"Although it seems beyond belief, there does not exist a single piece of music, not composed within the last forty years, that is regarded by the learned as worth hearing." Johannes Tinctoris [Liber de arte contrapuncti, 1477]
The spirit of innovation and modernism in music has a long and distinguished history. A century before Tinctoris wrote the above quotation, French secular music was already experimenting with extreme notational complexity and difficult rhythms that must have had much the same impact on the musical public of that time, such as it was, as the string quartets of Elliot Carter or Brian Ferneyhough have had on audiences in the late twentieth century. And it is equally true that for as long as there has been an avant-garde in music, there has been a vociferous and at times vehement critical opinion in staunch opposition to it. Monteverdi was judged as harshly in his day by Artusi as Wagner was by Hanslick, or as Boulez has been by Ligeti.
But within the framework of the history of innovation in music a special place must be reserved for the present century. In this connection, it is useful to repeat here Modris Eksteins' distinction between the avant-garde and modernism:
The term avant-garde has usually been applied simply to artists and writers who promoted experimental techniques in their work and urged rebellion against established academies. The notion of modernism has been used to subsume both this avant-garde and the intellectual impulses behind the quest for liberation and the act of rebellion.1
To develop Eksteins' use of these terms further, we may note that it is evident that there may well have been avant-garde music before the present century, but modern music, with its inherent need to shock and affront a bourgeois audience, is a creation of the twentieth century. Eksteins locates the inception of this new cult of modernity at the 29 May 1913 premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps in Paris:
To have been in the audience that evening was to have participated not simply at another exhibition but in the very creation of modern art, in that the response of the audience was and is as important to the meaning of this art as the intentions of those who introduced it. Art has transcended reason, didacticism, and a moral purpose: art has become provocation and event.2
Eksteins pursues the rise of modernism and its relation to other areas of human activity in ways that are not immediately relevant to the present thesis. But his idea about the importance of Le Sacre du printemps in the rise of modernism in the twentieth century is worth noting, and this point, together with his theory of the importance of the role played by the audience in modern music, will figure into this investigation of modernism as it relates to the Canadian string quartet repertoire.
The growth of modernism in the twentieth century invites us to ask what the underlying reasons are for this fascination with the radical and new in art. Leonard Meyer has pointed out one possible answer to this question:
The almost frantic search for the new, so typical of the arts in the twentieth century, is not, as far as I can see, the consequence of some innate need for change and novelty; rather it results from our culture's belief in the productive and beneficent value of innovation.3
This respect for innovation is pervasive in contemporary society and is witnessed daily by phenomena as mundane as the excessive use of the word "new" as an advertising slogan or as inspiring as the latest important technological advance. The scientific achievements that have put man on the moon and sent an unmanned spacecraft to the outer edges of the solar system have captured the public imagination, but they are only two of many examples of technological progress in the twentieth century. From colour photography to personal computers, from the automobile to fax machines and car phones, the twentieth century has been an era of unprecedented innovation and invention. Given this Zeitgeist it is little wonder that many composers have turned their back on music history in order to establish themselves in the artistic vanguard of their time.
With sufficient hindsight, however, even the most radical of compositions can be fit into the steadily evolving patterns of musical discourse, for it is a rare piece of music which does not relate somehow to what has preceded it. This is especially true in the genre of the string quartet, which has seen comparatively few total breaks with the past during its entire history. The Schoenberg string quartets, for instance, which were regarded as innovatory works in their day, have since been neatly assimilated into the history of the genre.4 A string quartet composition, by its very nature, does not and cannot break completely with the history of the medium. The challenge in writing a string quartet that adheres to the tenets of modernism involves a carefully balanced trade-off between maintaining a tenuous link with the past and incorporating new and revolutionary ideas within this traditional medium. If a composer starts out to write a string quartet in a modern idiom but then either cannot or does not wish to judge this balancing act correctly, he will either stray from the true and narrow path of modernism (such cases will be covered in the next chapter on "The Spirit of Compromise") or else he will abandon the string quartet medium for one of its various closely related mutant species (one or two such cases will be examined at the end of this chapter, even though strictly speaking they fall outside of the confines of this thesis.)
The string quartet is an intimate, private medium and as such it has at times in the course of its history been a focus for musical research and experimentation. A composer can air his private thoughts or radical ideas in this medium without having to make concessions to the taste of the general music public. In this respect, the string quartet accords well with an aesthetic of modernism that stands in opposition to Eksteins' theory of the importance of the audience to modern art. Milton Babbitt voiced this alternative viewpoint in the article "Who Cares if You Listen?":
I am aware that 'tradition' has it that the lay listener, by virtue of some undefined, transcendental faculty, always is able to arrive at a musical judgement absolute in its wisdom if not always permanent in its validity. I regret my inability to accord this declaration of faith the respect due its advanced age.5
Many composers write string quartets primarily to tackle the challenge of the medium and they address their composition, if they address it to anyone at all, in the first place to the performers and, only as a distant second, to the "lay listener." For this reason the string quartet, divorced as it is from the necessity for the kinds of artistic considerations involved in the larger, more public genres such as opera or the symphony, is an ideal medium for experiments in innovation and modernism.
Given Eksteins' espousal of the 1913 Paris premiere of Le Sacre du printemps as the founding event of modern art, it is fitting that the birth of modernism in the Canadian string quartet should have taken place just seven years later in that same city. This latter event took place when Rodolphe Mathieu wrote his String Quartet in One Movement in 1920, the first year of his residency in Paris. Mathieu was a leading member of a small but important group of musicians in Quebec who were among the first in this country to be well-versed in modern music. Financial assistance from his friends enabled Mathieu to travel to Paris, where he remained from 1920 until 1927. He studied at the Schola Cantorum, became familiar with recent European developments in composition, and wrote several interesting works including his Piano Trio (1921-22), Twenty-four Dialogues for violin and cello (1924) and Twelve Modern Études ('Monologues') for solo violin (1924) in addition to his String Quartet.
Léo-Pol Morin wrote about Mathieu's String Quartet in his 1930 book Papiers de musique as follows:
C'est a Paris qu'il écrit en 1920 son Quatuor à cordes, qui est une oeuvre pleine de qualités et bien déroutante à la fois, jusque-là une des plus intéressantes et moins complètes de l'auteur. Une des plus intéressantes par la substance, par l'idée, par la richesse des matériaux et une des moins complètes et des moins claires par la forme, par l'ordonnance des parties.6
What troubled Morin about Mathieu's String Quartet was the very aspect of it that we can see in retrospect was its most advanced feature. In this work Mathieu eschewed traditional formal models based on harmonic opposition and thematic recurrence in favour of a more episodic approach to form based on timbre and texture. It is this aspect of the work, together with its advanced palette of harmonic colours, that make it the locus classicus for a study of modernism and innovation in the Canadian string quartet.
Juliette Bourassa-Trépanier in her thesis on the life and works of Mathieu wrote that this quartet is organised
... dans une forme rondo: trois sections allegro animato, exploitant deux éléments principaux, sont séparées par des sections lentes.7
She delineates the sections as Refrain I (bars 1-36), Episode I (bars 37-101) Refrain II (bars 102-191) Episode II (bars 192-200) and Coda (bars 201-221). This is a helpful framework, and rondo is probably the classical form which comes closest to describing the way in which the work is organized, but the importance of this quartet lies more in its freedom from formal restraints than in its subservience to classical models.
