Attacca Quartet

CAROLINE SHAW

Entr’acte (2011)

Caroline Shaw composed her Entr’acte in 2011 after hearing a compelling performance of Haydn’s String Quartet, Op. 77, No. 2, given by the Brentano Quartet. She was struck by the change of keys between the sections of the minuet movement, writing, “I love the way some music suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s looking glass, in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolor transition.” Entr’acte initially takes the shape of a traditional, Classical minuet-and-trio, with a breathy first section and a contrasting, plucked chorale. When the chorale comes to a close, we might expect to return to the music of the opening. Instead, Shaw digresses: before making her way back to the original minuet, she spins out a long, exciting sequence of variations that features many through-the-looking-glass segues.

PAUL WIANCKO

Benkei’s Standing Death (2020)

Paul Wiancko wrote his string quartet Benkei’s Standing Death in 2020 on a commission from the Attacca Quartet. His piece depicts the twelfth-century Japanese warrior-monk Saitō Musashibō Benkei, who, according to legend, died “standing” while protecting a stronghold, propped up against the door by countless arrows. The first movement, “The Thousandth Encounter,” introduces Benkei. Wiancko describes the narrative portrayed in this first part of the quartet in his program note: “Benkei wanders the night on his continual quest to claim a thousand swords from arrogant and unworthy samurai. Currently one victory shy of his goal, he heads to a shrine to pray. But while crossing Gojo Bridge, he encounters Ushiwakamaru — a diminutive boy playing the flute and wearing an impressive sword. Benkei challenges him to a duel. Ushiwakamaru seems to fly as he effortlessly defeats Benkei in an astonishing display of skill and agility. The humbled warrior monk bows down and swears loyalty to the boy, vowing to serve him for the rest of his days. The boy accepts.” In Wiancko’s composition, the journey to a shrine for prayer is depicted with an edifice of plucked notes, perfectly orchestrated so that the group sounds like a single harp. For the fight scene, we hear aggressive, artillery-fire repeated notes from all of the members of the quartet. In the end, the two characters saunter off together in perfect, swaying, rhythmic synchrony.

RADIOHEAD [ARR. NATHAN SCHRAM]

2+2=5

The experimental British rock band Radiohead opened their 2003 album Hail to the Thief with a song called 2+2=5, alluding to the illogical equation that emblematizes the deceptive power of propaganda in George Orwell’s 1984. Thom Yorke, the band’s lead singer, wrote much of the album in response to the election of George W. Bush and the subsequent wars in the Middle East. Lines from 2+2=5 like “You can scream and you can shout / It is too late now / Because you have not been / Payin’ attention” critique the media’s capacity to mislead, distract, and catalyze political calamities. The band builds unstable arithmetic into the musical architecture of the song. The opening verses are arranged in lopsided metrical units of 2+2+3. When the pulse eventually becomes steadier, the short phrases themselves are grouped in sets of five that give an overly-insistent quality to the music, as if the band is saying something one too many times to drill it into our heads. In this seamlessly executed transcription by Nathan Schram, the homogeneity of the string quartet medium serves to emphasize the thrilling, dynamic crescendo that structures the track.

Program Notes by Nicky Swett

CAROLINE SHAW (b. 1982)

Three Essays (2016–2018)

Caroline Shaw has provided the following program note to accompany Three Essays:

I started writing these three “essays” while listening to the calm optimism of an audio recording of Marilynne Robinson reading from her book The Givenness of Things, but I completed it during the turmoil of the 2016 US Presidential election. The title of the first essay refers to the legendary biblical figure Nimrod, who oversaw the construction of the Tower of Babel – a city designed to be tall enough to reach heaven but which resulted in the confusion and scattering of language. This image of chaos and fragmentation, but also of extraordinary creative energy, may serve as a framework for listening to these three musical essays. The Second Essay (“Echo”) is in the spirit of a typical “slow movement” nested between two quick ones. The title touches on a number of references: the concept of the “echo chamber” that social media fosters in our political discourse; the “echo” function in the Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) programming language; and, of course, the sonic effect of an echo.

