienna. This was the String Quartet in D minor of 1891 by Luigi von Kunits. Some reference sources date this quartet in 1890, but on the recto side of folio 9 of the autograph manuscript is clearly written "Wien, den 3. Februar/1891/ LvKunits."¹¹ This is a much more substantial work than Couture's but it too falls within the classicizing movement of the European Romantic era.

Kunits, who was to become an indispensable addition to the musical life of Toronto upon his arrival there in 1912, wrote his quartet at the age of twenty-one. He was already an experienced violinist by that time and had studied composition with Bruckner. In the same year that he wrote his String Quartet, Kunits also played his Violin Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic. His String Quartet was first performed in Vienna by the Tonkünstler Quartett ca. 1895; in 1915 Musical Canada reported that "Brahms was present and it is interesting to observe the marks and smudges he made on the manuscript score while giving the young composer the benefit of his candid criticism."¹² The autograph manuscript of this composition at the National Library of Canada is singularly free of "marks and smudges" but the score does reveal the unmistakable influence of Brahms, even if it does not give concrete evidence of his physical presence at the first performance of the work. Although Kunits studied composition with Bruckner, he also studied music history with Hanslick, and as a composer he was clearly a follower of Brahms, not Bruckner.

The Kunits String Quartet is laid out in the classic four-movement pattern and is roughly 20 minutes in duration. The first movement is a lengthy essay in sonata-allegro form. The opening theme is presented in a rich Brahmsian texture of thirds and sixths, and it later reappears in other movements, giving the work a cyclical form.

Example 2-2: Kunits String Quartet, I bars 1-4

The role that classical counterpoint plays in delineating the key structural elements of this sonata form shows Kunits to be a true conservative member of the Romantic school. A fugato introduces the second subject, which is in the parallel major key (F major) just as it would be in a string quartet movement by Mozart (e.g. K.421). There is another short imitative section at the end of the exposition, and the development section begins with a fugue whose subject is a variation of Example 2-2. These contrapuntal sections are all incorporated into the various sections of a textbook sonata form.

Clearly delineated classic forms also serve as the basis for the second and third movements, a ternary form and a scherzo and trio respectively. The second movement is a short, monothematic Adagio in F major. It is the least interesting of the quartet's four movements, for the opening theme is simply presented in the dominant at letter A (bar 24) and then repeated note for note in the tonic key at letter C (bar 52). The scherzo is rather more interesting, for it begins with the opening notes of the cyclical theme treated in close imitation among the upper three voices, and this brief motive is further developed in the second half of the scherzo. The trio is contrasted in mode, texture and rhythm.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Kunits String Quartet is the fact that the composer provided two very different finales for it. The first one (folio 6v-9r) is a stormy sonata-allegro movement in D minor labelled "Finale agitato" which was presumably the original finale, as it is dated and signed after the last bar. The second finale (folio 10r-13v) is a rondo in the tonic major, labelled "Finale, Allegro giocoso." Unlike the first finale, the second makes use of the cyclical theme, which appears right at the outset in the following syncopated version:

Example 2-3: Kunits String Quartet, IV (second version) bars 1-4 (violin 1)

The two finales are strongly contrasted: the first is concise in length and tragic in mood while the second is episodic, expansive and on the whole more lighthearted in character than the rest of the quartet, although it does have a central episode in D minor, labelled "Mesto" (sad), which presents a contrast in mood to the rest of the movement. The second finale demonstrates that Kunits evidently rethought the nature of the composition sometime after completing it. Unfortunately, as this finale is not dated, it has not been possible to determine exactly when this re-evaluation took place, although it must have been sometime before the first Canadian performance of the quartet in 1915. The review of this 1915 performance says of the last movement that it is

a martial finale; the interruption of a passionate melody of gypsy character giving added color and contrast to the rhythmic robustness of the principal theme.¹³

This must refer to the rondo finale, as the only melody of "gypsy character" in either movement is the "Mesto" episode (folio 12r) of the rondo. This 35-bar long episode features thirty-second and sixty-fourth note runs in the various instruments which are quasi-improvisatory in nature and call to mind the "Hungarian" style of the Romantic era. It could well be that Kunits had in mind the Più lento section of the second movement of the Clarinet Quintet by Brahms as a model when he wrote this section of the rondo finale of his quartet.

The first Canadian performance of the Kunits String Quartet was given early in 1915 by the Academy String Quartet, and the work was revived sixty years later by the Orford String Quartet. Although written in Vienna, the work is regarded as Canadian by adoption, and as such it is the earliest extant multi-movement Canadian string quartet.

The early years of the twentieth century, up to the beginning of the First World War, saw the creation of many innovatory works for string quartet by Schoenberg, Bartók, Webern, Berg, Ives and Stravinsky, as well as a host of other more traditional string quartets by composers in Europe and the U.S., but there were no important Canadian contributions to the genre during this period. The only Canadian string quartet written during the First World War, the String Quartet in C minor by Ernest MacMillan, will be dealt with in the chapter on "The Spirit of Compromise," while the first Canadian quartet in an arguably modern style, Rodolphe Mathieu's String Quartet of 1920, will be discussed in the chapter on "Innovation and Modernism."

There were no further works in the conservative tradition of Canadian string quartet composition until some 35 years after the Kunits String Quartet in D. The Couture and Kunits quartets did not mark the beginnings of a continuous tradition of Canadian string quartet composition. Both works were written in Europe and they represent isolated cases rather than the mainstream of Canadian composition at the time. Canadian composers were still devoting their best efforts to smaller genres such as the song and the piano miniature rather than the larger forms of the symphony or the string quartet. This was only natural, for there was a large market for drawing-room music in Canada during the early part of this century, but there were few Canadian string quartet ensembles or orchestras. Even a successful composition for string quartet could not expect to receive more than a few performances and it would very likely never be published, and so from a practical viewpoint their was little artistic or financial incentive to compose one. That the situation was nevertheless ripe for chamber music composition in Canada is demonstrated by the fact that when a minimum of incentive was finally provided, several Canadian composers did compose works for string quartet. This incentive was provided by the CPR Festivals.

John Murray Gibbon, publicity agent for the Canadian Pacific Railway, organized a series of music and folk arts festivals that were held between 1927 and 1931 under the auspices of the CPR at various CPR hotels across Canada. Gibbon had recently completed his work as selector and translator for the collection Canadian Folk Songs, Old and New¹⁴ and the CPR Festivals were an inspired continuation of his interest in Canadian folksong. The first such festival, held in Quebec City in May 1927, featured not only various folk music performers, but also the Hart House String Quartet, which performed new works by Ernest MacMillan and Leo Smith based on French-Canadian folksongs.

The influence of folk music on the string quartet can be traced right back to Haydn, but the immediate inspiration for the Two Sketches by MacMillan and Smith was no doubt the more recent British folk music settings for string quartet by composers such as John B. McEwen, H. Waldo Warner, Frank Bridge, Percy Grainger, and others. These arrangements were popular as encore items in quartet recitals in Canada and abroad during the early years of this century.¹⁵ Such works represented the chamber music manifestation of the turn-of-the-century folksong revival in British music which was inspired by the work of Cecil Sharp (1859-1924) and other folk music collectors of his generation.

MacMillan and Smith both used French-Canadian folksongs for their arrangements, but the inspiration and methods were entirely British. Of the two works, MacMillan's has enjoyed far greater popularity, and it was published by Oxford University Press in 1928. In an introductory note to that score, MacMillan writes that he borrowed the tunes from Folk Songs of French Canada, a 1925 publication by Marius Barbeau and Edward Sapir.¹⁶ The two folksongs chosen by MacMillan form a nicely contrasted pair. "Notre Seigneur en Pauvre" is a slow and introspective song with a religious text, while "À Saint Malo" is a lively and spirited work or canoe song.

In the Barbeau and Sapir publication, "Notre Seigneur" has been transcribed in the transposed Mixolydian mode starting on F, but MacMillan has wisely changed this to the true Mixolydian mode on G in his string quartet arrangement, thus allowing the string instruments to sound richer and more resonant. MacMillan made a ternary form movement out of this slender melody, with a middle section in the transposed Mixolydian mode on E. The melody is spun out in various different ways, with a prelude and several interludes formed by presenting the opening notes of the folksong at various pitch levels or by using it to form short imitative entries. The actual folksong itself appears in the first violin (bars 14-22) and viola (bars 25-29) in the first section, in the cello (bars 52-59) in the middle section, and once again in the first violin in the final section (bars 63-76, sounding an octave higher than in the first section). MacMillan has suggested that the instruments may be muted throughout, which would enhance the sombre quality of this movement.

"À Saint Malo" is notated in G major in the Barbeau and Sapir publication, but the tune is based on the six-note scale G-A-B-C-D-E. MacMillan in his version maintains the six-note scale for the tune but uses the Mixolydian mode for the accompaniment, and he has also altered the metre from the original 2/4 to 3/4. MacMillan never gives the tune in its complete, original form, and there are only two near-complete presentations of it, both in the first violin. The first time it appears (four bars after letter A) the repetition of the last four notes is missing, and on the second statement (letter L) the three-note upbeat is omitted. The rest of the movement is built up from the clever manipulation of fragments of the theme which either form ostinato accompaniment patterns or are transposed to different pitches. MacMillan maintains the forward momentum of the piece by never allowing a phrase to come to a complete stop; the various entries of the thematic fragments continually overlap and push the music breathlessly onwards. The writing for the strings is idiomatic and exciting, and the movement makes a brilliant effect in live performance. The Two Sketches remains one of the most frequently performed Canadian works for string quartet and it is equally or perhaps even more popular in the string orchestra version.