Like his Piano Trio of 1921-22, Mathieu's String Quartet is epigrammatic in nature and consists of many shorter episodes in different tempi. There is some thematic recollection from one episode to another, but it is an important feature of Mathieu's style that earlier sections are never recapitulated exactly. One of the principal ways that material is recollected is through the use of similar timbral or textural ideas. Example 3-1 shows the opening of the work:
Example 3-1: Mathieu String Quartet, bars 1-3
Although the thematic content of Example 3-1 never returns in quite the same form during the course of the work, its salient textural ideas - the use of trills combined with short motives passed from one instrument to another - do return later on. In fact these features are varied in a textural equivalent to the kinds of thematic and harmonic procedures used in developmental forms. Thus at bar 102 the polyphonic texture of the opening returns but the trills become grace notes and the accompaniment, which was previously legato, is now pizzicato. At bar 209 the texture is homophonic, but the trills and legato accompaniment have returned. Indeed the work is remarkable for its extensive use of different timbres; Mathieu's concern with achieving as wide a palette of colours from the string quartet as possible in this work foreshadows the String Quartet No. 2 (1963) by Morel.
Mathieu must have sensed that the demands his String Quartet makes on performers were extreme, for in the manuscript copy he has altered the composition in order to simplify some aspects of it. Again, one is struck by the similarity with his Piano Trio. In both works, the dynamics are simplified by the removal of many crescendo and diminuendo markings, and in some cases (more often in the Trio than in the String Quartet) subsidiary lines have been crossed out. Mathieu even went so far in the Piano Trio as to suggest that large portions of the work could be excised and he provided optional cuts for this purpose; no such excisions have been suggested in the String Quartet.
It is interesting to see how Mathieu's harmonic language developed in the space of the two years that separate the String Quartet from the Trio. The former work is based firmly on tonality; augmented and diminished triads are common and there is some use of unusual chord structures, but a wholesale abandonment of tonal procedures did not take place until the Piano Trio. Nonetheless the String Quartet shows that Mathieu was not only familiar with recent developments in European music but that he had assimilated the musical vocabulary of modernism and was now preparing to generate his own distinctive language based on his discoveries. Mathieu's String Quartet was the first step in this process, which quickly reached fruition with his Piano Trio.
Mathieu's String Quartet is all the more noteworthy because it is such an isolated early example of modernism in the repertoire of Canadian string quartets. After the Mathieu work one must jump ahead almost a quarter of a century to find the next significant innovatory string quartet compositions by Canadian composers. The language of Western art music advanced rapidly during this time. When Mathieu wrote his String Quartet, Bartók had only completed the first two of his works in that medium, and Schoenberg had not yet developed the twelve-tone technique. By the time of the next examples of modernism in the Canadian string quartet repertoire, all six Bartók quartets had been completed and Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern had written many masterpieces using twelve-tone techniques. It is an understatement to say that Canadian composers did not keep pace with these developments. Mathieu himself did not develop his musical language any further after his Piano Trio, and when he returned to Canada in 1927 his activities as a composer all but ceased. The only important chamber music work from the later period of his life, the Piano Quintet (1942), is conservative in style. Most other Canadian composers during the 1930s and 1940s were not as well versed in contemporary idioms as Mathieu had already been before he went to Paris, and so there was a lot of catching up to do when modern music slowly began to make a widespread impact in Canada during the 1940s.
The 1940s mark an important turning point in Canadian music, as the older generation was succeeded by young composers who were more familiar with modern music. This new generation was the first large group of Canadian composers to make a conscious break with the past and write in the musical language of the twentieth century. There was also a gradual shift during this period, from the predominantly European and British training and inclinations prevalent among the older composers active in Canada, towards the distinctively North American outlook of some of the younger figures. Barbara Pentland gave voice to this trend in a 1950 article:
Our long dependence on a "Mother" country has let our resources of native talent be stifled or exported. The deep-rooted distrust of our cultural products is due primarily to this prolonged adolescence of a country that has made such a belated bid for nationhood. It is up to a younger generation now to dispel its psychological effects ... While we have no older generation of Canadian composers that we can emulate or admire, our American contemporaries have the music of Copland, Piston and many others which they can respect, and older generations including such an original creative figure as Charles Ives. We have no such important innovators to make our expression unfold from the material around us.8
This is a seminal artistic statement of the era and it is a good example of the Electra/Oedipus complex that was a pronounced component of the psyche of many Canadian composers of Pentland's generation. Both the "mother" country Britain and also the older generation of composers were thought of as oppressive parent figures that the younger musicians had to slay figuratively in order to fully realize their own creative powers. It is an interesting coincidence that just two years after Pentland's article, the notorious and equally oedipal article "Schoenberg is dead" by Pierre Boulez appeared in The Score.9
Three string quartets, one by John Weinzweig and the others by his pupils Harry Somers and Harry Freedman, mark the first appearance of more advanced twentieth century techniques in the Canadian string quartet literature since the String Quartet by Mathieu. It must be understood that these three works are only innovatory within a Canadian frame of reference; they replicate techniques that had already been in use for many years in Europe. But the importance of Weinzweig as a teacher and the subsequent success of these two of his pupils mark these quartets as quite important signposts in the growth of musical modernism in Canada.
The following remarks by Udo Kasemets about the teaching methods of Weinzweig are directly relevant to the three string quartets about to be studied and their relation to modernism:
His [Weinzweig's] method of composition teaching does not follow the established pattern where the training of an aspiring composer starts with feeding him the historical past. Weinzweig leads his students immediately towards melodic thinking free of harmonic or any other regimentation. He has divorced the training of his students from any existing style, be it sixteenth century vocal counterpoint, Bach's fugal art, Schoenberg's expressionism, or any of Stravinsky's many trends. Feeling that writing in any one style inhibits the creative impulses of a student, he has disposed of exercises in traditional counterpoint and harmony, dealing with these subjects only in the form of analysis.10
Kasemets no doubt exaggerated the ahistorical nature of Weinzweig's teaching for effect, but the fact remains that in its fundamental approach, this pedagogical method was diametrically opposed to the British school of music instruction, in which the culminating goal was to write a fugue in the style of Bach. The latter conservative pedagogical approach held sway in Toronto and much of the rest of Canada for many years, and Weinzweig himself was educated in this system. But after studying from 1937 to 1938 at the Eastman School of Music, where he came into contact with modern music, Weinzweig returned to Toronto and began to teach composition based on the methods described by Kasemets.
The use of modern compositional techniques by Weinzweig and his students was at first tentative and exploratory. Tonality was still accorded a great deal of respect in Canada, and it was a brave gesture to depart for long from its familiar shores; to abandon it altogether was unthinkable. Three string quartets of this era that did explore a more dissonant musical idiom while not totally rejecting tonality were Somers' String Quartet No. 1 (1943), Weinzweig's String Quartet No. 2 (1946) and Freedman's Five Pieces for String Quartet (1949).
Somers wrote his String Quartet No. 1 in 1943 while he was a 17-year-old pupil of Weinzweig, just before both teacher and student joined the armed forces. Written after just four years of music study and less than a year of composition lessons, the work is in many respects an impressive achievement. For the most part it looks not backwards to an earlier idiom but rather ahead to the composer's own later works, for it contains aspects of the mature Somers style in embryonic form. It also reflects the strong and immediate influence that Weinzweig's teaching methods, outlined above by Kasemets, had on Somers. Brian Cherney has written about this quartet that:
The turgid chromaticism and textural density of the opening measures recall the opening of Schoenberg's String Quartet Opus 7, but other indications of a stylistic lineage are conspicuously absent.11
It is interesting that Cherney should have compared the Somers quartet to Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 1, Opus 7, as the latter work was performed in two important concerts in Toronto, in 1915 and 1935, that marked the increasing tolerance for modern music in that city (cf. Appendix IV). The possible Schoenberg connection aside, it is important to note that Somers in his first effort was not influenced by the historical literature for string quartet. Instead Somers took the salient features of Weinzweig's own style - the use of ostinati, the lean textures and the emphasis on melody - added some of his own idiosyncratic touches, and expressed these ideas in the quartet medium with more self-assurance than Weinzweig himself had yet done.
