Introduction:
Musical Madness

Irresponsible…the most disappointing episode in the entire series of [Beethoven’s] quartets.

            — American composer and critic Daniel Mason, 1947

 

Not only the greatest work Beethoven ever wrote but just about the most astonishing piece in musical literature.

            — pianist Glenn Gould in a late interview, c. 1980

 

Throughout Western music’s history, scores of pieces have stumped performers, listeners, and critics, but perhaps none more famously than Ludwig van Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge. In 1931, critic Sidney Grew catalogued some of the many words that had been used to describe the work in the century since Beethoven’s death in 1827: “dour, uncouth, inconsequential, labored, extravagant, cerebral, obscure, impracticable, foolish, mad, illogical, formless, meaningless, and experimental.” Things didn’t get much better after 1927. One critic called the piece “[a] tiresome waste of sound…one of the two works by Beethoven—the other being the fugue from the piano sonata, Op. 106—which should be excluded from performance,” while Daniel Mason continued, “through many hearings [it is] repellent if not unintelligible…[it verges] on pathological eccentricity.” A perhaps kinder musicologist (at least in his acknowledgement that the piece does, indeed, contain some motivic coherency) wrote that the opening “Overtura” section “hurls all the thematic versions at the listener’s head like a handful of rocks.”

Ignoring the especially disparaging critics, (almost) everyone is right. Though inconsequential the Grosse Fuge is not, there is no denying that the piece is cerebral, experimental, extravagant, eccentric; that it can be—at least upon first hearing—rather unintelligible. It makes sense that the work ultimately began to find its footing in the repertoire during the same decades that the composers of the Second Viennese School were breaking away from the conventions of tonality. (“Your cradle was Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge,” the artist Oskar Kokoschka wrote to Arnold Schoenberg.) Likewise, that it found attentive ears in the halls of 1950s serialist-academia is unsurprising. The same complexity that initially repelled listeners became—and remains—a large part of its attractiveness. The Grosse Fuge, though still challenging for audiences and performers alike, is now nearly universally appreciated for its transcendent, explosive vision.

Taking this all into account, it makes sense that the Grosse Fuge would be the apex of a program exploring the idea of “musical madness” in all its shocking, murderous, raucous, sexy, chaotic, and occasionally tender glory. The six works featured on this evening’s program span centuries, cross continents, and represent diverse musical voices. Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue finds the composer at his darkest and most insistent while Renaissance duke Carlo Gesualdo’s Moro, lasso (and its modern companion, Erkki-Sven Tüür’s L’ombra della croce) are aching and harmonically adventurous. In Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round, two string quartets face off ferociously while the double bass referees. Finally, my new piece for KINETIC, Borrowed Density, obsessively reimagines motives from the Grosse Fuge, making them perhaps as unintelligible as they may have sounded in the 1820s. 

Taking this all into account, it makes sense that the Grosse Fuge would be the apex of a program exploring the idea of “musical madness” in all its shocking, murderous, raucous, sexy, chaotic, and occasionally tender glory. The six works featured on this evening’s program span centuries, cross continents, and represent diverse musical voices. Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue finds the composer at his darkest and most insistent while Renaissance duke Carlo Gesualdo’s Moro, lasso (and its modern companion, Erkki-Sven Tüür’s L’ombra della croce ) are aching and harmonically adventurous. In Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round, two string quartets face off ferociously while the double bass referees. Finally, my new piece for KINETIC, Borrowed Density, obsessively reimagines motives from the Grosse Fuge, making them perhaps as unintelligible as they may have sounded in the 1820s. 

W.A. Mozart:
Adagio & Fugue

There remains no clear compositional impetus for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue, K. 546; the composer entered the Adagio into his work catalogue in 1788 as a piece “for two violins, viola, and bass, for a fugue I wrote some time ago for two pianos” (referring to K. 426, from 1783). Today, the work is most commonly performed by string quartet or string orchestra (you will hear the latter version this evening). Though brief, the Adagio is not without gravitas. The music is at turns stately, menacing, and brooding, and each time the clouds seem near parting an ominous, pulsing bass line returns threateningly. The fugue, by contrast, is insistently, anxiously energized, its subject a firm quarter-note figure followed by slithering chromatic eighth notes. Mozart almost unrelentingly maintains maximum intensity throughout the fugue, which culminates in a dramatic revving of the engine before the curtain is pulled shut with a firm, punctuating cadence in C minor.