MAURICE RAVEL

String Quartet in F Major (1902–1903)

Maurice Ravel’s F major String Quartet proved divisive when it was premiered at a concert of the Société nationale de musique in March 1904. Some listeners heard it as a successful and creative use of the instruments, while others couldn’t look past the resemblance that the piece had to the Quartet in G minor written by Claude Debussy a decade earlier. The first movement of Ravel’s Quartet fills the traditional format of sonata form with a range of lush, characteristic touches. One brilliant detail is in the secondary theme, which is played in octaves by the first violin and viola and accompanied by cello pizzicatos. It is a melody that makes musical sense in multiple keys: the tune has the exact same notes in the exposition section, which is in D minor, and in the recapitulation, which is in F major. Only the cello’s plucked bassline needs to change, and suddenly the theme suggests an entirely different mood.

Program Note by Nicky Swett

CAROLINE SHAW

The Evergreen (2020)

Caroline Shaw has provided the following program note to accompany The Evergreen:

One day in January 2020, I took a walk in an evergreen forest on Swiikw (Galiano Island), off the West coast of Canada. This piece, The Evergreen, is my offering to one particular tree in that forest. I started writing music years ago as gifts for people (whether they knew it or not), or as companions to a piece of art or food or idea. It was a way of having someone hold my hand through the writing process, a kind of invisible friend to guide me through. This tree is towering, craggy, warped and knotted, wrapped in soft green, standing silently in a small clearing where the shadows are more generous to the narrow streams of sunlight that try to speak up in late morning.

Root:

What inflects the unfurling stem of one’s life as it draws time up from our roots through our twisted, articulated limbs and sprouts and blooms and leaves and surfaces and planes and points and chords and lines and tunes and angles and tangents and folds and peaks and valleys and accents and cadences and timbres and knots and burls and skin and grain and dust and breath and vapor and the memories of those who came before?

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 131 (1825–1826)

With a handful of exceptions, most of Beethoven’s cycle of sixteen quartets were composed upon the commission of noblemen — notably, Prince Lobkowitz (the six Op. 18 quartets); Count Razumovsky (the three Op. 59 quartets); and Prince Galitzin of St. Petersburg (three late quartets which became Opp. 127, 130, and 132). But upon completing the final quartet of this commission, Beethoven’s musical imagination overflowed into two further quartets, Opp. 131 and 135, his final major works, both completed in 1826. Beethoven’s secretary and close friend, the violinist Karl Holz, recounted, “While composing the three quartets requested by Prince Galitzin, such wealth of new quartet ideas flowed from Beethoven’s inexhaustible imagination that he virtually had to write the Quartets in C-sharp Minor and F Major involuntarily. ‘My dear fellow, I’ve just had another idea,’ he would say jocularly and with glistening eyes when we were out walking, and would write down a few notes in his sketchbook.”

The quartet presents a seemingly paradoxical opposition between fragmentation and integration. Despite its seven-movement architecture, the quartet is performed as an uninterrupted and kaleidoscopic continuity. Despite its elaborate branches into six different key areas, the quartet consistently recalls its roots in the key of C-sharp. And although Beethoven joked to his publisher that he had pieced together the quartet out of stolen musical fragments, the work demonstrates Beethoven’s meticulous attention to deriving links between key relationships, tempi, and even motifs: the haunting four notes of the opening fugue subject are inverted and become the commanding six-note gesture which opens the Finale.

Beethoven told Holz that Op. 131 was his favorite among his late compositions; and yet, he died before having a chance to hear it performed. However, Franz Schubert, who had helped carry Beethoven’s coffin at his funeral in 1827, asked to hear the quartet as he lay on his own deathbed a year later. His wish was granted by Holz, five days before his death. Holz described the scene in effusive terms: “Schubert was sent into such transports of delight and enthusiasm and was so overcome that they all feared for him. The C-sharp minor Quartet was the last music that he heard! The King of Harmony had sent the King of Song a friendly bidding to the crossing!”

Program Note by Peter Asimov