Although the work was performed at least twice in the 1940s, in Toronto and Rochester, and the second movement has been heard in an arrangement for string orchestra, Somers' first quartet has not been played in public for 40 years and it has never been recorded, either in a commercial release or on an air check tape for the Canadian Music Centre. It is worthy of revival, not only as a work of remarkable precocity by one of Canada's leading composers, but also for its intrinsic merit and its position as an important early work in the arrival of modernism in the Canadian string quartet repertoire.
Weinzweig's first significant achievement in the string quartet medium was his String Quartet No. 2 of 1946, which was commissioned by the Forest Hill Community Centre. Gordana Lazarevich has written as follows about the Forest Hill group:
A Toronto organization possessing a surprisingly broad vision of new music and Canadian culture in general - the Community Centre of the Village of Forest Hill - occupies an important position in the history of cultural developments in Toronto from 1946 to approximately the mid-1950s. This enlightened group of citizens, many of them professionals who volunteered their time for the cause of Canadian art, devised the daring (for the times) policy of commissioning Canadian compositions for their concert series.12
Weinzweig and his students figured prominently in the list of composers commissioned for the Forest Hill series. Weinzweig's String Quartet No. 2 was premiered on 21 April 1947 by the Parlow String Quartet as part of the inaugural concert season of this organization.
Weinzweig's String Quartet No. 2 was the first Canadian string quartet to exhibit the use of twelve-tone techniques, although admittedly these techniques are used in a very free and idiosyncratic way in this work. Like Somers, however, Weinzweig did not yet feel ready to reject tonality completely, and as a result there are frequent doublings at the third and the octave in this work. The two composers used tonality in a completely different way. In Somers' String Quartet No. 1 the tonal passages provide a measure of stability and repose within the intensely serious and harshly dissonant idiom of the work, while in Weinzweig's String Quartet No. 2, tonality more typically surfaces in gently humorous, even tongue-in-cheek episodes. The short excerpt from the third movement of Weinzweig's quartet given in Example 3-2, with its mocking bi-tonal melody and cheeky accompaniment in thirds, is a good illustration of Weinzweig's light-hearted use of tonality:
Example 3-2: Weinzweig String Quartet No. 2, III bars 24-29
In this quartet the row appears in its four basic versions and at various transpositions; it is used to form melodies, but is never deployed harmonically. Occasionally, as in the passage quoted in Example 3-2, the row is dispensed with altogether. Often when a row form appears for the first time it is revealed a few notes at a time, with much repetition of the notes before some more of the row is revealed. The viola solo which opens the first movement is a good example of this technique, and also of the frequent use in this work of intervals smaller than a third:
Example 3-3: Weinzweig String Quartet No. 2, I bars 1-7 (viola)
As a broad generalization, Weinzweig's row manipulations and his incorporation of tonal elements into this quartet are closer to the procedures of Berg than either Schoenberg or Webern. But it is worth stressing that the twelve-tone method of composition is a technique rather than a style, and while Weinzweig's technique may resemble Berg's in some details, his style is his own. While this quartet is fairly timid in its incorporation of twelve-tone techniques, it nevertheless merits recognition as the first Canadian string quartet in which these techniques are used.
The first Weinzweig student to use twelve-tone techniques in a string quartet was Harry Freedman in his Five Pieces for String Quartet of 1949. It could be said of this work that it is in the medium and the genre of the string quartet, but not the form. Rather it is, as Paul Griffiths has already been quoted as saying of Stravinsky's Three Pieces for String Quartet, "determinedly not a 'string quartet' but a set of pieces to be played by four strings."13 Freedman himself does not regard this work as a "string quartet," for he refers to Graphic II (1972) as his String Quartet No. 1. However the main influence on Freedman's Five Pieces was not Stravinsky but rather Weinzweig, and to a lesser degree Bartók, whose later string quartets were starting to have an influence on Canadian composers by this time.
Freedman's use of twelve-tone techniques is very similar to Weinzweig's, in that doublings at the third and octave, the repetition of notes, and various other departures from strict serial procedures occur. In addition the row is used melodically but not harmonically. Only two of the five pieces actually make use of twelve-tone techniques, but the other three pieces show the influence of these techniques.14 The first of the Five Pieces uses two rows: one is scalar and consists of only eight different notes, while the second is a full twelve-note row. The scalar row appears in its prime and inverted forms at various transpositions, while the full twelve-note row appears in these forms and also in retrograde form. Various rows appear in all of the other four pieces, but they are never used as consistently as in the first piece. There is no marked difference in style, and very little difference in technique, between the serial and non-serial movements.
The first of the Five Pieces also reveals that Freedman's musical sense of humour is very much like that of his teacher. The twelve-note row is first presented as a tune in the first violin that is to be performed "playfully" and Freedman achieves this effect by means of jaunty rhythms, unexpected melodic shifts and a comic use of glissandi:
Example 3-4: Freedman Five Pieces for String Quartet, I bars 11-16 (violin 1)
One final aspect of Freedman's work to be examined here is the influence of Bartók. George Proctor has noted that it was in the period from 1941 to 1951 that the Bartók quartets "were just coming to be known in Canada."15 All of the Bartók string quartets had been published by 1941 and by 1949 they had all been recorded as well.16 As noted in Chapter One, Bartók's String Quartet No. 1 had been performed in Toronto in 1925, but it is quite likely that this was the only one in the cycle to have been performed in Canada before a recording of it was available. The scores and some of the earliest recordings of the Bartók string quartets may have circulated in Canada during the 1940s, but it was the 1950 Columbia recording of the complete cycle by the Juilliard Quartet that resulted in the widespread availability of these works. However it is obvious from the fourth of his Five Pieces that Freedman was already acquainted with Bartók's String Quartet No. 4 as early as 1949.17 Some points of correspondence between the fourth movement of Bartók's String Quartet No. 4 and the fourth of Freedman's Five Pieces for String Quartet are shown in Table 3-1:
Table 3-1: A comparison of Bartók String Quartet No. 4, IV and Freedman FivePieces for String Quartet, IV
| Bartók | Freedman | |
| Tempo | Allegretto pizzicato; quarter note = 142 | Allegro, Pizzicato Ostinato; quarter note = ca. 120 |
| Metre | 3/4 | 2/4 |
| Length | 372 beats | 357 beats |
| Overall Rhythm | Predominantly repeated eighth notes | Predominantly repeated eighth notes |
In addition to normal pizzicato playing, both movements make use of pizzicato sul ponticello, arpeggiated and non-arpeggiated pizzicato chords, and pizzicato glissandi. Bartók also uses the "snap" pizzicato and strummed pizzicato in both directions (lower strings to higher and higher strings to lower). Example 3-5 shows that the two works also use a similar syncopated figure:
Example 3-5:a. Bartók String Quartet No. 4, IV bars 1-4 (violin lines)
b. Freedman Five Pieces for String Quartet, IV bars 61-64
This early work by Freedman is the first Canadian string quartet to betray the influence of the Bartók quartets. During the next decade, many Canadian composers would follow Freedman's example.
The course of modernism did not always run smoothly for Canadian composers of string quartets during the 1940s and 1950s. This was a period of much uncertainty and change in matters of musical style; several composers wrote quartets which they disowned when their aesthetic outlook altered in subsequent years. Even twelve-tone techniques, which seemed to be the last word in modernism in the 1940s, were somewhat passé as early as the 1950s. One casualty of the sweeping winds of change was the String Quartet, Opus 45 by Udo Kasemets. Completed in 1957, this twelve-tone work in two movements was written in a style which Kasemets no longer espouses. Kasemets regards his twelve-tone works as an important step which helped to lay the groundwork for his present aesthetic of music, but he does not feel that they adequately represent his present musical ideas. Although withdrawn, the String Quartet, Opus 45 has not actually been destroyed. It is in a large trunk with many of the composer's other twelve-tone compositions.18 In common with Kasemets, many other Canadian composers relegated basic twelve-tone techniques to cold storage during the 1950s and went on to explore the next stage in musical modernism - total serialism.
