Quartet after quartet

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With the end of the tonal era — the era of music rooted in the tonal major-minor system — whole species of music were becoming exhausted and extinct. The string quartet, which was so abundant and flourished so well in the tonal soil, shared the same fate. The final blow was to be delivered by manifestations of anti-art, such as George Brecht's String Quartet, which consisted of musicians entering onto the stage, bowing, shaking hands and leaving. This was met with understanding, also in Poland: so much music had been composed, why keep multiplying it in vain? How honest of the author ‘not to dare offend anyone's ears’ and, moreover, ‘is not a friendly handshake more beautiful than even the most beautiful music’ (I do not give the source as I quote from memory). This was to be the definitive end of the quartet.

However, in Poland during more or less the same period — end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s — a new generation of composers came to the fore, who felt an overwhelming need of ‘offending ears’ with new, unconventional sounds. This phenomenon was given the name of sonorism and became recognised in the world as the distinguishing mark of the ‘Polish school of composition.’

In sonorism everything was subordinated to new timbre-colour qualities and their textural consequences. The radicalism of this music consisted in a total (or nearly total) elimination of the harmonic and melodic factors, in aggressive antiharmonic and antimelodic stance. Their place was taken by the sonoristic texture. The two quartets by Krzysztof Penderecki provide an excellent examples of ‘Polish sonorism’, in particular his First Quartet (1960). It is the first fully sonoristic composition for such a set of instruments, a kind of sonoristic manifesto — in those years shockingly new and greatly ‘offensive to the ears’. Constructing a composition using emancipated articulatory effects, such as various kinds of vibrato, tremolo, glissando, the highest sounds of indeterminate pitch, such as playing between the bridge and the tailpiece (on one, two, three or four strings), playing on the tailpiece, such as hitting the strings with an open palm or with one's fingers, or hitting the upper part of the violin with the heel of the bow or the fingertips — at that time this was quite sensational. The Second Quartet, written eight years later, is enriched by further articulatory and textural innovations (quartertone microintervals, special harmonics technique, irregular glissandi, tremolo effects on the sound box or the players' whistles against the instrumental. background). Stress had been transferred here from the articulatory effect alone to the textural result, the music had gained textural density and became more dynamic, and the emerging symmetry of the form provided evidence of the need to plant the raw material in a more secure ground.

Both Penderecki's quartets grew out of a rebellion against the tradition of quartet genre, which by the second half of the twentieth century had become almost the rule. In the context of that tradition, these would be more accurately described as compositions for an ensemble of four instruments inherited from the past, rather than string quartets in the strict sense of the term, implying a particular formal-content and technical-expressive optimal solutions. However, the sonoristic idiom arose not in order to restore but in order to revolutionise; freeing the timbre-colour element of sound was carried out in opposition to traditional values in music. The sonoristic episode, although it did not last long in its radical form (it reached its peak in 1969 with 1+1+1+1 by Witold Szalonek, was of importance in later periods as well, and its echo could be heard on a number of occasions in quartet compositions.

The atmosphere of the 1960s was charged with energy which favoured experimentation, exploration and discovery. Explorations in the area of harmony and form, conducted by Witold Lutosławski, turned out to be of deeper significance than the sonoristic experiments (which can finally be reduced to extending the catalogue of textures). Lutosławski's String Quartet from 1964 is of particular importance. The composer said repeatedly that his aim was to try out a technique worked out earlier, of collective ad libitum in a small instrumental cast, and to confront the possibilities of solo performance within ensemble music. This was true; however, one may suspect that behind the screen of authorial pronouncements there lay a much greater ambition — to create a new model for the genre. A model for an organically developing large room, based on contrast between two movements: the initial movement, which draws the listener in and whets the appetite, and the main movement, which culminates in fulfilment, in satisfying the hunger for music. The technique of collective ad libitum (controlled aleatorism) opened up new textural fields, shimmering rhythmically, subtle and flexible, but still based on a hard harmonic backbone. It also offered a new model of instrumental partnership, new relationship between players — in a word, a new manner of interplay within a quartet. This gives Lutosławski's quartet the importance and gravity proper to a quartet — different from the traditional one, but worthy of a great tradition.

Many learnt from Lutosławski, but nobody undertook further attempts to develop the new paradigm embodied in his Quartet. Even Lutosławski himself was aware years later that that composition did not so much open new perspectives, as closed the history of the genre, and could be regarded as its last link. In this context, the composer's words to Krzysztof Meyer: ‘what else new can yet be written after my Quartet?’ should, in my opinion, be interpreted in this way; not as a boast, but as the final farewell to the quartet as a genre.