It was no doubt partly due to the success of MacMillan's Two Sketches that an E.W. Beatty Competition for Compositions Based on Canadian Folk Melodies was announced for the 1928 CPR Festival in Quebec City. The winner of the Beatty prize in the string quartet category was George Bowles, an organist and theory teacher who was born in Quebec but had lived in Winnipeg for 31 years; Bowles also won an honourable mention in the orchestral category. The Bowles suite for string quartet was premiered by the Hart House String Quartet on 24 May 1928. This work is listed among the holdings of the National Library of Canada, but it has in fact been lost for many years, and furthermore no other biographical information about Bowles is available. He seems to have been a once-off phenomenon and is remembered solely for his success in the 1928 competitions. His string quartet suite was in four movements and made use of the following folksongs:¹⁷

I    Allegro - Genticorum; J'ai cueilli la belle rose
II   Largo   - Descendez à l'ombre; Je le mène bien mon devidoir
III  Vivace  - C'est la belle Françoise; François Marcotte
IV  Allegro - Au bois de rossignolet; Jamais ne nourrirai de geai; Digue Dindaine

The foreign press did not hold as high a view of the Bowles work as the prize committee (Achille Fortier of Montreal, Paul Vidal of Paris, Eric De Lamarter of Chicago and Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir Hugh Allen of London) evidently did. As the New York Evening Post reported

On the opening day came the prize quartet ... It was nothing but four groups of folk songs of different tempos, not even hitched together. The award of first prize was unexplainable and the playing of the second prize winner later by the same quartet made it more so. The superiority of the second was very great.¹⁸

The second prize had been awarded to Miss Wyatt Pergeter of Bournemouth, England. Even less information is available about Miss Pergeter than Mr. Bowles; she seems to have left no mark on the musical world whatever beyond her second place finish at the CPR Festival. It should be added that the home press had more praise for the Bowles work, which was called "extremely fine in workmanship and delicate in texture" by the Winnipeg Bulletin.¹⁹

While it is impossible to judge the merits of the Bowles work in the absence of a score for it, the criticism to which it was subjected in the press does point out the inherent weakness in the use of borrowed folksong material. In large-scale works, the danger is that a composer might simply resort to stringing a number of different folksongs together without any compelling underlying formal structure. But on the other hand if a folksong tune serves only as a source for thematic material which is then subjected to developmental thematic processes such as any other tune might undergo, then the work immediately loses its "folk-like" quality, which presumably was the original inspiration for the use of folk-derived materials. MacMillan intuitively steered his way through the Scylla and Charybdis of the folksong-derived style, for in his Two Sketches he limited himself to a modest treatment of two separate tunes. By confining himself to a six-minute long two-movement work, MacMillan was able to preserve something of the charming simplicity of the borrowed melodic material but at the same time he varied the material enough to create an interesting and engaging musical composition.

Two other Canadian composers also produced short works for string quartet in a folk-like idiom. Claude Champagne arranged his Danse villageoise, written for violin and piano in 1929, for string quartet ca. 1936. (Champagne had earlier won a Beatty prize at the 1928 CPR Festival in the cantata category for his Suite canadienne.) Although this work uses original melodic material, it is in a folk-like idiom and indeed is similar in general style to MacMillan's "À Saint Malo." Hector Gratton, who was a pianist and arranger for the early CPR Festivals, wrote a series of five Danses canadiennes in the 1920s and 1930s, and at least one of these works was arranged for string quartet. Like Champagne, Gratton used only original material in his dances but the influence of Quebec folksong and fiddle music is evident.

The use of folksong or folk-like styles in Canadian music, and especially in Canadian string quartets, proved to be not only part of the conservative tradition but also ultimately something of a dead end. Nothing like the renewal of the string quartet repertoire that came about after the folk music researches of Kodály and Bartók in Eastern Europe happened in this country. Instead of a hearty meal, Canadian composers made only a few appetizing hors d'oeuvres out of the indigenous musical material of Canada. As R. Murray Schafer has written, the folksong style was a phase of musical nationalism which did not flourish in Canada for at least two reasons:

In the first place, the struggle for independence and national achievement in Canada did not coincide with the period of our most impressive artistic accomplishment. Then too, progressive urbanization has rendered large portions of the population less conscious of folk art of all kinds; such material is much less meaningful for Canadian audiences than would be the case in, say, Eastern Europe.²⁰

This was not the final chapter for nationalism in the Canadian string quartet. But later composers such as John Beckwith and Schafer himself went beyond the simple use of borrowed melodic material and instead incorporated more substantial elements of the Canadian soundscape. The use of folksong was exhausted early on in the course of events and never again became a major factor in the Canadian string quartet repertoire after the 1930s.

Not all conservative composers were inclined to write string quartets, and of those who were, not all were successful in their attempts. One noted example of a conservative composer who seems to have had difficulty in his efforts at writing a string quartet was Healey Willan. As F.R.C. Clarke has pointed out,²¹ Willan began as many as four string quartets in England between 1903 and 1905. These were all abandoned except for one movement (the Poem B.102) which Willan completed in 1930, 17 years after moving to Canada. To the Poem can now be added the Introduction and Allegro, a sonata form movement that Clarke finished in 1984 from Willan's sketches. Clarke points out that the twin models for Willan at this period in his career were "Brahms and the turn-of-the-century English school."²² One of these quartet sketches is labelled "Phantasy." Willan possibly intended to enter this work in the first Cobbett Competition of 1905, which offered a prize for "the composition of a 'Phantasy' in the form of a string quartet, the piece to be of short duration and performed without a break, but, if the composer desired, to consist of different sections varying in tempo and metre."²³ In 1907 the Cobbett Competition was for a Phantasy for piano trio, and this may explain why two of Willan's later sketches for this same string quartet movement are scored for piano trio.

It is worth noting that few of Willan's composition students in Toronto went on to write string quartets. Many avant-garde composers such as Gilles Tremblay or Norma Beecroft have not been attracted to the string quartet, but neither have conservative Willan pupils such as Godfrey Ridout and F.R.C. Clarke (though both men did write one work for string quartet as students).

A conservative composer who was an almost exact contemporary of Willan but who found the string quartet to be a more congenial medium was Leo Smith. Like Luigi von Kunits, Smith was also an experienced string quartet performer and intimately acquainted with the great works of the traditional European chamber music repertoire. Both Kunits and Smith had a vested interest in the ordered continuance of the string quartet as a genre and this may in part explain why both were reluctant as composers to depart radically from the conservative norms of the great string quartet tradition. Furthermore, Smith both knew and admired the Kunits String Quartet, as he related in an obituary of Kunits in 1931:

His [Kunits'] string quartet, which, with Mr. Blachford as leader, we played on two occasions, belongs to the earlier works, and impressed me, at the time of performance, as being well written, always remembering the principle of fitness, and in consequence always sounding as if [it] were meant for strings.²⁴

Smith was by no means ignorant of recent developments in composition; he was a literate and educated musician, and he wrote perceptively about all eras of music as contributing editor of The Conservatory Quarterly Review from 1918 to 1935. He was at times open-minded about experimental music, but only up to a point. In the final analysis, he did not really feel that either he himself or the Canadian musical community as a whole were yet ready for "modernism." In a 1929 editorial column, written just three years before he composed his String Quartet, Smith stated

For we, of Canada, have hardly felt the wave of modernism which has permeated musical circles in the older countries during the last fifteen years. Of course we have had the occasional performance: Schönburg [sic], Strawinsky [sic], Bartók, Milhaud, etc., have appeared now and then, and we have listened to them with a certain interest and curiosity. But the pros and cons of such music, the suggestion that it should usurp the older schools, that we should immerse ourselves in it, as it were, has not been seriously thought of.²⁵

Smith expressed exactly these same sentiments in music with his String Quartet in D of 1932.

Smith wrote his String Quartet for the Conservatory String Quartet (of which he was the cellist) and this ensemble gave the first performance of the work in Toronto on 19 January 1932. Hector Charlesworth wrote an extensive review of the premiere for Saturday Night, the full text of which follows:

     An event of unique importance on Jan. 19th was the first public performance of a new Quartet in D major by the distinguished Canadian composer and violoncellist, Leo Smith. The total volume of chamber compositions of Canadian origin is small and Mr. Smith's opus is not only the most impressive achievement in that field, but a notable and authentic contribution to modern chamber music considered internationally. It was composed for the Conservatory String Quartet, of which Mr. Smith is a member. His distinguished gifts have been evidenced in the past in songs and short compositions, but this Quartet in D major is his noblest achievement so far. Chamber music audiences are not much given to demonstration; but at the conclusion of this work a large audience instinctively rose and ardently applauded the composer, who is one of the most modest and diffident of individuals, for five minutes.
     Constructed with strict adherence to classical form, the work marches on from the first phrase to the last with unflagging interest and emotional appeal, and is marked by fresh and thoughtful treatment of rarely fine thematic material. The opening Allegro is elaborate, without the slightest suggestion of padding, and infused with profound emotion. It is followed by a Scherzo which is captivating in symmetry and grave rhythmical distinction. The third movement, Poco Adagio, is graciously lyrical in character; and the Finale (Commodo) is quiet, suave, and inherently vital, flowing on to an inspiring coda. Scholarly throughout, the work is never dry, but on the contrary richly temperamental in expression. The just distribution of interest among all four instruments, with beautiful passage work for each, augments its merits from the standpoint of performance.
     Needless to say, the new work was rendered "con amore" by the Conservatory players. Their attack was splendid; their tone beautiful and their expression limpid and virile. It is not flattering Mr. Leo Smith to say that his composition made the Dvoark's [sic] quartet in F major, which followed seem rather trivial in comparison, though delightfully rendered, as was also Haydn's charming, transparent Quartet in D Minor, Opus 76, No. 2, which opened the program.²⁶

The work was repeated in November 1934 as part of a Conservatory String Quartet concert in Toronto entirely devoted to works by Smith (in addition to the Quartet seven of Smith's songs were sung by Myrtle Bruce Brown accompanied by Smith on piano and his Schumannesque for piano was performed by Reginald Godden) and it was also played on the BBC in 1935 as part of a programme on music in Canada. On the occasion of Smith's retirement from the University of Toronto, the Quartet was performed on the CBC on 4 May 1951 by Elie Spivak and Blain Mathe, violins, Jack Neilson, viola and Philip Spivak, cello. This seems to have been the most recent performance of the work to date.