One of the earliest Canadian string quartets to employ total serialism is Clermont Pépin's String Quartet No. 4 (1960). It was noted earlier that according to the theory of modernism espoused by Eksteins, the response of the audience to the work of art is of central importance to modernism. In the case of the premiere of Pépin's String Quartet No. 4 by the Montreal String Quartet on 1 April 1960, the audience reaction was indeed an integral part of the occasion. Claude Gingras reported in La Presse the next day that
Quelques auditeurs ont quitté la salle juste avant le Quatuor de Pépin, plusieurs sont arrivés juste à temps pour l'écouter puis sont repartis, et les applaudissements ont été plus que simplement polis.19
The other works on the programme that evening were Mozart's "Dissonance" Quartet and the Grosse Fuge by Beethoven. The fact that those interested in hearing the Pépin quartet did not stay for Mozart or Beethoven calls to mind Cocteau's comment that those who favoured the modernists "would applaud novelty at random simply to show their contempt for the people in the boxes."20 Eksteins added that the audience's role in the modernism movement is "To be scandalized, of course, but, equally, to scandalize."21 The premiere of the Pépin quartet may not have led to riots in the audience or to the fighting of duels, but within the limited parameters of chamber music life in Montreal it seems to have had much the same effect as Le Sacre did in Paris - it divided the audience into pro and con, into those who were supportive of modernism in music and did not mind thumbing their nose at the classics in the process, as opposed to those who wanted to listen to Mozart and Beethoven without having to sit through Pépin. Pépin, whether consciously or not, encouraged this schism, for his String Quartet No. 4 is more notable for the new compositional methods it employs than for its use of the string quartet medium. As such this work would have fitted more comfortably into a concert of new music than it did in a traditional string quartet recital.
Pépin subtitled this quartet "Hyperboles" in French, or "Hyperbolas" in English. This subtitle is a geometric term which Pépin in his notes for the quartet defines as "the perspective of a circle."22 A hyperbola is a curve with two branches, each of which theoretically extends for an infinite distance. It is perhaps in this sense that the term is meant to relate to the quartet, for in the quartet not only pitch but also durations, timbres, attacks, intensities and rhythms are serialized. As Pépin notes, "by superimposing these series, one can obtain tonal results which could produce pieces of unprecedented length should they be extended until their eventual return."23 The possible theoretical length of this work, like the length of the two branches of a hyperbola, is infinite. But it is more likely that the use of a mathematical term as a subtitle was simply a reflection of the new scientific attitude towards music that was a common feature of the modernist movement of the day.
"Hyperbolas" consists of nine fragments, each of which ranges in length from half a minute to one and a half minutes. The entire work is just eight minutes long. As this is a good deal shorter than the theoretical infinite length, it is clear that the composer makes only a very selective use of the possible combinations of the available series. Pépin in his programme note about the work numbers the movements "Hyperbola I-IX" and subtitles them "Superimposition I-III," "Counterpoint I-III," or "Alternation I-II" according to the manner in which the different series are combined (the final fragment is labelled "Coda"). The work as a whole demonstrates a principle which W.C. McKenzie discovered in the works of Webern, namely that "with each new innovation of compositional technique there is a counteracting restriction ... each new complexity of relationship is counter-balanced by a significant simplification."24 In the case of "Hyperbolas" the increase in complexity of pre-compositional operations is counter-balanced by a significant restriction in the actual choices made from the available combinations of series. Similarly a greater complexity in the use of string techniques (col legno, "snap" pizzicato, spiccato, leggiero, portato, etc.) is balanced by a drastically simplified conception of string quartet scoring.
Only at the beginning of Hyperbola III do all four of the instruments have independent rhythms. Occasionally two or even three different rhythms are employed simultaneously, as in Hyperbola II which in terms of its rhythm is a duet between the two upper and the two lower voices. For much of the quartet, though, the four instruments are bound together, playing the same rhythm simultaneously. It is in this sense that the fundamental conception of the work is simplified in terms of its scoring for string quartet. Hyperbolas VI, VIII and IX, for instance, are conceived primarily as single melodic lines in unison or octaves with only the occasional interruption of chords. Rarely is full use made of the varied polyphonic resources of a string quartet.
In each of the fragments, at least one and more often several of the serialized parameters remains frozen as a result of this simplification process. The extremes to which Pépin goes in reducing the complexity of pre-compositional choice at times weakens the musical end result. Hyperbola IV, for example, uses "series of chords without timbre or vibrato but with series of irrational rhythms and series of symmetrical rhythms."25 What this translates into in the music is a number of alternations between homorhythmic chords in half notes played by all four instruments and flurries of rhythmic activity by a smaller grouping of instruments (usually the two violins). Not only the rhythms, but also the articulations, timbre (senza vibrato and muted) and dynamics are the same in all four instruments and rarely change throughout this, the longest of the nine fragments. The complexities of pre-compositional choice have been reduced here almost to the point of complete stasis.
Pépin's String Quartet No. 4 was clearly an experimental piece that was meant to explore new techniques rather than to work within established ideas about composition. The composer admitted as much himself when he wrote
"Hyperbolas" for string quartet are not the ultimate of my research in serial technique but rather a beginning. I am of the opinion that only through electronic instruments will the unlimited possibilities of the serial technique be completely exploited.26
It was a tentative and not completely convincing beginning too, but an important beginning nonetheless. In view of Pépin's opinion about the suitability of electronic instruments for the further development of serialism, it is not surprising that "Hyperbolas" is not completely convincing in terms of its writing for string quartet. Pépin did not successfully manage that delicate balancing act between maintaining a link with the past on the one hand and incorporating new ideas on the other. Instead he came close to abandoning the string quartet in favour of electronic music. Thus while "Hyperbolas" was a successful experiment in modernism, it was not really a satisfying use of the medium of the string quartet.
Pièces pour quatuor by Serge Garant, written a year before and premiered a year after Pépin's String Quartet No. 4, represents a different approach to the serialism of parameters other than pitch. These three short pieces were written between August 1958 and January 1959 for the Montreal String Quartet and were premiered on a CBC radio broadcast on 15 February 1961.27 The pieces have almost certainly never been performed since that date; as the composer wrote, "I suspect the fact that they are very difficult and very short is the main reason. (But then I never made special efforts to have them performed, either!)"28
At first blush Garant's Pièces seem to be an orthodox exercise in total serialism along the lines explored by Garant's friend Pierre Boulez. The techniques used in the first of the three pieces, for example, closely resemble those used by Boulez in his Structures Ia for two pianos (1955). These similarities are summarized in Table 3-2:29
Table 3-2: A comparison of Garant Pièces pour quatuor, I and Boulez Structures 1a for two pianos
Garant Boulez Tempo Modéré, eighth note=120 Très Modéré, eighth note=120 Metre 5 9 3 2 7 9 3 2 3 5 3 5 8 16 8 8 16 16 etc. 8 8 8 16 8 16 etc. Pitch Serialized Serialized Dynamics Series of nine levels from pppp to fff Series of twelve levels from pppp to ffff Attacks Series of ten kinds of attacks used Series of ten kinds of attacks used
Both works also feature a very complex rhythmic organization, a lack of conventional melodic writing, virtuosic writing for the respective instruments and very sparse textures. Garant himself later acknowledged his debt to the first book of Structures in passing in a script for a radio broadcast on the works of Boulez:
Le deuxième livre des Structures, en deux parties, fut composé alors que Boulez commençait d'explorer la technique du hasard dirigé. La musique ici est beaucoup plus libre que dans le premier livre et, il faut bien le dire, elle est aussi plus facile d'accès. J'avoue, pour ma part, avoir gardé un faible pour le premier livre, peut-être parce qu'il a marqué si fortement ma jeunesse, mais aussi pour cette dureté qui me plaît beaucoup.30
The lessons of the second book of Structures were also not lost on Garant, however, and he soon put them to use in Pièces.
