Ben Johnston – String Quartet No. 10 (1995)

Composer: Benjamin Burwell Johnston Jr. (1926 – 2019) Performer: Kepler Quartet, recorded in 2007 The opening movement of String Quartet No. 10 is a textbook sonata structure, with an exposition (repeated), a development, and a recapitulation. The exposition presents two themes, the first in a microtonally extended G minor and the second in its relative major, B-flat; in the recapitulation both themes dutifully return in the tonic. This is eighteenth-century sonata form almost to the point of caricature. The materials, however, tell a different story. The opening music is gently polyrhythmic, with both the violin 1 melody and the cello bass line implying rhythms of 3, out of synch with each other, against accompanying patterns in the inner voices in a syncopated 4. The harmony is tonal but microtonally extended in a playful way, as though the notes “between the cracks” were making a bid for independence. The fugal slow movement that follows, while formally conventional, is an exercise in richly sonorous 13-limit harmony, more tonally oriented (in an extended D minor) than in the Fifth Quartet. Then comes a robust and joyful scherzo and trio, both with the customary A and B sections, but in a rhythmic language out of the world of Nancarrow: the four players are locked throughout in a rhythmic relationship in which the measure is simultaneously divided into 4 beats (violin 1), 5 beats (violin 2), 6 beats (viola) and 7 beats (cello); only on the downbeats do the players’ notes actually coincide. For the musicians this is certainly difficult but, as we hear here, not impossible; the dance-like nature of the music (a quality found in much of Johnston’s output) seems to propel the music along, with the barline serving as a kind of rhythmic anchor. The finale, as Johnston described it to the members of the Kepler Quartet (who premiered String Quartet No. 10), is a “sort of a music history essay, period- by-period.” The opening, in a lilting 6/8 metre, resembles a Renaissance dance tune complete with tabor accompaniment (the viola playing col legno battuto), but also suggests the quasi-antique style occasionally found in the music of Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison. A brief but elegant middle section in 4/4, beginning here at 4′ 37″, seems to move the music a century or two onward, while maintaining the translucent harmonic character of the movement’s opening (5-limit triadic just tuning, with an occasional 7-limit interval in passing). Then—to our astonished ears—the music segues into the mid-nineteenth-century traditional Irish song “Danny Boy,” in a extended harmonic world in which the 7th (and occasionally 11th and 13th) partial relationships evoke, somewhat incongruously, the harmonies of jazz. This reference is further emphasized by the walking bass line soon provided by the cello, allowing the music to—as Johnston’s generation would say—let its hair down. And yet the emergence of this tune, unexpected as it is, has a rational explanation: the whole movement has in fact been a set of variations on it, with the opening Renaissance-like theme being a strict inversion of the “Danny Boy” melody and the other material directly derived from it. This is a kind of hidden ingenuity of the kind found in serialism but also in medieval and Renaissance music; in the present context Johnston’s variations seem in the spirit of both of these and more. The sense of joyful abandon that the music finds as it progresses comes to an unexpected end. After the second time through the “Danny Boy” melody, the players come to rest, very quietly, on an open string—D in the case of violin 1, G for violin 2, C for viola and low C for cello. They sustain this while playing a glissando of harmonics with the left hand. The effect is striking: it is, in this context, as though the history of music has ended and all that is left is pure tone—tone with all its resonant properties, its inner, hidden, spectral structure, now fully audible. -From the liner notes of the Kepler Quartet’s recording. Timestamps: 00:00 Preface 00:14 Brisk, intent 06:02 Solemn 09:38 Deliberate but as fast as possible 12:15 Sprightly, not too fast