The National Library of Canada has a complete manuscript score and parts for the Smith String Quartet in good copy, as well as various sketches and preliminary drafts for the work.²⁷ Smith gave the following short description of his String Quartet:

The work is in four movements and hasn't any story or program. It conforms to modern example in that the last movement recalls the themes of the first two, but the idiom generally speaking avoids dissonance and any experimental technique.²⁸

As Hector Charlesworth noted in his review, Smith had composed some songs and short pieces (such as his Two Sketches) before writing his String Quartet, but the latter was one of his first large-scale works and it seems to have given him some trouble. The manuscript copy of the score gives clear indications that Smith was experiencing some difficulty in tying together a large four movement work, especially in the last movement. Towards the end of the finale there are numerous revisions, one suggested cut and several pages where corrections have been effected by taping the new version over the original score. These revisions consist of attempts at unifying the quartet by recalling themes from the first two movements in order to create a work in cyclical form. In the first half of the finale this is accomplished with some success, but towards the end of the work the earlier themes are recalled once too often and in a somewhat forced manner, with the result that the quartet loses momentum just at the point where it should build to a culmination.

Smith relied on the classical models of sonata form, scherzo and trio, and ternary form. His compositional style employs late romantic harmonies with the occasional overlay of impressionistic devices such as the whole-tone scales of the Scherzo movement (10 bars before rehearsal letter R). Thematic material is evenly distributed among all four instruments, but the writing for the strings is rather commonplace, which is surprising given Smith's proficiency as a cellist. The players are rarely required to go above third position, most of the quartet uses only détaché or legato articulation, and only very sparing use is made of special string effects. Perhaps Smith exercised such self-restraint because he felt that virtuosity would have been out of place in a string quartet. If this was the case then he was overly cautious, for the string writing is lacking in character and interest.

There are, however, many strengths in the quartet to balance the weaknesses detailed above. The overall proportions of the piece are well balanced, the movements are nicely contrasted, and the work is suffused with an appealing gentle lyricism. While conservative in its general style and textures, the quartet has unusual and interesting features in each of its four movements.

In the first movement (Andante/Allegro), the themes are skilfully manipulated within the basic premises of sonata form. The main theme undergoes many clever transformations, from its initial presentation by solo cello in the slow introduction to its appearance in the final bars of the movement. The second main theme appears at bar 78 (rehearsal letter D) in B flat major and towards the end of the development section there is a new theme in A major (bar 197, rehearsal letter L) that combines elements of the two main themes.

The second movement (Vivace: Rhythmic) combines a scherzo and trio structure with the developmental processes of sonata form. The Scherzo is in G major and G minor, while the Trio is in F major, and there is a close thematic link between the two sections, as shown by the following musical example:

Example 2-4: Leo Smith String Quartet, II

a. Rehearsal letter B

b. Rehearsal letter M

As this example shows, the Trio (Example 2-4b) is based on the G minor section of the Scherzo (Example 2-4a). The theme is presented in imitation between the viola and first violin in the Scherzo but in a homophonic texture in the Trio. There is a further reference to the Scherzo in the Trio, for the cello accompaniment at letter M recalls the lively rhythm of the opening of the Scherzo. Instead of an exact return of the Scherzo after the Trio, there is a development of the main theme of the Scherzo which ranges through various keys before it finally settles on the tonic towards the end of the movement.

The slow movement (Poco Adagio) is the shortest and least interesting of the four. It consists of a simple alternation between episodes in G major and C major. The last movement is the most unusual with respect to its harmonic planning. It opens in D minor with a pizzicato theme in the second violin, but the key unexpectedly shifts to E major for the reappearance of the main theme of the first movement at bar 55 (letter D). The main Scherzo theme passes by in G major at bar 95 (letter F), and a new theme appears in E-flat major at bar 142 (letter H). These various themes are combined and developed in a loose sonata-rondo form which, as mentioned earlier, is not entirely successful in its execution. The thematic material is too diverse and the harmonic planning seems rather wayward, although the movement does finally settle comfortably into D major in the coda for the expected tonic confirmation.

Despite the warm reception that Smith's String Quartet in D received at its premiere and the fact that it was subsequently broadcast in Canada and Britain, the work has now dropped out of the repertoire and has not been heard for nearly forty years. Although not without its weaknesses, it is a composition of quite considerable charm and accomplishment and it certainly merits repeated hearings. The reasons for its recent lack of success are not difficult to determine. The performance materials exist only in manuscript and are not easily accessible. Since the death of the composer in 1952 there has been little scholarly interest in his work, and in the absence of a recording or even an air check tape of his String Quartet, performing ensembles and the chamber music public have not been able to get to know the work. While all this is understandable, it is also regrettable for it has resulted in the disappearance of one of the earliest substantial Canadian string quartet compositions. The centenary of Smith's birth has passed with little notice; it is to be hoped that we do not have to wait until the centenary of his death for the revival of his String Quartet in D.

Just as not all conservative composers have been attracted to the string quartet medium, so too composers of conservative string quartets have not always been otherwise conservative composers. A case in point is John Weinzweig and his String Quartet No. 1 of 1937. This work was submitted as the composer's B.Mus. thesis to the University of Toronto, and so it had to satisfy the requirements set by the examining committee. As a result the compositional style of this early work by Weinzweig is not representative of the composer's work either as a whole or even at this early stage of his career. Indeed if the score were unsigned it is unlikely that it would be recognized as the work of Weinzweig. The three movements of the quartet (Allegro con brio, Poco adagio and Furiant) are in sonata, ternary and rondo form respectively, and the work is notable chiefly for its unusual handling of tonality. Each movement is in a different key (D minor, C sharp minor and A minor respectively) and each modulates to quite distantly removed keys in the course of the development of its opening thematic material.

Weinzweig's String Quartet No. 1 was first performed by the Kilbourn Quartet in Rochester in 1938, and it was also featured in an all-Canadian concert given at the New York Public Library on 11 January 1942. At that time the work evidently seemed more interesting than it now does; a review of the New York concert stated that

The Weinzweig string quartet, less hampered by clichés than most of the other works given, had thematic material of a distinctive character and refreshing spontaneity of expression, especially in the first movement.²⁹

The programme for this concert listed Weinzweig's work as "Second String Quartet (1937)" as it was preceded by an even earlier one which has since been lost or destroyed. The String Quartet of 1937 had been re-numbered as No. 1 by 1960 at the latest, when a list of Weinzweig's works was published in The Canadian Music Journal. The work was withdrawn by Weinzweig in July 1975 and the score is now only available at the Canadian Music Centre for study purposes, although a circulating set of manuscript parts is in the Edward Johnson Music Library. The slow movement of this work can be heard in a performance recorded on RCI 12 by the Parlow String Quartet in 1950.

A new generation of Canadian composers came to the fore during the 1940s and, like Weinzweig, many of these young people produced an early string quartet in a conservative style that was not representative of their later compositions. In part this was due to the nature of music education at this time; not until after World War II were modern compositional techniques taught at Canadian conservatories and universities. Scores, recordings, performances and radio broadcasts of modern music were still a comparative rarity; staple musical fare remained rooted in the past.³⁰ The tentative beginnings musical modernism had made in Toronto and Montreal in the 1920s and 1930s experienced a setback with the outbreak of World War II, and the prevailing critical opinion remained largely apprehensive, and at times even hostile, towards experimentation in music until the 1950s. Consequently the first string quartets written by Harry Somers (1943), Barbara Pentland (1944) and Clermont Pépin (1948), although by no means as conservative as Smith's String Quartet or even Weinzweig's String Quartet No. 1, nonetheless are not representative of the directions in which these young composers were soon to venture.

During the decade after the end of World War II, thoughts again turned to the future instead of the past or present, and there was a renewed interest in experimentation and modernism. Nonetheless the inertia which had been built up during the course of many decades of musical conservatism was slow to dissipate, and many composers continued to successfully explore the musical techniques and styles of the past.

One of the more intriguing works from the end of this period is Glenn Gould's String Quartet, written between April 1953 and October 1955. This work belongs in the present chapter due to its conservative style, but it also holds a unique place in this study. It is the only major work that Gould wrote, so it is not possible to speak of its place within the ongoing development of his compositional personality. Gould referred to the work as his "Opus 1" but the published edition of the score does not carry any opus number. Aside from juvenilia, the quartet was preceded by an atonal Bassoon Sonata which Gould subsequently disowned (although a copy of this work survives in the National Library of Canada) and it was followed by "So You Want to Write a Fugue?" and a few other short jeux d'esprits. With perhaps unintended irony, Gould ended his liner notes for the recording of his String Quartet as follows:

In any event, though the system must be cleansed of Opus Ones, the therapy of this spiritual catharsis will not remedy a native lack of invention. It's Op. 2 that counts!³¹

Gould never did write an Opus 2, and this fact, together with the decidedly uneven quality of his String Quartet, provide ample testimony to his own "lack of invention" as a composer.

Another interesting aspect of the Gould String Quartet is that Gould is said to have acknowledged the indebtedness of this work not just to earlier musical styles in general, but to one particular earlier work - the Bruckner String Quintet. Gould never acknowledged this debt in writing, but there is reliable second-hand testimony about it.³² This would have been an odd choice of model for a number of reasons. In the first place, Viennese romanticism was out of fashion with young composers in the 1950s, and Bruckner in particular was not popular in North America at the time. Secondly, Bruckner's reputation rests on his symphonies and choral music; his place within the history of chamber music is marginal. Besides the String Quintet, the only other full-scale chamber music work by Bruckner is a student string quartet dating from 1862 that Gould may not have known about - it was only rediscovered after World War II and was first performed in 1951. Bruckner and Gould are thus similar in that both men's chamber music legacy consists of a single major work.

Despite the testimony of reliable sources, the extent to which Gould's String Quartet was inspired by Bruckner's String Quintet must be questioned, for the two works have little in common. The Bruckner Quintet is in standard four movement sonata form. The Gould Quartet, on the other hand, is in the extended single movement sonata structure initiated by Liszt and further developed in the early works of Schoenberg.³³ Both works are in F (Bruckner's in F major, Gould's in F minor) and make extensive use of contrapuntal procedures. Gould's counterpoint, however, is frequently awkward and almost always seems suited to the keyboard, while Bruckner employs the more varied contrapuntal textures characteristic of good chamber music writing for string instruments. For these and other reasons, the influence of Bruckner's String Quintet on Gould's String Quartet must be discounted as of minimal importance. The first written report about Gould's String Quartet is perhaps the most accurate in the matter of the composer's indebtedness to earlier models:

Glenn Gould confesse deux influences dans son oeuvre: celle de Richard Strauss et celle de Schönberg jeune. Bien qu'il ne soit pas tombé sous l'influence de Bruckner, il professe la plus grande admiration pour le compositeur du célèbre Quintette.³⁴

It is easy to see how Gould's professed admiration for Bruckner's String Quintet could later have been interpreted as an admission of influence upon his own String Quartet, but this seems not to have been the case on the evidence of this early statement and of the music itself.