György Ligeti has demonstrated that Structures Ia makes unrealistic demands on the performer with respect to the dynamic levels and modes of attack called for,31 and similar problems exist with Garant's Pièces in these two areas and others as well. As noted in the above chart, Garant's row for dynamics is somewhat simpler than Boulez'; it excludes "quasi p," "quasi f" and "ffff." Ligeti also makes the point that string instruments can differentiate between modes of attack better than pianos can. However the general point Ligeti makes in both of these instances is to some extent valid for the Garant work as well.
The third of the Garant pieces begins with the tempo marking "As Fast As Possible" but subsequently the indications "Faster" (bar 25) and "Still Faster" (bar 31) are called for. Aside from purely physical difficulties, the Garant work also calls for some extremely demanding ensemble work, as in the following example from the last of the three pieces:
Example 3-6: Garant Pièces pour quatuor, III bars 33-34
Ligeti in his analysis of Structure Ia noted that in the sheer complexity of the work the limits of human perception have been reached and that much the same results could be achieved by entirely different methods:
Seen at close quarters, it is the factor of determinism, regularity, that stands out; but seen from a distance, the structure, being the result of many separate regularities, is seen to be something highly variable and chancy.32
Garant seems to have come to the same realization while composing his Pièces pour quatuor, as indeed Boulez himself did when he wrote the second book of his Structures.
In the first of Garant's pieces, the first violin plays at a faster tempo than the other three instruments in a cadenza-like fashion from bar 14 to bar 28 and then launches into a solo cadenza from bar 29 to bar 36. The first violin part is strictly notated, but a certain amount of freedom must be granted to allow this part to be matched to the other three parts, which move at a slower tempo and in different metres. In the second of Garant's Pièces, from bar 26 to the end of the movement, this process is taken one step further as the second violin is given full freedom to decide in what order to play the given melodic fragments while the other three instruments play their strictly notated parts. "From a distance" the passage in the first piece would not seem to be very different from the one in the second piece, but the first instance adheres to pre-determinism while the second one crosses over into the realm of chance.
It is perhaps ironic that this meticulously worked out and for the most part rigorously pre-determined work owes the slight recognition it has received thus far to the limited use it makes of chance music. The work is sometimes referred to as "Study on Chance," although this subtitle is not present in the score. Some writers hold this to be the first occurrence of chance music in a Canadian composition.33 On the other hand, Otto Joachim has also been credited with being the first Canadian composer to employ chance music in his Nonet of 1959-60.34 The second of the Garant pieces, where indeterminacy is used for the first time in this work, is dated 3 November 1958, whereas Joachim does not seem to have begun work on his Nonet until the following year. However the Joachim Nonet was premiered at the 1960 Stratford Festival, while the Garant work was not premiered until 1961, when it was performed by the Montreal String Quartet, of which Joachim was the viola player. It is thus possible, although by no means certain, that Joachim had already seen the Garant work before he began to write his Nonet. Joachim has denied, though, that the Garant Pièces influenced his Nonet in any way, and has pointed out that indeterminacy figures far more prominently in his Nonet that in Garant's Pièces.35 Regardless of whether or not Garant's Pièces enjoys the distinction of being the first Canadian example of chance music, it is certainly the most rigorously seralized and also one of the most difficult works in the Canadian string quartet repertoire.
In a competition for most difficult Canadian string quartet, Garant's Pièces might be pitted against the String Quartet No. 2 (1963) by Morel. The latter work explores the timbral possibilities of the string quartet in the same spirit of technical innovation that Garant applied to the organization of pitch, rhythm, metre, dynamics and mode of attack. Morel's quartet was written for the Canadian String Quartet and was premiered on a CBC broadcast on 25 March 1963. The work is conceived in terms of the modern playing techniques of string instruments and of the timbres available in the string quartet medium in the twentieth century. A list of traditional and modern string techniques called for in Morel's String Quartet No. 2 includes col legno, col legno battuto, col legno détaché, col legno staccato, col legno tratto, col legno tratto tremolo, con sordino, du talon, flautando, glissando, harmonics (both artificial and natural), non vibrato, open strings, pizzicato, "snap" pizzicato, scordatura, spiccato, staccato, sul ponticello, sul ponticello tremolo and sul tasto. A transcription of this quartet into any other medium would be unthinkable, for a completely different work would result.
Morel has explored many different compositional techniques in the course of his career, but a common thread running through his different stylistic experiments has been a preoccupation with timbre. The composer himself has said:
I was never a tonal musician. At first I went through a modal stage; then I decided in favour of serialism. Even at the Conservatoire I was not very interested in classical forms. Not having been subjected to German influence, I was guided for a long time by instinct alone and I was mostly attracted by sonorities ... When writing a work, what I search for are sonority and orchestration. I consider these two things far more important than themes.36
More fully than any other Canadian composer before him, Morel in his String Quartet No. 2 rejected the historical associations of the string quartet medium and turned his back on classical forms and thematic manipulation. The only traditional formal aspect of the work is that it is in four separate movements. Much of the quartet is not melodic in a conventional sense; instead it consists of changing dissonant chord clusters. These successions of chord clusters seem arbitrarily ordered and totally unrelated to one another, almost as though the work were written in moment form. Upon closer examination one discovers some conventional melodic procedures such as the repetition of short phrases, loosely imitative writing and mirror structures, but these features are usually short lived and hidden from the ear by dense textures and complex rhythms.
Any feeling of regular metric pulse is completely destroyed by frequent changes of metre, consistent use of syncopation and irrational subdivisions of the beat. The tempi are continually changing as well; there are 17 tempo changes in the first movement, 19 in the second, 6 in the third and 13 in the last, and frequent use is also made of ritardando and accelerando. Each of the movements makes use of a wide range of tempi from very slow to very fast, although the third movement is on the whole somewhat slower than the other three. Accurate rhythmical coordination of the four parts is sometimes all but impossible to achieve, as in the very first bar of the work where there are four different tempi simultaneously which must slow down in the course of one bar to four different slower tempi, with each instrument playing complex irrational rhythms. A similar section in the second movement (bars 28-37) introduces aleatoric passages in the violins and cello which are to be performed at the same time as a strictly notated cadenza-like passage for the viola. Morel in this work evidently came to the same decision that Garant did in his Pièces, namely that at a certain level of complexity the required effects can be achieved more easily through the use of chance procedures.
Modernism seemed to reach something of a peak as far as the quartet repertoire is concerned with the Garant and Morel works. During the later 1960s and the 1970s composers found new areas to explore which made even the most experimental works in the Canadian string quartet repertoire seem tame by comparison. During this period developments in electronic music, danger music (with directions such as "Creep into the Vagina of a living Whale,"37 or "One antipersonnel type-CPU bomb will be thrown into the audience"38), environmental music, mixed media, biomusic and so on threatened to consign the string quartet to a hopelessly antiquarian role with little or no relevance to the truly adventurous composer. Nevertheless some composers did find previously neglected areas to explore in the quartet medium and created works which, while not as unusual or as deliberately provocative as what was occurring on the radical fringes of modern music, were still sufficiently controversial to cause chamber music audiences and critics considerable consternation.