Nineteen-seventies and the following years were years of disappointment, loss of faith in the possibility of constructing music according to the ideology of progress and of creating some more permanent, universal language. In this situation further development took a number of paths: one of them was to return to the broken ties with tradition, and to attempt to create, in good faith, a synthesis of new and old; another path took the form of distancing oneself from tradition through post-modernist gestures (Paweł Szymański's fascinating deconstructions); yet another involved concentration on working out one's own compositional language without the ambition of making it universal; lastly, there was the direction chosen more rarely, pursued with a belief in the eternal value of ‘modernity’.

All these trends, either in pure or mixed form, can be heard in the quartets composed during the last thirty years, both in those dependent on tradition (including the avantgarde tradition), and in those freed from all constraints. However, the dominant feature now is concern with the development of the individual idiom, of ‘self-realisation’ of expressing one's own ideas. The quartet has become just one of the many media to which one applies more general, wider aesthetic principles. In the words of Zbigniew Bargielski: ‘Although it is difficult to ignore the tradition that the quartet carries, it does not evoke strong emotions in me; respect should not have a paralysing effect. In essence, making use of one kind of an instrumental ensemble or another while realising my own aesthetic vision is a matter of secondary importance to me.’ Making the quartet perform tasks which do not necessarily belong to its ‘natural’ functions can significantly expand its possibilities. For instance, Zygmunt Krauze's unistic ideas apportioned within the quartet resulted in something unique — a heterophonic tissue hung out in space, as if beyond time. Or — as did Krzysztof Knittel — one can enter political discourse using the quartet: his Dorikos with the text by Zbigniew Herbert, a message from a poet whose work was banned by the communist regime, was at that time an ‘incorrect’ and highly political gesture.

For some composers the quartet was something naturally given, as if transmitted genetically; for others was a stage on the road, something which one reaches. matures into. ‘From my youngest days I have lived in the world of strings, and it is the quartet which is the essence of strings; the most natural and perfect chamber ensemble, a wonderful place in which to build one's own musical world’ — says Aleksander Lasoń, who belongs to the first group. An instance of long maturation is the case of Henryk Mikołaj Górecki. But what can a mature artist mature into? Clearly, into producing a mature quartet — one with the right tension, pitch, intensity, which the composer found in Beethoven's late works (‘it was thanks to Beethoven that I was able to write the Quartets’, was Górecki's comment to Adrian Thomas). Eugeniusz Knapik also admits that, in order to compose his only Quartet so far, he had to mature by finding the appropriate language, which could carry the gravitas required of a proper quartet, one in the spirit of Beethoven.

And there is one more quartet, one which stands by itself, different from all others, which recently had its premiere at the ‘Warsaw Autumn’ festival in 2002, and was written in the years 1991-96. This is Symphony of Rituals by Witold Szalonek: it was born of the ritual of tuning the instruments, passing through the phase of the ritual of exercise, and fulfilled in the final phase — the ritual of dance. This is music which has grown into the essence of the quartet and is as obvious as Schubert's quartets were at one time. Although this work in its conception cannot be repeated, it seems to suggest a future direction: what the quartet might become as a medium for undoing spells with sound, for a ritual exorcising of time.

For modern Polish composers the quartet has provided an exceptionally attractive range of tools of expression. One can estimate, without being far wrong, that the number of quartets written here during the last half century is likely to stand at several hundred. An important part in this development was played by the excellent ensembles which often inspired composers — in the earlier days it was the Wilanów Quartet, for the last twenty years and more — the Silesian Quartet. The Silesians themselves have in their repertory almost a hundred native works from the last few decades. At present, as never before, we have an abundance of excellent ensembles who like contemporary quartet music and want to play it. All this goes to make up the phenomenon of the Polish quartet. Is it worth honouring it with a whole day devoted to it during the Festival? — let the listener decide.

The choice of 19 compositions out of several hundred is of course only one of many possible choices. The aim of this selection was to open up a reasonably wide expanse, composed of diverse elements, which together — we hope — make up an artistic whole. The purpose now is to experience that whole together with the listener, to live through the day together, a kind of one-day retreat.

A good place to start is the Fourth Quartet (1951) by Grażyna Bacewicz; this is music which precedes the fifty-year framework by a few years, but it could be described as the visiting card of the quartet from the shores of the Vistula, dating from the days when the quartet did not have any problems with its genre identity.

Krzysztof Droba
July 2006
(Translation: Zofia Weaver)