Program Notes by Joe Gusmano

Caroline Shaw (1982 – ): Valencia

Shaw is an American composer, violinist, and vocalist. She is currently on faculty at NYU Steinhardt as an adjunct composition instructor and she has worked with a wide variety of musical artists, ranging from the Brentano String Quartet to Kanye West. Shaw began composing at the age of ten, emulating the melodies and textures of composers like Mozart, Haydn, and Brahms. As she developed her own compositional voice, she fused these melodic tendencies with more minimalist musical aesthetics.

Perhaps best known for her Pulitzer-prize winning acapella piece Partita, for 8 voices, Shaw composed Valencia as an homage to the orange. The subject of this quartet was inspired by the performance artist Glasser, who performed a piece about the simple beauty of fruit at a performance at the MoMA that Shaw attended in 2012. Shaw described this music as an “untethered embrace of the architecture of the common Valencia orange, through billowing harmonics and somewhat viscous chords and melodies.” The piece opens with a vivacious gesture in the upper strings, which play harmonics, a technique that requires a string player to lightly touch part of a string rather than pressing down on it entirely. This creates a light, airy pitch that would be otherwise too high to play using conventional fingerings. As the piece develops, the texture of the music becomes thick with deep, resonant chords that use a lot of open strings. The harmonics move from the violins down to the viola and cello, and the rhythmic motif from the beginning of the piece returns at its close.

György Ligeti (1923-2006): String Quartet No. 2

The Hungarian composer György Ligeti is one of the more influential avante-garde composers of the second half of the 20th century. He was born in Transylvania but emigrated to Austria to study music. Ligeti eventually went on to teach composition at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater. Much of his work was suppressed by Soviet officials in Hungary, where in Germany he became much more experimental with his art. Ligeti is best known for his concept of micropolyphony, or the use of many different independent melodies moving at radically different pitches and rhythms, resulting in a dense polyphonic texture.

Throughout his life, Ligeti only composed three string quartets. His final quartet uses micropolyphony, but his first two quartets are inspired by Bela Bartók’s compositional style. The five movements of his second string quartet are vastly different from one another in terms of tempo, organization, and articulation. The first movement is structured into loose, broken up sections where the second movement is much slower and lyrical. The third movement is performed entirely using pizzicato, or plucked, attacks and is reminiscent of the fourth movement of Bartók’s fourth string quartet. The fourth movement of Ligeti’s quartet crams together the musical material from the previous movements into one lightning-fast burst of notes. The fifth movement, by contrast, is much slower and stretches the themes from the third movement into much longer phrases. This final movement gives a more clear context for the form of the entire piece.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1

Beethoven composed this quartet in 1806 as part of a set of three quartets that were commissioned by the Russian ambassador to Vienna, Count Andreas Razumovsky. These quartets are known as Beethoven’s “Middle Period” quartets, along with op. 74 and 95. This first quartet is more technically challenging than his earlier quartets, and they demonstrate a clear departure from the traditional formal and melodic conventions of string quartet writing established by Classical composers like Haydn and Mozart. The three quartets from Op. 59 were initially received with some trepidation by listeners and performers, who no doubt bristled at the technical challenges and extended length of Beethoven’s more mature quartets. Eventually the public warmed up to the “Razumovsky” quartets, with one review published in 1807 saying, “The conception is profound and the construction excellent, but they are not easily comprehended.”

One significant challenge presented by the first of these quartets is the use of highly contrapuntal melodic writing, which appears towards the end of the first movement in the fugato section. Contrapuntal melodies involve two or more voices performing independent melodies at the same time. The second movement is no less daring and challenging. Beethoven gives the tempo marking “Allegro vivace e sempre scherzando,” which implies that the movement should maintain a light, tongue-in-cheek, and humorous character even as it spins into a tempestuous web of melodic figurations. He connects the dark, moody music of the third movement with the joyous fourth movement by way of a short musical segue between the two movements. The Russian theme in the final movement is no doubt an attempt by Beethoven to ingratiate himself to his benefactor.