At the same time as he was writing his String Quartet, Gould was becoming known as something of a specialist in the music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. This did not, however, diminish his appreciation for earlier musical styles. Gould wrote that:

Unlike many students, my enthusiasms were seldom balanced by antagonisms. My great admiration for the music of Schoenberg, for instance, was not enhanced by any counterirritation for the Viennese romantics of a generation before Schoenberg . . . For some time I had had the urge to write a work in which the achievement of Schoenberg in unifying motivic concepts would be applied to an idiom in which the firm harmonic hand of key relationship would be invited, its discipline acknowledged, and the motivic manipulation controlled thereby.³⁵

In the early 1970s an important U.S. serial composer arrived at a similar point of view. George Rochberg, after a good deal of soul searching, decided that his own use of atonality and serialism did not invalidate tonality. Rochberg eloquently gave voice to his discovery in writing about his String Quartet No. 3 (1972):

I came to realize that the music of the "old masters" was a living presence, that its spiritual values had not been displaced or destroyed by the new music. The shock wave of this enlargement of vision was to alter my whole attitude toward what was musically possible today ... music can be renewed by regaining contact with the tradition and means of the past, to re-emerge as a spiritual force with reactivated powers of melodic thought, rhythmic pulse, and large-scale structure. As I see it, these things are only possible with tonality ... but in this open ambience tonal and atonal can live side by side.³⁶

Despite their similar aesthetic backgrounds, the two quartets by Gould and Rochberg are disparate in quality and style. Rochberg was a practised, mature composer; Gould was an inexperienced young composer. Rochberg in his Third Quartet successfully reconciled the conflicting demands of tonality and atonality and created an outstanding work that led to much stimulating debate and was a harbinger of the New Romanticism. Gould's work would have remained little known if it had not been for his subsequent rise to world-wide prominence as a performer. As Otto Friedrich wrote, "his quartet rather suddenly changed from the experiment of a provincial youth into the creation of an international celebrity."³⁷ One might argue with the adjective "provincial," but Gould's String Quartet did arouse interest because of the fame of the composer rather than the intrinsic merits of the composition.

In one of his essays, Gould posited the case of an imaginary musician who created a piano sonata in perfect imitation of Haydn's style. If the work were a good forgery and were thought to be a previously lost sonata by Haydn, it would be accorded much respect, Gould maintained. But if it were passed off as a work by Mendelssohn, it might be regarded as a minor trifle from that composer's youth. However, if this same work were instead attributed to Vivaldi, it would then be hailed as an astounding presentiment of the classical style. Gould called this shifting of aesthetic judgement due to factors outside of the work itself "the van Meegeren syndrome" after the infamous Dutch forger Han van Meegeren (1889-1947) whose best known painting, The Supper at Emmaus, was regarded as Vermeer's greatest work before it was exposed as a forgery by van Meegeren and subsequently vilified.³⁸

A similar scenario could be imagined for Gould's String Quartet. If Gould had managed to pass it off as a work written in 1879 by Oscar Telgmann, for instance, one might argue that it would have been hailed as the first great Canadian string quartet and historians would have been amazed that Telgmann was keeping pace with Bruckner, whose String Quintet dates from the same year. But as it was written in 1955, instead of amazement the work was greeted with polite interest in some quarters and a certain disappointment in others. Gould does not seem to have applied the "van Meegeren syndrome" to his own String Quartet; perhaps he realized that it would have been a misguided defence of the work if he had. For it is not the anachronistic use of a late romantic idiom that disappoints in the Gould Quartet, but rather the way in which that idiom is manipulated.

The weaknesses of the Gould String Quartet are abundantly evident. Graham George has written that it is the work of a good student, but a student nevertheless, and that it is "marred by momentary tangles of ineptly-handled dissonance."³⁹ Geoffrey Payzant relates that Gould admitted that he was "insufficiently acquainted at that time with the technical capabilities of stringed instruments."⁴⁰ This is indeed true. The violins rarely go above third position, quartet textures are frequently muddy and are not varied enough, pizzicato is used just once and even then to pointless effect, and so on. In the last 100 bars of the work, there is an almost continuous use of tremolo in the viola and/or cello; this might be an effective technique in the coda to a Bruckner symphony, but it simply muddies the textures and sounds ponderous and laboured in Gould's String Quartet.

Other problems arise from the excessive and at times unimaginative use of dense polyphonic textures. The fugue subject in the central development section (Example 2-5) is awkward and ungainly, with its interrupted rhythms and tortured melodic line which includes four tritones within the first four bars:

Example 2-5: Gould String Quartet, bars 196-202

Gould often combines several melodic lines that lie within a narrow range and have a similar rhythmic profile; this results in turgid, dense textures in which it is difficult to hear the separate polyphonic strands. In Example 2-6, for instance, four separate melodic ideas are presented simultaneously, but because of the similar tessitura and rhythm of the lines, this contrapuntal nicety is difficult to appreciate:

Example 2-6: Gould String Quartet, bars 420-422

There a few brief moments of inspired writing, but much of the work sounds like a convoluted counterpoint exercise, a musical experiment that did not quite come off as intended. Despite Gould's huge talent as a performer, his stimulating ideas about music and his interesting experiments in the technology and manipulation of recorded sound, in the final analysis he did not reveal an outstanding creative talent as a composer.

While Gould's String Quartet presents a unique case in this study, Gould was by no means the only Canadian composer to write a string quartet in the conservative tradition during the 1950s. Curiously enough, three composers whose overall activities were markedly different from one another each wrote a string quartet between 1953 and 1955 falling within the broad boundaries of the conservative tradition. Jean Papineau-Couture's String Quartet No. 1 (1953), Claude Champagne's String Quartet (1954) and the String Quartet No. 2 (1952-55, revised 1960) by Oskar Morawetz are the works in question. These works prove that there is not one kind of composer or style associated with the conservative movement in music. Instead there are many tributaries of musical conservatism, and composers of opposed ideological beliefs and musical practices may be unexpectedly joined together in a study such as this due to a coincidence of musical style in a single and perhaps even uncharacteristic work which they have written at some point in their career.

Jean Papineau-Couture embraced a conservative neo-classical style for nearly ten years before turning to serialism; his String Quartet No. 1 was one of his last conservative works before the cerebral serial compositions he wrote in the later 1950s and thereafter. Claude Champagne cultivated a conservative post-Romantic idiom throughout most of his career, but at the age of 63 wrote his most adventurous work to that time, a String Quartet in an extremely dissonant idiom. As adventurous as this late work was, it nevertheless remained within the limits of the conservative style by eschewing the use of special playing techniques and the more advanced mid-century developments in the organization of musical sound. Oskar Morawetz has defended the conservative tradition throughout his career, and he has remained unswervingly true to this tradition in all of his compositions. He has never experimented with contemporary techniques; instead he has continued to expand and develop his own conservative but distinct and recognizable style.

The Papineau-Couture and Champagne quartets exhibit certain similarities. Both works are in two movements, and both employ a dense harmonic idiom with traces of C major tonality surfacing from underneath dissonant chord structures. The final chord of the first movement of the two works is a C major chord with one added note in each case (an added D in the Papineau-Couture and an added B in the Champagne). Repeated notes, ostinato figures and pedal tones are also common to both quartets. With respect to formal procedures, both works make use of classical patterns, most clearly in the two second movements (a ternary form in the Papineau-Couture and a slow introduction followed by a rondo form in the Champagne). Despite these similarities, the two works are dissimilar in sound, and this is at least in part because of the different treatment of textures. Melody plus accompaniment is the predominant texture in the Papineau-Couture work, whereas more varied textures and greater use of contrapuntal procedures are featured in Champagne's quartet. The Papineau-Couture work calls to mind the neo-classical style of Prokofiev, while the Champagne quartet is similar in idiom to the early expressionistic works of Schoenberg. The two works are not exactly old-fashioned for their time and place, but neither are they very forward-looking.

The String Quartet No. 2 by Oskar Morawetz is not unlike the above-mentioned works by Papineau-Couture and Champagne in its harmonic language (tonality expanded to include a high degree of dissonance), but in other respects it is quite different in construction. It is in three contrasted movements and over twice as long as the Champagne work, which in turn is half as long again as the Papineau-Couture quartet. The Morawetz quartet is neo-romantic in style, and is marked by an unashamed melodic expressiveness and the use of the dramatic developmental procedures of classical sonata form, procedures which were largely absent in the Papineau-Couture and Champagne works. Morawetz frequently doubles the melodic line in octaves (and less often at the interval of a third) in order to intensify its expressive characteristics. The quartet textures are varied and interesting; Morawetz showed that considerable ingenuity and strength could still be drawn from traditional ways of writing for four string instruments. There is no uneasy striving for new effects for the sake of novelty. Instead, expression and form are intimately joined in an artistic statement of great power.

The expressive element of Morawetz' String Quartet No. 2 is highlighted in the middle movement, which "came to the composer's mind while watching a film depicting the desolation resulting from World War II."⁴¹ Programmatic elements in this movement include the use of a funeral march (rehearsal number 2) and of closely spaced trills which are meant to reproduce the effect of a drum roll (rehearsal number 19). Notwithstanding the dramatic nature of the quartet and the specific programmatic elements featured in the second movement, the work still stands on its own merits as an independent piece of chamber music. The loosely autobiographical quartets of Smetana or Janácek are closer in spirit to this work than is a detailed programmatic chamber music composition such as Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht.