Brian Cherney's String Quartet No. 2 (1970) incorporated some of these newer ideas in modern music, which the composer discovered during two trips to the Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 1966 and 1969. The influence of the new string effects of Penderecki and other members of the Polish school and of Mauricio Kagel's use of theatricality in music had an immediate impact on Cherney. The 28-year-old composer used these and other features of recent vintage in his String Quartet No. 2, and as a result that work was one of the more experimental pieces of Canadian chamber music of its day.
Cherney's quartet is in seven movements which follow one another without a break. For the first five to seven seconds of the first movement, all four members of the quartet sit with their bows poised, as if about to play, but make no sound. As in John Cage's infamous 4'33", this opening theatrical gesture challenges the audience's expectations about the beginning of the composition and draws attention to the ever-present sounds that are extraneous to a performance of any work. For the first page of the score (13 bars) only special string effects are employed - the players bow on the bridge and on the side of the instrument, play pizzicato and tremolo behind the bridge, and they finger passages rapidly without letting the bow touch the string. The performers (or perhaps their instruments) seem to be suffering from a serious psychological disturbance - the instrumental equivalent of apnea (partial privation of breath; breathlessness caused by forced respiration) or dysphonia (impairment of voice quality).39
The diagnosis at the beginning of the second page of score (bars 14-26) is clear - the players are now suffering from the musical equivalent of aphemia, which is when one knows what one wants to say (in this case play), but is unable to utter the words (here, unable to play the music). What the players want to play is the opening of the second movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Opus 131, but they are instructed by Cherney to make no sound. They see Beethoven's music pass before them for a dozen bars, the notes all correctly heighted but without staff lines, and they go through the motions of playing, but the audience hears nothing, or at most hears the sound of the players' fingers hitting the fingerboard. Cherney remarked that this passage and similar ones at the end of the third movement (a silent performance of the opening of the fifth movement of Opus 131) and the beginning of the sixth movement (mute quotations of bars 26-31 and 64-69 of the fourth movement of Opus 18 No. 3) were his "contribution to the Beethoven bi-centennial."40 The irony implicit in this comment is in keeping with the modernist stance of freedom from the bondage of history. Reflecting back upon his work 16 years later, however, Cherney revealed that he admired the Beethoven quartets very much and that the quotations were used only to give the players structured gestures to perform silently; no deprecation of Beethoven's music was intended.41 Homage to an earlier musical style - previously a feature of conservatism in music - is used here as a device of modernism. The silent Beethoven quotations are also a modern incarnation of Renaissance eye-music, intended for the amusement of the players as a shared but private intimacy between composer and performers.
Throughout the entire first movement, only a few ordinary notes are played, and they appear as brief interjections of normality within a surreal soundscape of unusal string effects. The first movement ends with the string quartet ensemble verging on the point of utterance. Cherney combines four different sound effects (a flautando of indeterminate pitch, bowing on top of the bridge, bowing between the bridge and the tailpiece, and bowing on the wood of the instrument) and instructs the string quartet to "try to approximate a 'whisper' sound" (bar 51). The earlier strangled, inarticulate gestures of the movement merge here into a unified, homorhythmic, but hoarse plea. Short of adding a voice to the ensemble, this is as close as a string quartet can come to articulate expression. Cherney has miraculously managed to give the instruments an almost human voice; a message seems not to be conveyed because that voice lacks semantic content, but the message will indeed be revealed towards the end of the work.
The second through fifth movements of the quartet are based on a series of four earlier works by Cherney all called Mobile. String Quartet No. 2 is the sixth work in this Mobile series and it incorporates elements from Mobiles II, IIIa, IV and V. In a programme note about the quartet, the composer explains that
Much of the material (i.e. intervallic structures and shapes, but rarely "themes" in a traditional sense) of movements II, III, IV and V is based upon a series of four earlier works called MOBILE. In these works, similar ideas are presented (both in the same work and from one work to another) in different perspectives, through variations in time and instrumentation.42
The idea for the Mobile series was influenced by the mobile as an art form, in which the same work can be seen from many different perspectives. When Cherney wrote his String Quartet No. 2, he was not familiar with Earle Brown's works, such as String Quartet 1965, in which musical mobile form, with its variable sequence of segments, is applied.43 Nevertheless some sections of Cherney's quartet, such as the third movement which has three small boxes of music that can be played in any order, are remarkably similar to the use of mobile form by composers such as Cage and Brown.
The sixth movement, with its silent Beethoven quotations, is reminiscent of the first movement. It serves as an introduction to the seventh movement ("Notturno") in which some of the secrets of the work are revealed. The movement's title provides a clue to the meaning of the quartet. "Notturno" is the title of the Lyric Piece for Piano, Opus 54 No. 4 by Grieg, and Cherney uses a distorted version of this music in bars 308-40. The quartet is dedicated to the memory of the composer's mother, who was an amateur pianist and often performed the Grieg Notturno. She was also an amateur actress with a passion for the theatre, and the theatrical elements of this quartet may have been sub-consciously influenced by this fact. On the final page of the score (bars 342-55) the instruments are again required to imitate a whisper. This time the homorhythmic message is longer; what earlier seemed to be a plea lacking in semantic content now stands revealed as a wordless recitation of the Kaddish, the doxology in praise of God that by tradition Jews are required to say every day for eleven months after the death of a parent and then on each anniversary afterwards.44 The wordless Kaddish sets a final seal of benediction on this work of exploration and of homage.45 Once again the string quartet has been chosen as a medium for the most intimate and private of messages.
Cherney submitted his String Quartet No. 2 to a competition for the McMaster University Prize for Chamber Music. The jury, consisting of Violet Archer, John Beckwith and William Wallace, awarded Cherney's work the first prize in the competition. This occasioned a splenetic outburst of indignation from Lorne Betts in his review of the performance of Cherney's quartet by the Czech String Quartet:
As one listened carefully to this new work, one had a feeling that Cherney must have had an uproarious laugh at the powers that be who awarded him $300.00 for a piece of nonsense. BUT MORE devastating is the fact that two among our major musicians and composers in Canada - Violet Archer and John Beckwith - should have been taken in by the farce ... One can only be disturbed that such a work as this should be awarded a prize in a major competition. If this was the best work submitted, the prize would have been best withheld. For a fly-by- night organization with nothing on the ball, one could possibly understand such a thing happening. But for an accredited Institute of Higher Learning such as McMaster University, one could only feel ashamed at the incredible lowering of musical standards.46
In the set roles of the modernist confrontation, Betts played the part of Outraged Conservatism to the hilt.
Apart from a single performance by the Orford String Quartet at the Shaw Festival in the summer of 1972, Cherney's quartet has not been heard again in live performance. The wave of experimentation and modernism in Canada was cresting when Cherney wrote this work and a new cycle of conservatism was already creating an artistic climate in which such a work would be out of fashion. In addition, an element of theatricality, especially one as pronounced as in Cherney's quartet, is always difficult for musicians to realize successfully, and this alone would discourage most ensembles from attempting the work.
