For violin and viola. Excerpt from String Quartet
Back in 1988 during my third year at college in Madison, I was discovering Beethoven, string quartets, and American folk music all at the same time.
I can trace my love affair with the string quartet back to a precise moment.
In spring 1988 I was accepted into a music history class taught by the Pro Arte Quartet. It was a semester-long course on the complete string quartets of Beethoven.
Since 1940 the Pro Arte had been the quartet-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The story behind how an illustrious Belgian group ended up in an agrarian midwestern American town is the stuff of movies. Founded in 1912, the Pro Arte was making about its 30th tour to the USA when World War II broke out. The quartet was told dramatically, in an announcement during a concert’s interval that Hitler had invaded Belgium. Unable to return home, the four men were offered refuge in Madison, which they gratefully accepted. The university even committed to bringing the men’s wives from Europe to be reunited with them.
Thus an unassuming semi-rural city became the center of a powerful string playing tradition. Rudolf Kolisch, the famous left-handed violinist and brother-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg, led the Pro Arte from 1944 to 1961, championing the music of the Second Viennese School. How strange that music must have sounded to the farmers and residents of America’s dairyland. Because of the Pro Arte, celebrities like Stravinsky and Milhaud visited Madison. Amongst the many works premiered by or dedicated to the Pro Arte were Samuel Barber’s quartet, which includes the famous Adagio for Strings, and Béla Bartók’s avant-garde fourth quartet, which the Pro Arte would play at official college functions to the bewilderment and consternation of the less musical university officials.
I was utterly in love. The string quartet repertoire and genre opened up like a field of flowers to me. I listened to every string quartet recording that was in the university’s Memorial Library. I made a pest of myself befriending the Pro Arte and quizzing them about themselves, their work, their history, everything. And I learned my Beethoven.
There was a time when I swear I could have written out every Beethoven quartet by hand, I was that much immersed in them. I was exhilarated by the C-sharp minor quartet’s 7 movements, to be played without any pauses in between. I was puzzled by the Grosse Fuge, which to me made perfect sense on paper and little sense aurally. And my secret favorite was his F major first quartet, but I didn’t tell the other quartets this of course.
At the same time I was discovering the Beethoven quartets, I was also discovering American folk music. Some Sunday evenings I’d find an excuse to break off from my cohort of friends hanging out in bars (as good college boys should do) and sneak home to listen to the radio, because on Sunday evenings there were programs that exulted folk music, like Pages from a North Country Notebook, Simply Folk and A Prairie Home Companion. Though I’d always known American songs (prophetically the first piano book I ever had in Malaysia contained the likes of Dixie, Red River Valley and Stephen Foster), I now understood them in the context of the composers I was discovering who’d created their personal language out of them: Charles Ives, Carl Stalling and Aaron Copland.
Somehow, I found it really natural to compose in the style of American folk song. It’s not as anachronistic as it sounds. There is a very alive tradition of folk music writing. I even went through a phase of trying to write Mormon folksongs, thanks to the attention of a certain handsome Mormon missionary named Aaron who visited often. That’s when I formed my opinion that Mormons, who don’t drink or smoke or have coffee, are the free-range chicken of the human species. I wrote a Wisconsin cowboy lullaby, for solo piano, for a young cowboy who gave me his jacket one Homecoming football game when the weather turned.
Liberty and the pursuit was sketched during this time. With two exceptions, all the tunes are original. I was proving to myself that I could folk melodies, even though I was accompanying them with classical counterpoint. Of the two quotes, one is from Beethoven. There’s an avant-garde moment during his ‘alla danza tedesca’ movement from the B-flat quartet Op. 130 when the very folksy music suddenly becomes fragmented and jumbled up. It’s brazen. Beethoven put it near the end of his piece, and I’ve put it near the beginning.
The other quote is the bluegrass tune. Why do I love bluegrass? Who wouldn’t after years of hearing A Prairie Home Companion. The bluegrass tune (mm.68-107) is ‘John Hardy’. It’s there because I was convinced by the other folk tunes I composed, but I couldn’t write a bluegrass tune that was better than ‘John Hardy’ – so I just dropped it in.
It’s some of the brightest music I’ve ever written.