That three composers of such different backgrounds and inclinations as Papineau-Couture, Champagne and Morawetz could write a conservative string quartet within two years of each other was symptomatic of the period of flux that Canadian music experienced during the 1950s. Few composers had yet attached themselves rigorously to the avant-garde stream of composition, and yet by the same token the old guard, which upheld the most conservative musical traditions, was on the wane. For a time, it seemed as though a basic agreement as to which path composers would pursue could be attained. Even though some might prefer to travel by an alternative route, the roads were parallel and seemed to be leading to the same destination. Important string quartets by conciliators between modernism and conservatism appeared during this decade (Joachim's String Quartet and the Second and Third String Quartets by Somers) and these works seemed to demonstrate that the rift which had opened up between the twelve-tone school and the more traditional-minded composers might be breached, if not healed.

Things changed quickly with the advent of the 1960s. Paths which had previously seemed to run parallel soon diverged, and the split between the conservative and the modernist camps grew wider. In short order the avant-garde school advanced from twelve-tone music to serialism to electronic and aleatoric experiments and beyond, while the conservative school dug deeper into the trenches. A number of composers (Deegan, Dela, Adaskin, Gagnon, Kenins, Surdin and Fleming among others) continued to compose string quartets in the traditional manner as though nothing had changed, but the most characteristic works of the 1960s were those that challenged and experimented within the medium. A new tone of defensiveness crept into the statements of some conservative composers, as though they realized that even if they believed in what they were doing, many others did not. A good example of this siege mentality was the somewhat petulant programme note that Murray Adaskin supplied for the premiere of his String Quartet in 1963:

Mr. Adaskin has written a few words about his new string quartet. He says he had no desire to experiment with the medium and used none of the special devices peculiar to string instruments, which are so often used by non-string playing composers. As a string player himself, he finds the overuse of these devices tiresome, sometimes even annoying. He did, however, attempt to write a simple and innocent work with a hope, unusual these days, that at some moment during the course of the performance, listeners might be reminded how pleasant a world this could be.⁴²

The recipients of Adaskin's barbs - those composers who used unusual quartet textures and unorthodox playing techniques, who wrote complex and unpleasant works and who did not even play string instruments - were clearly in the ascendancy, otherwise Adaskin would not have felt the need to attack them obliquely in this programme note for his own String Quartet. Just five years earlier, Adaskin would not have been compelled to mention these avant-garde usurpers of the chamber music throne, let alone launch a salvo in their direction, for they had not yet made much of an impact upon chamber music composition globally, and almost no impact at all within Canada. Things changed quickly within the space of a few years, and it was the rapidity of the change, almost as much as the change itself, which seemed to put conservative composers on their guard.

It was inevitable that an action as strong as the widespread advent of radical modernism in music would eventually produce an equal and opposite reaction. Serialism was the last of the great orthodoxies to sweep the world of Western art music, and it was symptomatic of the times that it was not replaced by an opposing compositional technique, but rather by a multitude of styles and idioms. In increasing numbers, young composers in the 1970s turned their back on row charts and magic squares in order to try out a variety of compositional methods. Tonality, which had never lost its power for the die-hard musical conservatives, was "re-discovered" by more progressive composers young and old in the early 1970s and was re-admitted into the canon of orthodox musical procedures. By the middle years of the decade, writers and critics were discussing the neo-conservative movement as an established entity, and these global events were reflected within the microcosm of the Canadian string quartet. The neo-conservative movement of the 1970s was much more historically aware than its predecessors. The increased scope of the influences that came to bear on composers is illustrated by a remarkable string quartet written in 1972 by Paul Crawford.

Paul Crawford was a 24-year-old student at St. Augustine's Seminary in Toronto when he wrote La nuit étoilée, subtitled "A Fantasy for String Quartet." (The title La nuit étoilée was added after the work was written "because of a purely subjective association by the composer with the famous painting by Van Gogh.")⁴³ Crawford had completed a B.Mus. degree at McGill University, where he studied composition with Bruce Mather and Harry Freedman. A number of features mark Crawford's quartet as an outstanding work, not the least of which is that it captured the spirit of its time by looking some 300 years into the past for inspiration.

The subtitle "Fantasy" provides a clue to the structure of and inspiration for Crawford's quartet. The fantasy or fantasia (there are many varieties of the word in use) has a long and distinguished history dating back to the Renaissance era. The Fantasias for strings by Purcell are among the most important of the forerunners of the string quartet in the era before Haydn; they are performed and occasionally recorded by string quartet ensembles. (The Purcell String Quartet performed the complete Purcell Fantasias in Vancouver in 1969, for example.) The Purcell Fantasias are short pieces which alternate between contrasting homophonic and polyphonic sections, the sections often distinguished by changes in tempo as well. The fantasy was revived as a species of chamber music composition in 1905 by Walter Willson Cobbett, who instituted a competition for the composition of a Phantasy for string quartet in that year.⁴⁴ An early example of the use of the form by a Canadian is the Phantasie Suite for string quartet of 1927 by former MacMillan student Roy Angus of Toronto. This piece was written when Angus was studying music in England at the Trinity College of Music, London, but is not at present available for study (see Appendix I).

Crawford turned to the fantasy as the inspiration for his quartet La nuit étoilée. He expanded the form in length and complexity, but like Purcell's Fantasias, La nuit étoilée is, in the composer's words, "a one-movement work in several distinct sections, with varying but complementary moods"⁴⁵ and it does alternate between points of imitation and homophonic sections, as shown in Table 2-1:

Table 2-1: Textures in Crawford's La nuit étoilée (first section)

bars 1-6       Paired points of imitation
bars 7-17     Predominantly solo with accompaniment
bars 18-24   Imitative entries in the three lower instruments
bars 25-32   Violin 1 solo, accompanied by violin 2 and viola
bars 33-42   Homophonic version of opening point of imitation
bars 43-49   Violin 1 solo, accompanied by violin 2 and viola
bars 50-56   Freely imitative writing
bars 57-62   Viola solo, accompanied by violin 1 and violin 2
bars 63-70   Return of bars 1-6 with minor alterations

The second section of the quartet continues to alternate between homophonic and imitative textures, but this particular aspect of fantasy structure is less evident in the final two sections of the work. The imitative parts of the first section are closely based on the opening point of imitation stated by the cello:

Example 2-7: Crawford La nuit étoilée, bars 1-2 (cello)

This point of imitation is in turn derived from the first three notes of the quartet, which outline a descending major third followed by an ascending minor third. This motive is developed by inversion, retrograde and transposition to form the point of imitation. In fact the melodic material in bars 1-37, which comprise the first half of the opening section of the work, is almost entirely restricted to movement by third or by sixth. On the evidence of the opening of this quartet, it seems as though Crawford needed to set quite conscious and strict limitations upon his creative processes, perhaps in order to counteract the inherent freedom of a fantasy structure.

The work is not serially organized, but the opening point of imitation consists of ten different pitches, and in the next phrase the two missing pitches of the chromatic scale are added. This saturation of pitch content is not maintained throughout the work. Indeed, one of the most striking features of the quartet is its great variety in harmonic organization, which ranges from areas of extreme chromaticism to the hauntingly beautiful use of extended tonality in the opening and closing portions of the third section of the work. Example 2-8, for instance, is the end of the third section; the use of tonal harmonies in these bars forms a nicely balanced counterpart to the opening bars of this same section.

Example 2-8: Crawford La nuit étoilée, bars 276-287

Opposing this diversity of vertical organization are several recurring gestures which bind the work together in a network of reminiscences. The eight-note chord in bar 73 returns in bars 125, 127 and 134-135, and the five-note chord in bar 199 is also heard in bars 209, 255 and 322; in the last three instances, it is part of a repeated two-chord harmonic progression. There are also several recurring rhythmic gestures, such as the one on the last beat of bar 109, which returns five times, in bars 112, 138, 141 and 153. Ostinati are used to good effect in several sections of the work, including bars 117-22, 154-62 and 219-234.

The diverse strands of the work are summarized and united in the fourth section, titled Recapitulation. After a short introduction, this section consists almost entirely of material heard earlier; some of it returns literally, some in altered form. Table 2-2 summarizes the derivation of the material in this section:

Table 2-2: Sources of Crawford's La nuit étoilée (fourth section)

bars 290-297   new material, perhaps based on bars 1-33
bars 298-300   based on point of imitation in bars 135-138
bars 301-304   based on cello line in bars 145-148
bars 305-307   bars 126-129 transposed, with one chord changed
bars 308-310   bars 139-140, altered rhythmically and transposed
bars 311-324   return of bars 244-257, with only minor changes
bars 325-329   return of bars 1-3, with last note extended
bars 331-334   return of bars 266-267 and 187, slightly altered
bars 335-341   varied return of bars 189-193, an octave higher

The Recapitulation in this work does not fulfill the same function as it would in a sonata movement. In the Crawford quartet, the recapitulation is a gathering up of previously stated material into a new and coherent form rather than a reconciliation of previously opposed ideas with one dominating the others. And yet the end result is similar - it sets a seal of completion and finality upon the work, bringing material that was heard earlier to a new sense of fruition and achievement.

La nuit étoilée is a masterful and rewarding work in its own right, and also an important step on the road to a renewal of the conservative tradition of string quartet writing in Canada. The work was written at exactly the same time as the Third Quartet by George Rochberg (discussed earlier in connection with the Gould String Quartet) - the Crawford work was completed in January 1972 and the Rochberg in February 1972. These two quartets share more than their chronology - both works combine atonal and tonal ideas within what Rochberg called "a multi-gestural music . . . [which] makes possible the combination and juxtaposition of a variety of means which denies neither the past nor the present."⁴⁶ Rochberg virtually paraphrased the Verdi epigram which heads this chapter, and the sentiment expressed almost exactly 100 years apart by Verdi and Rochberg also guided many Canadian string quartet composers in the 1970s and 1980s.

Crawford's La nuit étoilée is only tangentially related to Purcell by its use of the fantasy; Robert Turner's String Quartet No. 3 pays more direct homage to the great English composer of the Baroque era. Turner's quartet was written for the Purcell String Quartet to take on its tour to England in 1976. Alone of all the many composers who have written string quartets for the Purcell ensemble, Turner had the clever idea of basing his work on music borrowed from Purcell. Thus on 18 February 1976, the Purcell String Quartet gave the world premiere of Robert Turner's String Quartet No. 3, which is based on the song "Fairest Isle" from King Arthur by Purcell, in the Purcell Room in London.