Norman Sherman's Quadron (1976) for string quartet has had a Rezeptionsgeschichte similar to that of Cherney's String Quartet No. 2. The Sherman work was commissioned by the Vághy String Quartet and was premiered along with Graham George's Fuguing Music for String Quartet on 15 July 1976 as part of the Kingston events for the Arts and Culture Program of the Games of the XXI Olympiad. The Brahms String Quartet in C minor, Opus 51 No. 1 was also on this programme. The Sherman work has not been heard again in live performance in Canada since the premiere. The composer's programme note for Quadron reads in full as follows:
The form of Quadron is in one extended movement which can be divided into three sections; moderately, slow and fast. This will be easily discernible to the listener. Sonorities, timbres and textural balances are all integral parts of 'moments', short or long, which are held together in a continuity developed from a procedure of non repetition.47
Whatever Sherman's intentions may have been, either in composing the piece or in writing this programme note, the end result was clearly not "easily discernible" to the audience. Moment form, which Karlheinz Stockhausen had developed in his Momente (1961-62), was still enough of a novelty in 1976 that its methods and procedures were not widely appreciated or understood. As for the three sections of the work, the dividing lines between them were blurred by continual changes in tempi and the lack of a clear relationship between one 'moment' and the next. While procedures such as this were an indispensable characteristic of moment form, they did not make for an easily perceived sense of continuity in the work. On the contrary, Sherman's Quadron seemed to many in the audience, including the local critic, to be an arbitrary succession of musical gestures which were ungainly in themselves and did not seem to be building towards a cumulative statement.
Critic Ted Bond, writing in the Kingston Whig Standard, included in his review a lengthy apologia about the difficulty of reviewing new music and then dismissed Quadron in one sentence:
The most difficult task for a critic is to review new music. The best of listeners is often not able to fully appreciate a complex new work at first hearing, and music critics are no exception. They are expected to pontificate about a work's merits and failings as if all music were within their instant grasp, when, in fact - until they have had the opportunity for a second hearing - all they can really do, in honesty, is give an account of their impressions ... Quadron by Norman Sherman struck me as formless, directionless, and rhythmically monotonous. But again, it is difficult to judge from a first hearing.48
Sherman decided to reply to this brief but stringent review in a letter to the editor. The modernist confrontation between artist and audience was thereby continued within the pages of the local newspaper, with the critic standing in for the audience and the battle medium changed from music to language. Sherman's reply to the review of his quartet read in part as follows:
To say that the composition "Quadron" is formless or directionless is indeed a superficial statement demonstrating how far one is out of touch with trends in contemporary music. The fact is that in the program notes it was mentioned that the piece was made up of "Moments"; and this is a concept developed over the last 30 years and commonly used by many contemporary composers. If Mr. Bond should care to bring his musical knowledge up to date he would be more at ease in grasping and understanding present-day art forms in music. He could start off by turning to Page 494 in the "Dictionary of Contemporary Music" (ed. J. Vinton) where he would find what Moment Form is all about.49
Bond, a philosophy professor specializing in aesthetics, was not about to let Sherman have the last word. He replied to Sherman's letter with his own letter to the editor, which read in part as follows:
I was, in fact, most careful not to say that Mr. Sherman's "Quadron" was formless or directionless, only that that was how it struck me as a listener hearing it for the first time. I did read Mr. Sherman's notes on the structure, but that did not alter my listener's impression. A structure has no point, in any case, if it does not contribute to the audible unity of a piece ... As to knowledge of contemporary composing techniques, no doubt the critic should have it, but the point of view he takes as a critic is not that of a composer, a musicologist, or a performer, but that of a listener. He should try to speak, to the best of his ability, from the point of view of an ideal member of the audience. It would be a pity if composers no longer wrote for an audience of music lovers, but only for their fellow composers.50
The fine distinction Bond claims to have made in his review between saying that Quadron strikes a listener as formless and directionless, as opposed to actually being that way, was likely lost on most of his readers. In addition his contention that the structure must contribute to the audible unity of a composition is erroneous, as could be shown by numerous examples from the isorhythmic motet onwards. But in the final analysis, the disagreement between Sherman and Bond was not really about either of these matters; rather it was a dispute over the question of how music criticism should deal with modern music. As such it was an argument that has been fought many times over in the course of music history, from the age of Artusi and Monteverdi to the present. Unlike Babbitt, Bond was not prepared to concede that music had advanced beyond the stage where the lay listener could be expected to understand and judge the merits of a new composition. Sherman, on the other hand, felt that whatever the capabilities of the average listener in the audience might be, the music critic must keep pace with advanced developments in compositional style and technique. As in most modernist confrontations, a fundamental disagreement in matters of aesthetic judgement lay at the heart of the dispute.
However far apart their ideas about the role of the critic in modern music may have been, Sherman and Bond at least were in agreement about the physical makeup of the string quartet. For despite its formal and stylistic difficulties, Sherman's work is scored for the traditional grouping of two violins, viola and cello. Quadron may have been an uneasy companion to the Brahms quartet on the second half of the programme, but to pair the two works in the same concert was not an unthinkable affront to decorum or to the entire institution of the string quartet. The same could not be said for all string quartet compositions of the 1970s and 1980s. During this time several composers tampered with the actual physical makeup and the basic acoustic properties of the string quartet medium. In so doing they created works which maintain some traditions of the string quartet but abandon others. Such works probe the sometimes unclear dividing line between what is and what is not a string quartet.
Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 (1907-08), with an added soprano voice in the last two movements, is the locus classicus for the alteration of the sound of the string quartet. What was notable about Schoenberg's quartet was not only the addition of a soprano voice to the ensemble but also the retention of the title String Quartet for this work with five performers. (The work is also important for its use of atonality but this aspect is not immediately pertinent to the present discussion.) Many composers have followed Schoenberg's lead and added a voice to their string quartets; a list of such works is given in Table 3-3:
Table 3-3: Chronological list of string quartets with added voice
Arnold Schoenberg String Quartet No. 2 (1907-08) [soprano] Darius Milhaud String Quartet No. 3 (1916) [soprano] Robert Siohan String Quartet, Op. 2 (1922) [soprano] Erich Sternberg String Quartet No. 1 (1924) [mezzo-soprano] Václav Kaprál String Quartet No. 2 (1927) [baritone] Jan Seidel String Quartet No. 1 (1930) [soprano] Jan Seidel String Quartet No. 2 (1940) [narration] Ralph Shapey String Quartet No. 5 (1958) [female voice] George Rochberg String Quartet No. 2 (1959-61) [soprano] Ilja Hurnik String Quartet No. 2 (1961) [baritone] Jan Kapr String Quartet No. 6 (1963) [baritone] Frederick Koch String Quartet No. 2 (1966) [mezzo-soprano] Leon Stein String Quartet No. 5 (1967) [soprano] Henrik Donner String Quartet No. 1 (1970) [baritone] Alberto Ginastera String Quartet No. 3 (1973) [soprano] Barry Guy String Quartet No. 3 (1973) [soprano] Walter Buczynski String Quartet No. 3 (1987) [soprano]
Although legitimized by Schoenberg and cultivated sporadically throughout this century, this particular sub-species of the string quartet genre has found little favour in Canada. A few earlier works in the Canadian repertoire (such as MacMillan's Three French-Canadian Sea Songs of 1930) are scored for this same combination of performers but are not titled String Quartet; such works are songs with string quartet accompaniment rather than string quartets with an added voice part. An intermediate stage was reached with Freedman's Graphic II (1972) in which the string quartet players are themselves required to vocalize briefly. Indeed it could be argued that Schoenberg's String Quartet No. 2 has had no influence on Canadian string quartet composers, for Buczynski has categorically stated that his String Quartet No. 3 is not based on the Schoenberg work in any way.51 In any event, adding a voice part to the string quartet ensemble remains an infrequent occurrence and such works form a marginal sub-category in the string quartet repertoire both in Canada and elsewhere.
