The Quartet Progresses

I need to get a good part of the new quartet to the performers sooner than I thought so I have been working daily and two movements are pretty much finished. A violinist and violist friend came over on Sunday and we went through the two movements in some detail. We fixed all sorts of little details that otherwise would have led to an embarrassing first rehearsal! For example, I tend to put phrase marks everywhere they seem relevant, but I learned yesterday that if you put phrase marks over passages in pizzicato for bowed instruments, they are likely to think you are an idiot and there will be titters. I didn't know that! I guess that the concepts of bowing and phrasing are very close for string players. As a guitarist, pretty much everything I play is pizzicato and phrase marks are normal for me. Interesting...

But I had a little win in another movement. The second movement, titled "Forest" (the quartet is inspired by the geographic beauty of the Vancouver/Vancouver Island region) is in moment form. This was invented by Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1950s and taken up by many others since. My first encounter as a player was with a piece called Night Rain by Canadian composer Anthony Genge. It is a lovely piece for alto flute and guitar. The score has three pages, each divided into a top and bottom half and each page is a separate movement. The flute part is on the top and the guitar, the bottom. Each part consists of ten or fifteen "moments" or brief cells that may be played in any order. Some of the cells are rests. You play each moment once in any order. The trick is ending each movement roughly together as there are no musical signposts. We discovered, as we played the piece, that we quickly developed an intuitive sense of where we were and when we recorded it, we did so in one take. Here is our recording:

We always enjoyed playing that piece because it had a mood and atmosphere quite different from anything else. I wrote my first "moment" piece decades ago for guitar orchestra. It consisted of a kind of flow chart with the different moments in little boxes. Each row was numbered and lines showed where you could go next. What is not on the page is how I conducted the piece. I created the form during the performance by cuing certain players to, for example, return to the "snare drum" box on level one. Other performances could take a different course. So the score is like a box of materials to construct a performance. Here is page one of the score:

(Just a note to future scholars: my original name for this piece when I wrote it around 1978 was Forms. When the Swedish publisher Guitarissimo issued it in a collection with two other pieces of mine for guitar orchestra I changed the title to Long Lines of Winter Light. That title I had, many years before, given to a piece for string quartet (not a regular string quartet, but one with mandolin, guitar, banjo and double bass or something like that!). That piece never got beyond a brief sketch, so I re-used the nifty title. Much later, as in just a few years ago, I revived that idea and put a great deal of time into a new version for violin, harpsichord, harp and guitar. That piece has never been performed.

Here is a recording, with ten guitars, of the original piece under the title Long Lines of Winter Light:

One section of my new piece Dark Dream uses moment form. Each player has a number of moments, to be played in any order, but that whole section is then repeated. I haven't posted the recording of that piece yet, but I will.

The new quartet, adventurously titled String Quartet No. 2 as there was an earlier quartet, is in three movements. The first, titled "Mountain" is just a sketch so far. The second movement, "Forest" is in moment form, but I have organized it quite differently. The moments are in a fixed order and spiral out from the center to the periphery. Then the player returns to the center. However, the player can play each moment several times if so desired. There are four "signposts" which are four whole notes. The four instruments each have a different note and the four signposts together outline a chord progression. When a player reaches a signpost, he or she waits until all four performers are there, then they all continue. My violinist was extremely skeptical about this so I suggested we just play through it. We both arrived at the signposts at nearly the same time! Actually, the piece is designed so it is really not possible to have ensemble problems. In fact, I would prefer that the four instruments arrive at the chordal signposts at different times allowing the chord to "bloom." Here is what two of those parts look like:

Click to enlarge

I rather enjoy the ontological question of how many pages there are. This is the first page of the two pages this movement takes up in the score (which shows all the parts together). Now, of course it is not a normal score where the parts are aligned vertically. To the listener, this movement only has one page as all four parts are played simultaneously. However, when I print out the parts for each player, there will be four pages. So, how many pages are there? As I mentioned before, you start in the center, move along the spiral to the periphery and then return to the center.

There were some scores by George Crumb that used spirals back in the 60s, but apart from that I am pretty sure this is a fairly original idea.

The last movement is a hard-driving finale in 10/8.