In basing his quartet on a Purcell song, Turner has invited comparison with Benjamin Britten. Britten was closely associated with the music of Purcell not only as an editor and performer but also as a chamber music composer. Britten's String Quartet No. 2 in C, Op. 36 was written in 1945 as an act of homage to mark the 250th anniversary of Purcell's death. Britten did not borrow any of Purcell's music for his commemorative quartet, but he did end this composition with a movement titled Chacony. The chaconne, and more particularly the chacony, which is the old English form of the word, is a form that is closely associated with Purcell, most notably through the famous Chacony in G Minor. The Purcell Chacony appears in the same collection of autograph scores dating from 1680 that includes the Fantasias for strings. Britten made an edition of the Purcell Chacony in 1965, and it is in this edition that the work is most often performed. Thus Turner, by using a chaconne for the first movement of his String Quartet No. 3, seems to invite us to hear echoes of Purcell as filtered through the lens of Britten, and it is no surprise that much of the first movement of Turner's work is so reminiscent of these two British composers.

Turner's String Quartet No. 3 consists of two movements, Chaconne and Theme and Variations. The Chaconne is based on a six bar distorted version of the start of the song "Fairest Isle, all Isles Excelling" which is sung by Venus in the last act of Purcell's "dramatick opera" King Arthur. The song in its original form (but without voice) is the theme used as the basis of the variations that form the second movement. For the Chaconne movement the lively dance metre of the song is slowed down into a stately triple metre and the tune, harmony and rhythm of the song are all distorted, but the outline of the six bar refrain is recognizably that of Purcell's song. Turner has skilfully constructed his Chaconne so that groups of variations on the six bar theme form larger units, and these larger units in turn build in momentum and excitement and gradually get faster, culminating in a fugue, as shown in Table 2-3:

Table 2-3: Turner String Quartet No. 3, outline of first movement

Variation	Characteristic features
Theme	Largo espressivo (half note = 54)
1 - 2	Smoothly flowing melodic lines (half note = 54)
3 - 5	Static harmonies, brief melody passed from viola to violin 1 to violin 2 (half note = 58)
6 - 7	Repeated notes and syncopations (half note = 63)
8 - 10	Vigorous dotted rhythms and an increasingly active accompaniment (half note = 69)
11 - 12	Toccata with measured tremolo and swelling dynamics (half note = 76)
13	Crescendo and accelerando leading to Variation 14
14 - 18	Use of chromatic scale and twelve-tone row
19	Fuga with subject entries separated by a tritone and a second exposition with the subject inverted and in a different rhythm

There is only a rudimentary use of twelve tone techniques in this work. The row, which first appears in Variation 15, is used only in the prime form at the original pitch level. A final twelve-bar-long version of the theme, presented in a combination of trills and tremolo, brings the movement to a close and a three-bar-long transition section leads directly into the theme and variations.

One interesting feature of the fugal section is a footnote in which Turner indicates that when two or more eighth notes appear together, they may be performed using notes inégales, a convention of Baroque notation which allows the player to alter the rhythm of written notes. This is an interesting and isolated instance of a composer giving such care to the treatment of the borrowed material that performance practice conventions are even respected. The use of notes inégales continues when "Fairest Isle" is presented as the theme at the beginning of the second movement. Turner also asks that the theme be played "Tasto," "flautando," "quasi lontano" and "veiled" and the instruments are muted. These indications have the combined effect of making a modern string quartet sound somewhat like a group of Baroque string instruments. The Purcell String Quartet in its recording of the work (RCI 476) realizes these instructions faithfully and the result is altogether extraordinary, as though the players had suddenly switched to a set of Baroque instruments. The effect is comparable to the "Pavana Lachrymae" section of George Crumb's Black Angels (1970), wherein three performers of electric string instruments are instructed to bow behind the left hand while holding their instruments like viols in order to sound "like a consort of viols" as they play the opening of the slow movement of Schubert's String Quartet in D Minor ("Death and the Maiden").

The theme and variations movement is constructed as a foil to the chaconne movement in that the six variations gradually become slower so that the work ends in almost the same tempo in which it began. The danger in constructing a work in this way is that the dissipation of energy and momentum in the second half of the work may run the piece into the ground prematurely. Turner is only partially successful in avoiding this. As the second movement progresses there is a gradual increase in the complexity of the figurations decorating the theme, but this does not entirely compensate for the energy lost through the slowing down of the tempo. As a result the piece climaxes with the presentation of the theme at the beginning of the second movement and the rest of the work creates the effect of being something of an afterthought. An entertaining, eloquent and charming afterthought, but an afterthought nonetheless.

The 1980s saw a return to traditional values in many walks of life, and conservative principles governed major political, economic and cultural initiatives in Canada for much of the decade. The string quartet in Canada benefited from this trend somewhat less than it might have as a result of the decline in chamber music performance noted at the end of Chapter One. Nevertheless the return of familiar musical styles and conventional playing techniques that was characteristic of much new music during this decade did not go unnoticed among string quartet composers in Canada. Several composers wrote conservative string quartets that are among the most important contributions of their kind to the Canadian chamber music repertoire. The String Quartet No. 3 by Violet Archer (1981), the String Quartet No. 1 by Srul Irving Glick (1984) and Three Archetypes for string quartet by John Hawkins (1984, revised 1986) demonstrate that the return to earlier musical styles did not exclude the possibility of saying something new and relevant to the present using earlier styles.

Violet Archer's String Quartet No. 3 was written for the University of Alberta String Quartet to perform at a concert on 30 April 1982 in honour of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the University of Alberta. Archer's previous works for string quartet date from the 1940s, and her String Quartet No. 3 goes back to that era for its source of inspiration. The influence of Bartók is powerfully evident on virtually every page of Archer's work, and this is not surprising given both her own training and the repertoire of the University of Alberta String Quartet. Archer studied with Bartók in New York during the summer of 1942, and as her final assignment for Bartók she wrote a theme and variations for string quartet.⁴⁷ Archer subsequently studied with Paul Hindemith at Yale University, and as a composer she has passed through a number of different style periods.⁴⁸ But when she wrote her String Quartet No. 3 in 1981, the period of study with Bartók was clearly uppermost in her mind. This may have been partly a result of the fact that the University of Alberta String Quartet was also closely associated with the works of Bartók. The ensemble had all six Bartók quartets in its repertoire, and in June 1976 performed and lectured on the cycle in collaboration with Zoltán Székely at the University of Missouri.

One result of the rapid changes in musical style during most of the twentieth century is that new ideas and idioms soon become outmoded and old-fashioned. If Archer's String Quartet No. 3 had been written forty years earlier, it would have been considered very advanced in idiom, dating from just two years after Bartók's String Quartet No. 6. But by 1981 the Bartók idiom was no longer current and it was certainly not avant-garde. It was an idiom of the past, and as such it had become the preserve of conservative rather than innovative composers. This is another variation on the van Meegeren syndrome, first discussed in connection with the Gould String Quartet, but there are some important differences between the Gould and Archer cases. In the first place, Gould was an inexperienced young amateur composer when he composed his String Quartet, whereas Archer was an established professional at the height of her career by the time of her Third String Quartet. Consequently, while Gould used a late Romantic idiom in his work with only limited success due to his lack of experience, Archer incorporated the Bartók style into her work naturally and the end result was a quartet which, while owing an undeniable debt to the example of Bartók, stands on its own as a successful, independent work of art. As a London critic wrote in a review of the first performance of Archer's String Quartet No. 3, "The influence of Bartók is assimilated into a powerful individuality and Miss Archer's qualifying 'intenso' and 'espressivo e con rubato' at once suggest the range and seriousness of her intention."⁴⁹ In other words, maintaining that Archer's quartet should be placed within the conservative tradition because of its strong reliance on the example of an earlier musical style is in no way meant to diminish the quality or importance of the work. These factors are held to be independent of musical style, and consequently the van Meegeren syndrome as Gould envisioned it does not apply here.

Archer has been quoted as stating that she regards variation technique as a central attribute of twentieth-century music,⁵⁰ and this observation is borne out in practice in her Third String Quartet. The composer has written:

The work is in three movements. Like the Sonata No. 2 for piano, it is entirely built on the technique of perpetual free variation, the latter procedure being used as a means of unifying the entire piece. The thematic material for the whole composition is quoted in the first seven bars of the first movement. The three movements are contrasted as to mood and subject matter though all is derived from the opening theme of the first movement, which is vigorous with much contrast of texture and dynamics. The second movement is expressive and somewhat introspective while the third movement is intense and forceful with a relentless rhythmic drive. The composer has in mind a definite structure in each movement. The first two make use of a three-part form in a broad sense. The third movement links its various sections imperceptibly by means of certain intervals thus creating a feeling of organic structure, unity and continuity.⁵¹

The main theme is presented in the first seven bars in octaves:

Example 2-9: Archer String Quartet No. 3, I bars 1-7

The emphasis on the intervals of the fourth, fifth, tritone and semi-tone in this theme is characteristic of the rest of the quartet, as is the use of syncopated and short-long rhythms. These are all aspects of the musical style of the work that are shared with the quartets of Bartók. Other Bartókian features which appear in Archer's quartet are the use of the "snap" or "Bartók" pizzicato (III bars 137-143), the use of irregular metres (numerous times in all three movements) and the rapid interjection of dissonant chords within passages where all four instruments are playing in unison (III bars 197-210, modelled on Bartók's String Quartet No. 5, I bars 126-132 and similar passages). Some parts of Archer's String Quartet No. 3 are not only based on the methods of Bartók but even recall specific passages in Bartók's quartets - the last seven bars of the work, for instance, bring to mind the opening of the last movement of Bartók's String Quartet No. 4. But Archer's quartet is not simply an uninspired Bartókian pastiche, nor would it ever be mistaken for a work of Bartók. It is the work of a mature and experienced composer rather than an impressionable young student, and the lessons of Bartók have been absorbed and transmuted into an original, independent musical creation. Archer's quartet may be conservative for its time, but it is a fine work nevertheless.