The addition of voice to a string quartet may challenge our conception of the medium but it does not necessarily result in an experimental or avant-garde composition. For in the end, the voice has simply been accepted as an occasional visitor to the string quartet in much the same way as it has sometimes been added to the symphony, although it is a more modern and a less frequent visitor to the former medium than it is to the latter. Rarer still are those works which have altered the conventional membership of the string quartet ensemble in other ways besides adding a voice. String Quartet No. 2 (1902) by Austrian composer Karl Weigl, for instance, is scored for string quartet with viola d'amore, and more recently English composer Peter Dickinson included piano and tape in his String Quartet No. 2 (1975). To date the only Canadian composer to tamper more radically with the traditional scoring of the quartet ensemble is R. Murray Schafer, whose String Quartet No. 4 (1988) includes both a soprano and a third violin. Such works represent an even smaller sub-species within the string quartet repertoire than those with a single added voice part, and they present a more serious challenge to our conception of the medium. Nonetheless these works remain closer to the string quartet tradition than Sydney Hodkinson's String Quartet for Five Players (1967), which is scored for two guitars, harp, electric bass and percussion. Somewhere between the Schafer and Hodkinson works, the fine line separating the string quartet from other chamber music genres has been crossed.
Another area of experimentation which has tested the limits of our understanding of the string quartet medium has been the use of electronics in association with the conventional string quartet ensemble. David Neubert has classified electronic string compositions into three categories, namely those that use string instruments (1) with tape, (2) with electronics, and (3) works that process string instrument sounds in a recording studio.52 Canadian string quartet composers have not been overly attracted to the combination of acoustic string instruments with electronic sounds, but they have made modest contributions to each of these categories. In the first category are Longtin's Deux rubans noirs II (1972) which exists in two versions, one for tape alone and one for string quartet and tape, and Southam's Counterplay (1973) for string quartet and tape. In the second category is Montgomery's Reconnaissance (1975) for amplified string quartet and in the third category is Daoust's Quatuor (1979) which is a work that was created in a studio by processing the sounds of a "live" string quartet into an electronic music composition.
Montgomery's Reconnaissance is an example of some of the problems and difficulties raised by combining the string quartet with electronics. The Vághy String Quartet premiered the work at the Guelph Spring Festival on 3 May 1975 (Canada Music Day) in an all-Canadian programme together with Koprowski's String Quartet No. 1 and Somers' String Quartet No. 2. In a programme note for this concert, the composer wrote as follows:
Reconaissance [sic] completes a group of four pieces dealing with a structural concept suggested by the work of Lawrence Durrell. That concept is the following: given a specific event, or series of events, create four distinct metaphors, letting the variable be the distance in time from the seminal event. The four works, each a year apart, are: Relations (1972), Plunger (1973), White Fire (1974), and Reconaissance [sic] (1975).53
The reference to Lawrence Durrell suggests a comparison with that author's group of four novels which are intended to be read as a single work under the collective title of The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60). In his Preface to this work, Durrell writes that
In trying to work out my form I adopted, as a rough analogy, the relativity proposition. The first three [novels] were related in an intercalary fashion, being 'siblings' of each other and not 'sequels'; only the last novel was intended to be a true sequel and to unleash the time dimension.54
The quartet of works that Montgomery mentions in his programme note are related in that all make use of electronics but they differ in that each is scored for a different combination of instruments. Relations is for piano and tape, Plunger is for horn and tape, White Fire is for amplified brass quintet and Reconnaissance is for amplified string quartet.
Only two of the four sections into which Reconnaissance is divided make use of electronics. The outer two sections of the work employ traditional techniques and are rather conventional in style, while the two inner sections employ electronics and abound in special effects. For the premiere performance, a quartet of conventional but inexpensive string instruments was modified in such a way that the body of the instruments could be amplified electronically; these modified instruments were used for the inner two sections. In addition, special effects such as bowing slowly with a great amount of pressure, rubbing the fingernails over the strings, whistling and clapping are used in the middle two sections of the work. A somewhat uneasy dichotomy was thus set up between the conventional and even conservative outer sections of the work and the more experimental, electronically enhanced inner sections. This dichotomy was emphasized by the fact that the players switch to different instruments for the amplified parts of the quartet. In short, the outer sections of Reconnaissance stay within the traditions of the string quartet; the inner sections are scored for amplified string quartet, a related but separate genre that requires different instruments and, in Montgomery's hands, is more experimental and adventurous in style than the traditional string quartet. Montgomery himself seems to have been aware of this dichotomy, for in 1982 he made a new arrangement of the work for string orchestra. In this new version, the use of electronics is abandoned and the work was made into a homogeneous, unified and entirely acoustic composition.
While Montgomery combined the genres of string quartet and amplified string quartet in Reconnaissance, Daoust in his Quatuor has completely subordinated the string quartet to the medium of electronic music. Daoust has written about this work as follows:
Quatuor was produced from recording a "live" string quartet. Thanks to the magic power of electro-acoustic technology, the scale is shattered, the violin is liberated, it takes flight, leading us into unexplored, dreamlike zones inaccessible to the real instrument.55
Daoust, by electronically manipulating the sounds of the string quartet, has distorted and twisted the medium into a tortured, at times painful parody of itself; it is as though in Quatuor we are witnessing the very death throes of the string quartet. As an electro-acoustic work, Quatuor is no doubt successful, and it won a first prize in the analogue division of the 1980 Concours international de musique électroacoustique de Bourges. The work was clearly not intended as a contribution to the string quartet repertoire, but it can be interpreted nonetheless as a commentary on the state of the string quartet in the late twentieth century.
If the string quartet was figuratively killed off by Daoust through electronic manipulations in 1979, it was appropriate that it should be reborn soon thereafter in a new, electric form. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Toronto cellist and inventor Richard Armin evolved a new family of instruments known as the Raad electric string instruments. Peter Mose has described the Raad instruments as follows:
Narrower and thinner than typical stringed instruments, the Raads are each shaped like vertically paired diamonds. Their tops are the traditional auburn, but these are isolated sonically from the rest of the fiddle (which is jet black), and instead amplified directly. Thus these instruments are truly electronic, though played normally, and facing the audience from behind the performers were two sets of stacked speakers, and a couple of console boxes that winked Christmas colors.56
The Armin Electric Strings, an ensemble that varies in size from string trio to string quintet, perform on these Raad instruments; the repertoire includes chamber music written for the traditional string instrument family by composers from Beethoven to Glass and also newly created works by Canadian composers. A good example of the new Canadian works created for the Armin Electric Strings is John Rea's Some Time Later (1986), scored for a string quartet of Raad instruments. Some Time Later explores the electronic capabilities of the Raad instruments such as sampling, a process whereby a short segment of music can be stored and repeated an infinite number of times while the "live" Raad instruments stop playing and then resume with a new rhythmic pattern that is laid on top of the music played by the sampler. Despite performances by the Armin Electric Strings of works from the traditional chamber music repertoire, it is clear that the Raad instruments will not supplant the original, acoustic string quartet. Instead a new medium has been created, the electric string quartet, for which a new repertoire is now being created that may one day be the subject of a future thesis.57
In a sense, the development of the electric string quartet was the ultimate end towards which the innovative experiments of modernism were striving. Pépin had noted as early as 1960 that his exploration of total serialism would probably find fullest expression in electronic music. The exploration of the unusual textural and timbral possibilities of the string quartet reached intricate levels of complexity in Garant's Pièces and in Morel's String Quartet No. 2, but the development of the electric string quartet has opened up a whole new range of possibilities in these and other related areas of experimentation. This is not to say that all possible innovative ideas in the medium of the string quartet have been exhausted, or that the string quartet will never again be the focus of modernism in music. Time and again throughout the history of the string quartet, the genre has been renewed by composers who have been able to breathe new life into its time-honoured traditions without destroying a delicate but necessary sense of continuity with the past. This does not seem a likely prospect at present, but the resilience and variety of the string quartet is such that there is every reason to expect that it will be renewed sometime in the future and that innovation and modernism will once again find a place of honour within the medium.