Carlo Gesualdo:
Moro, lasso, al mio duolo

Erkki-Sven Tüür:
L’ombra della croce

Seemingly worlds away from Mozart is the seductively chromatic music of Carlo Gesualdo—the Renaissance Duke of Venosa known for the gruesome double murder of his wife and her lover—whose infamy has only added to his music’s allure in a gore-fetishizing 21st century. In the madrigal Moro, lasso, wandering and twisting harmonies contrast lilting melodic lines that flow among the voices. Disorientingly un-linear chromatic chords repeatedly halt the more flexible melismatic material; the result is at once something mystically ancient and starkly modern, voices that reach out but seem eternally unable to grasp anything firmly. L’ombra della croce is Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür’s free fantasia on Gesualdo’s “O crux benedicta.” It is a vibrant reimagining both of Gesualdo’s melodic gestures and his sound world; Tüür’s passages of layered, cascading eighth notes gradually become more dissonant and swirl into a frenzied peak of activity before receding back into the vaporous, homophonic texture with which the piece began.

Osvaldo Golijov:
Last Round

Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round for string orchestra or string nonet (performed this evening in the nonet version) celebrates the memory and channels the musical mind of Argentine Nuevo Tango master Astor Piazzolla, who died while the piece was being written. Golijov writes, “The title is borrowed from a short story on boxing by Julio Cortázar, the metaphor for an imaginary chance for Piazzolla's spirit to fight one more time (he used to get into fistfights throughout his life). The piece is conceived as an idealized bandoneon. The first movement represents the act of a violent compression of the instrument and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh…. But Last Round is also a sublimated tango dance…. The bows fly in the air as inverted legs in crisscrossed choreography, always attracting and repelling each other, always in danger of clashing, always avoiding it with the immutability that can only be acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern.” The first movement, marked “moving, urgent” and “macho, cool, and dangerous,” bursts with a motoric energy that refuses to be contained; the two string quartets taunt and confront one another, lunging and dodging as Piazzolla-inspired melodic and rhythmic motives come in and out of focus. In the second movement, threads of Piazzolla’s Milonga del Angel weave through the ensemble, trying to find their way. A blistering middle section quotes the Piazzolla tune in full in the instruments’ low registers; in the final moments of the piece, the ensemble takes on the timbre of a bandoneon as the sounds of the tango band fade into darkness.

Giancarlo Latta:
Borrowed Density

Borrowed Density, which Natalie Lin requested as a sort of companion piece to the Grosse Fuge, is written specifically for KINETIC’s instrumentation (with each member of the sixteen-piece ensemble playing his or her own part) and dedicated to the members of the ensemble. Over the course of the work’s yearlong gestation, each time I listened to the Grosse Fuge, my obsession and fascination with it—and, admittedly, my fear of it—grew until it was virtually impossible to begin writing a piece. This obsession, and perhaps a shred of fear and anxiety, made it into the piece: small motives from the Beethoven are twisted, transformed, compressed, layered, pulled apart and put back together again. Some of it will (hopefully) be recognizable, but much of it will be obscured. Part of what I ultimately wanted to capture was the incomprehensibility the Grosse Fuge projected at its premiere. Perhaps hearing the piece’s gestures obscured even further will lay Beethoven’s original in somewhat clearer relief.

Ludwig van Beethoven:
Grosse Fuge

 Not much more needs to be said of the Grosse Fuge itself. Cast in a single movement but divided internally into sections, the piece lasts only a quarter of an hour but is a massive work—operatic in its scope (indeed, it begins with an “overtura”), symphonic in its sonic range, and, above all, an unrivaled feat of compositional virtuosity. Perhaps there are as many ways of looking at the Grosse Fuge as there are of looking at a blackbird. Violinist Arnold Steinhardt of the Guarneri Quartet has described the piece as “more than music…an overwhelming act of nature.” In the poem “Grosse Fuge,” American poet Mark Doty writes, “What does it mean, chaos / gathered into a sudden bronze sweetness, / an October flourish, and then that moment / denied, turned acid, disassembling, / questioned, rephrased?” It is hard to know exactly what questions the piece poses and even harder to know if it answers them. Though perhaps mad and certainly often maddening, the Grosse Fuge is a towering artistic achievement that requires as much virtuosity from its performers and listeners as it demanded from its Creator.

 

—Notes by Giancarlo Latta (2018)