Three years after Archer successfully borrowed from Bartók to create her String Quartet No. 3, Srul Irving Glick turned further back into the past to find the inspiration for his String Quartet No. 1. Glick completed this work on 5 February 1984 and it was premiered by the Orford String Quartet on 25 June 1984 as part of a Toronto International Festival concert that featured five new works all commissioned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Music Centre. Glick's work was inspired by two distinct bodies of music - the traditional European string quartet repertoire on the one hand, and Jewish music on the other. Included in the latter category are Hassidic and Israeli songs and dances which the composer learned as a youth in the habonim, or Labour-Zionist Youth Movement, and also Jewish liturgical music, both traditional and newly composed by Glick himself. These two streams of music are prominent in many of Glick's works, and the composer has referred to them as his "symphonic" and "folk" styles respectively.⁵²

Glick's earliest contact with the traditions of Western art music (the "symphonic" style) was through his brother Norman, a professional clarinettist. Glick pursued his interest in this type of music at the University of Toronto and also through studies in Paris with Darius Milhaud, Louis Saguer and Max Deutsch. The Jewish musical idiom (the "folk" style) was absorbed by hearing his father's cantorial music and also through his participation in the habonim. Much of Glick's music is devoted to the working out of the melodic and harmonic ideas of Jewish music within the genres and in the classical structures of Western art music. The interpenetration of these two musical influences is demonstrated in his String Quartet No. 1.

The first movement of Glick's String Quartet No. 1 is a large-scale structure with an interpolated section (bars 106-142) in a slower tempo that is thematically and structurally unrelated to the rest of the quartet. In a programme note for the premiere of the quartet, Glick explained that this section is "a kind of funeral march, originally composed for the Martyrology of the Yom Kippur service."⁵³ The main thematic material in this section bears a distinct resemblance to a well-known Tchaikovsky melody, but this is not a matter of concern for Glick. "If something in my work sounds like somebody else's I never concern myself with it, provided it grows honestly out of the material," Glick has stated.⁵⁴ Nor does Glick feel that this section's unrelatedness to the rest of the quartet lessens its impact or detracts from its intended effect. The important consideration for Glick is that this section grows naturally out of the mood of the music that comes immediately before it, and for him this appears to have been the overriding reason for including it in this context. Glick has stated "I have a gut response to what works and how long it works for, and when it needs to change."⁵⁵

The "funeral march" section of the first movement of Glick's String Quartet No. 1 was first used as an accompaniment for a setting of the words "These things I remember, how my soul was poured forth" from the Martyrology of the Yom Kippur service. This is the portion of the service in which the tragedy of Jewish martyrdom is remembered. This music was also later used in the movement "These Things Do I Remember" from Glick's string quartet suite ... From Out of the Depths, a work premiered on 4 May 1986 as part of a commemorative service sponsored by the Holocaust Remembrance Committee of the Toronto Jewish Congress. The close connection between Glick's "folk" and "symphonic" styles can be seen by tracing the use of this funeral march. It originated as newly composed Jewish liturgical music, then became part of the first movement of the String Quartet No. 1, and was subsequently used as part of a service commemorating the holocaust.

Religion, life, music and history are inseparable aspects of the human condition for Glick, and as a result he felt no sense of inappropriateness in using this music for both religious and secular purposes. In the programme note for the premiere of his String Quartet No. 1, the composer wrote that the first movement "expresses an emotional world of struggle and pathos, related to a recent period of personal difficulties"⁵⁶ and in a subsequent interview with the author he related that the work was written at a time when he was undergoing a trial separation from his wife.⁵⁷ The inclusion of the music from the Martyrology of the Yom Kippur service in the String Quartet No. 1 may thus have had a cathartic effect for the composer, enabling him to cope with his personal troubles by placing them within the wider context of the much more serious misfortunes of Jewish martyrs. That such a process should have been attempted in a string quartet was not only appropriate, it also enjoyed ample historical precedent. As one of the most intimate of genres, the string quartet is often the focus of deeply personal statements that would be out of place in other media. One need think only of the "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit" movement from Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132, and try to imagine such a movement in one of the Beethoven symphonies, to see that this is so.

If Glick's String Quartet No. 1 had served as a personal catharsis for the composer and nothing else, it would not have any relevance or importance to the wider musical community. But many others have enjoyed the work, both in live performance and in the 1984 recording by the Orford String Quartet.⁵⁸ Indeed critic Martin Elste writing in Fanfare chose the recording as one of the best discs of the year for 1985.⁵⁹ Elste wrote admiringly of the combination of romanticism and the avant-garde in Glick's String Quartet No. 1, but his use of the phrase "avant-garde" is totally inappropriate and can only be explained by the fact that he is a specialist in pre-classic music. Other critics have attacked the work for its traditional outlook. Peter Mose wrote that Glick's quartet is "one of those almost maddeningly conservative works that could have been written any time during the last 100 years" and added that this was "not bad, just strangely anachronistic in the 1980s."⁶⁰ Barry Edwards also thought the quartet old-fashioned, but then came to its defence:

Viewed with the jaundiced eye of the late 20th century, this work is patently anachronistic. At the same time, it is not distinctively Canadian, nor is it progressive or innovative. And yet, is it not the prerogative of every composer to choose his own personal style or idiom, and to express himself as he thinks best, in serial terms, or, perhaps, even tonally? What matters is whether the music created is honest, well-written, satisfying, or rewarding. Glick's String Quartet is all of these.⁶¹

Indeed, Glick's String Quartet No. 1, by turning its back on the present to look inwards in spirit and backwards in time, may have paradoxically captured the essence of its time and place.

Three Archetypes for string quartet by John Hawkins was written as the test piece for the 1986 Banff International String Quartet Competition. The work was completed in 1984 (the same year as Glick's String Quartet No. 1) and a few minor alterations were made in April 1986 after Hawkins had heard it played by the ten competing string quartet ensembles. In this work Hawkins successfully met the demands of writing a test piece for string quartet that was also a rewarding and significant composition in its own right. Audience and critical reaction to the work at the 1986 Banff Competition was overwhelmingly positive, and nine out of the ten competing ensembles decided to keep the work in their repertoire.⁶² The Parisii String Quartet was awarded the prize for the best performance of the Hawkins work and this ensemble also recorded the work for Radio Canada International.⁶³

Hawkins, in an interview broadcast on the CBC, stated that he attempted in Three Archetypes to find a deeper, closer musical correlative to the archetype:

I became fascinated by the idea that there could exist archetypes in a musical sense, in other words primordial musical images which recur in various guises in different periods in history and also in folk music and popular music, which tie seemingly disparate cultures and groups of people together and also historically tie people together. The titles of the movements [Dance, Invocation and Hymn] are three of possibly many archetypes.⁶⁴

This use of the word "archetype" refers to the writings of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), and in particular to the essays gathered together in Volume 9, Part 1 of his collected works, titled "The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious."⁶⁵ R.W. Coan has provided a cogent summary of the meaning of the word "archetypes" as used by Jung:

Carl Jung introduced this term into psychological theory, and he is primarily responsible for the development of the concept to which it refers. He recognized two basic layers in the unconscious: the personal unconscious, whose contents are derived from present lifetime experience, and the collective unconscious, whose contents are inherited and essentially universal within the species. The collective unconscious consists of archetypes. Jung described these as primordial images that have existed from the remotest times but lack clear content. Their specific content as realized images is supplied by the material of conscious experience. Thus the archetype as such is an empty form that must be inferred, or derived by abstraction, from a class of experienced images or symbols.⁶⁶

Jung states that his theory of archetypes can be traced as far back as Plato's "ideas" or "forms," and that similar concepts have been used in the study of myth, comparative religion and other fields. Jung refined and elaborated upon his definition of archetypes by studying mentally disturbed patients (many of whom described universal religious and mythological symbols) and also by analysing his own dreams. Jung's concept of the personal unconscious, which is the part of our psyche that is derived from individual experience and is acted upon by complexes, is similar to Freud's theories about the unconscious mind. Jung departed from Freud in his thesis of the collective unconscious, which is made up of archetypes. Jung stated that archetypes are closely analogous to instincts in that both are innate, unlearned and universally present in the human species.

Coan notes that Jung in his essays concentrated on the archetypes of "the shadow, the anima and animus, the wise old man, the magna mater (or great earth mother), the child, and the self" but Coan adds that "it may be assumed that the total number of archetypes is indefinitely large and that an exhaustive inventory of them is not feasible."⁶⁷ Implicit in this observation is the fact that other writers are free to name further archetypes and to extend the idea of the archetype into other areas, as Hawkins has done. To examine how Hawkins has transformed the concept of archetypes into musical terms, the individual movements of Three Archetypes must now be examined.

The first movement of the Hawkins work, titled "Dance," is not based on any particular dance rhythm, but rather tries to evoke the characteristics of Latin dance music in general, as the composer explained in the CBC interview:

The Dance that I had in mind here uses a kind of Latin rhythm. Latin music, which we think of as South American, is really interesting because it includes elements of native American Indian music and African music and European music, harmonically speaking, so Latin music is actually a compendium of three or four different areas of the world come together into something quite recognizable. Everybody knows what Latin music sounds like and the kinds of rhythms that it uses, so it was very attractive to me to use that kind of material because I thought that it exemplified this kind of dance archetype in a way that would be related to popular music and so would, in Jung's sense, be part of the collective unconscious.⁶⁸

Of the three movements in the Hawkins quartet, "Dance" is the most successful in translating the idea of a Jungian archetype into music. The very title ("Dance") tends to evoke unconscious associations in the same way that the various archetypes with which Jung himself was preoccupied do. The idea of dance and of music to accompany dance must exist in the collective human unconscious, for it is manifested in so many different specific kinds of dance and dance music which can be observed in cultures around the world. Hawkins chose not to model his movement on any particular dance rhythm or musical dance style. As he pointed out in the CBC interview, the movement is loosely based on a generalized idea of Latin dance music, which is itself an amalgam of influences from several different racial and cultural groups. In addition, Latin dance music appears in a wide range of musical styles, from popular music to the art music tradition. Judging by its widespread origins and the diverse uses to which it has been put, Latin dance music must register deeply in the collective human musical unconscious, if such a thing may be said to exist. Hawkins has incorporated various rhythmic elements, including syncopation, off-beat accompaniment patterns, and the idea of what jazz musicians call "swing," to create a pseudo-Latin dance. A particular conscious and concrete manifestation of dance music has thus been generalized back into something like what may be lurking in the collective unconscious under the rubric "dance."

This movement formed an excellent test of the ensemble playing abilities of the competing quartets at the Banff String Quartet Competition. It is in an irregular metre (11/16) with syncopations against that metre. There are also ostinati which must performed without the slightest fluctuation of timing so that the tune may be accurately meshed with the accompaniment. The two constituent elements of the movement's ternary structure are well contrasted - the first section is popular in nature and consists of a simple tune that is repeated with minor variations and builds to a climax at the return of the opening section in bar 80. The outer sections are offset by a more complex but short fugato in the middle section (bars 54-79) whose subject is derived from the opening popular melody. In short, "Dance" achieves artistic merit by combining the idea of musical archetype with the function of a competition piece.

The second movement, "Invocation," is somewhat less easy to relate to Jungian archetypes. Hawkins explained the theoretical background to this movement as follows:

An Invocation is literally a "calling up," in this sense meaning a summoning up of spirits of some kind. This is also a musical archetype - what I think of as a kind of perpetuum mobile movement - a Mendelssohn scherzo, for example the "Scherzo" from A Midsummer Night's Dream, or one of the very quick Beethoven scherzi. These relate to what I think Jung would call the trickster figure, in other words something which is slippery and slithery. It is as if everything is slipping and sliding out from underneath the listener; there's nothing to hang on to.⁶⁹

The difficulty with this movement is that two archetypes are presented and these must be related to one another. The Jungian archetype is that of the trickster, which Hawkins joins with the musical archetype of the perpetuum mobile cum scherzo.

Jung was quite explicit about his interpretation of the trickster archetype, which is the subject of his essay "On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure."⁷⁰ He traces the appearance of this archetype in such diverse manifestations as the devil of the Old Testament, the trickster in American Indian mythology, and Pulcinella and other similar clowns in European carnivals. The trickster figure serves as a reminder for Western civilized man of a former primitive level of existence - a brutal, savage time when mankind existed primarily in a state of darkness. The trickster is to our collective unconscious what the shadow is to the personal unconscious - the unrecognized, unknown and often negative or even evil side of the personality. The idea of an invocation, or summoning up of spirits, is closely related to the trickster. Jung writes that the figure of the trickster

... is a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man, and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.⁷¹

Strangely enough, then, the trickster represents the shadowy, dark and often evil side of the unconscious mind, but it can also lead man upwards onto a higher spiritual level. The trickster is a slippery figure indeed - it is not to be embraced, but neither is it to be rejected.

There was ample historical precedent for Hawkins to link the idea of the trickster figure with the perpetuum mobile in scherzo form as he has done in "Invocation." Hawkins himself has drawn attention to the Scherzo from Mendelssohn's incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream as a precedent for this movement; he might also have mentioned the perpetuum mobile which forms the opening section of the Overture. Both of these sections of the Mendelssohn suite are closely linked with Puck, who is nothing if not a Shakespearean trickster figure, divine but mischievous; indeed Puck's last speech in the play begins "If we shadows have offended," (V.i.423). There was also a precedent for the trickster/scherzo correlation in the Canadian string quartet repertoire. The third movement of Barbara Pentland's String Quartet No. 3 (1969) is a scherzo that is headed "Allegretto pagliaccesco" and according to the composer this movement represents "the 'problems' of the sad clown."⁷² The clown is of course one of the figures that Jung identified as a manifestation of the trickster archetype.

"Invocation" posed a formidable technical challenge to the competing quartet ensembles at the Banff Competition. Rapid figurations pass by from the lowest to the highest tessituras, and this quick passage work must be played in a variety of dynamics with different articulations, all the time maintaining good ensemble coordination. More than one competing ensemble no doubt slipped up in this devilishly difficult movement. In addition to fitting in with the overall scheme of archetypes and fulfilling the requirements of a good test piece, "Invocation" also forms an excellent contrast with the preceding and especially with the following movement.

The first two movements of Hawkins' Three Archetypes reached upwards from the earth-bound "Dance" to the half-human, half-God trickster. The final movement, "Hymn," completes the cycle in that it is the musical archetype which corresponds most closely with what Jung would call the God archetype. John Beckwith has noted that "Hymn-tunes are the musical vehicle for religious expressions of ordinary people."⁷³ By titling this movement "Hymn," Hawkins has thus linked it to this ancient and widespread tradition of religious music. In common with many great hymns, this movement is simple, tuneful, memorable and very beautiful. It is not a hymn, for it lacks one of the essential ingredients of a hymn, namely a text. The movement is a theme with twelve variations, and it ends with a brief reminiscence of the first movement.

Whereas "Dance" and "Invocation" presented considerable rhythmical and technical problems respectively, "Hymn" tested the musicality and the ability for sustained playing of the ensembles in the Banff competition. After the busy writing and technical difficulties of the second movement, the passacaglia theme, which consists of five chords played adagio, pianissimo, and senza vibrato, is a moment of ethereal simplicity and beauty. Like the opening of Lohengrin, these four bars are a truly arresting gesture that capture the idea of the divine, the incorporeal, indeed the archetype of the Sacred and the Holy, in music of transcendent beauty. This simple but extraordinary theme (or more exactly this four-bar-long harmonic progression, consisting of I - III - lowered VII^c - IV - V) is developed in a series of masterful variations which build to a climax in bar 40. Three more variations gently bring the pitched level of excitement down to earth, and a brief recollection of "Dance" rounds out the work with a nice cyclical touch. "Hymn," together with the variations movement of Rochberg's String Quartet No. 3 (1972) (which, like Hawkins' "Hymn," is clearly and unambiguously in A major) rank as two of the outstanding works in the conservative tradition of late-twentieth century chamber music.

In addition to the musical influences noted above, Hawkins acknowledged one other important model for Three Archetypes. In an interview on CBC he stated:

I didn't want to write a string quartet, so to speak; I chose to write three pieces for string quartet. I sort of modelled it on the work by Stravinsky titled Three Pieces for String Quartet. I wanted to write something where there was a maximum amount of contrast between the three different sections and something which would exploit the different kinds of playing techniques and styles which a quartet would be expected to be able to produce in a competition like this.⁷⁴

The beginning of the above quotation by Hawkins closely parallels the comment about Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914) in Paul Griffiths' book The String Quartet:

Stravinsky's work, for the first time in the history of the genre, is determinedly not a 'string quartet' but a series of pieces to be played by four strings.⁷⁵

The influence of the Stravinsky work on Three Archetypes exists on several levels. Stravinsky's Three Pieces do not have separate movement titles in the original string quartet form, but when the composer later arranged the set for orchestra the three movements were titled "Danse," "Excentrique," and "Cantique." Two of the movement titles in the Hawkins work are thus borrowed from the orchestral version of Stravinsky's Three Pieces. In addition, the middle movement of the Stravinsky work is said to have been influenced by a performance the composer saw in London by the clown Little Tich,⁷⁶ and so the trickster figure is a common element to both of the middle movements. There is also a traceable musical influence from Stravinsky's outer two movements on the corresponding Hawkins movements. The first movements of both the Stravinsky and the Hawkins works make use of ostinati, and the respective slow movements which end each work (with a metronome marking of quarter note equals 40 in each case) begin homophonically. Certain details of string scoring, such as the use of high artificial harmonics, are also common to the two works.

But perhaps most importantly the very idea of writing a short work for string quartet that consists of three detached pieces (instead of an isolated string quartet movement such as Schubert's Quartettsatz) originated with Stravinsky and it is therein that the true indebtedness of Hawkins to Stravinsky lies. It is symptomatic of the late twentieth century that a work such as Stravinsky's Three Pieces, which was regarded as path-breaking and avant-garde in its day, should become a source of inspiration for a conservative Canadian work for string quartet. Modernism has become a part of music history and as such its historical works, as much as those of the Baroque or Classical era, are now the stock-in-trade of composers in the conservative tradition.

Composers as different as Weinzweig and Morawetz have contributed to the conservative tradition of string quartet writing in Canada, and influences as widespread as Purcell and Stravinsky have been observed within this same body of works. Indeed a great diversity of stylistic features and other musical characteristics has been one hallmark of the conservative school of string quartet writing in Canada, but the factors which this body of works share are more numerous and noteworthy than the ways in which the works differ from one another. In each of the works studied in this chapter, and in the many other Canadian string quartets in the conservative tradition not included herein, one or more of the following features is present:

1)   the strongly felt influence of music history, from Purcell and Haydn to Bartók and Stravinsky;

2)   the use of conventional musical forms including, but not limited to, sonata form, theme and variations, rondo form, and ternary form;

3)   the use of traditional playing techniques and the concomitant shunning of unusual string effects;

4)   the avoidance of unusual performance situations, theatrical effects, avant-garde compositional techniques and other musical devices not previously found within the mainstream European quartet repertoire.

Perhaps the most salient observation to be made about all of the Canadian string quartets within the conservative tradition is that any of them could comfortably be programmed within a concert of works otherwise devoted to the mainstream European repertoire without unduly disrupting the performers' nerves, the audience's expectations or the critic's sensibilities. Indeed most, if not all, of these works were written with just such a performance situation in mind and quite likely with the hope and expectation that the new composition would gradually find its place within the canon of respected and often-performed string quartets.

That such has more often than not failed to be the case is due not so much to the inherent worth of these works; rather it is due to the timidity of performing ensembles and chamber music audiences. Therein lies the irony for a Canadian composer writing a string quartet within the conservative tradition: no matter how closely he or she approaches or imitates the great traditions of the mainstream European string quartet repertoire, it cannot be close enough for the majority of chamber music ensembles or audiences. Both the composer and the audience are the loser in this regard; the former does not get the opportunity to hear repeated and varied interpretations of his work, while the latter misses out on the chance to broaden its experience of what a string quartet is or can be. However closely a Canadian composer imitates the traditional European quartet repertoire, in the last analysis the music he or she creates is not part of that repertoire, except by extension. This music is part of the Canadian string quartet repertoire, though, and it says something unique and important about this country and its music. These works may well be conservative, but foreign or alien they most certainly are not. These composers have adapted a European model to Canadian circumstances, and in this way they are indeed a microcosm of the human condition in this country.