SAMUEL BARBER
Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, 1910
Died in New York City, 1981
String Quartet, Op. 11 (1936)
A child prodigy from a musical family, Samuel Barber enrolled in the founding class at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 14. He went on to win the American Academy’s Rome Prize, which bankrolled his Italian residency from 1935 to 1937. During that time, Barber composed his String Quartet as well as an adaptation for string orchestra of the quartet’s slow movement. That Adagio for Strings launched Barber’s international career, when Arturo Toscanini conducted it on a radio broadcast in 1938. This mournful excerpt has been played at the funerals of John F. Kennedy and Leonard Bernstein, in the devastating war film Platoon, and in a televised performance at the BBC Proms four days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, cementing its status as The Saddest Music Ever Written, to borrow the title of Thomas Larson’s 2010 book on the Adagio.
Marked Molto adagio (“very slowly”) in its original quartet setting, the movement dwells on a melodic gesture of three rising notes, creating a persistent sense of unfulfilled yearning and reaching. Drawn-out suspensions in the harmonies generate waves of tension and release, while a grounded bass line progresses with glacial patience. This heart-stopping centerpiece of the quartet is framed by matching fast movements that point to Barber’s understanding of Beethoven’s intensely taut and concentrated gestures in his quartets. Some of the more unsettled intervals and folk-like colors point to the contemporary influence of Bartók.
GEORGE CRUMB
Born in Charleston, West Virginia, 1929
Died in Media, Pennsylvania, 2022
Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land (1970)
In the 1960s and ’70s, George Crumb created a series of ethereal and mystical compositions that are now hailed as landmark accomplishments in American music. It makes sense that Crumb cited Debussy as a formative influence, since both composers learned to emphasize sounds and colors for their own sake, and not just as byproducts of musical rules and formulas. Another recurring touchstone for Crumb was the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, whose surreal and haunting verses appeared in some of Crumb’s most distinctive works, including Ancient Voices of Children from 1970.
In that same banner year, Crumb composed Black Angels, indulging his fascination with numerology and religious symbolism. He dated the finished score “Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli)”— the Latin phrase for “in time of war” being a reference to the conflict in Vietnam — and he organized the music as a series of “Thirteen Images from the Dark Land.” The structural plan pits the sinister number 13 against the godly 7, with the segments grouped into three symmetrical sections labeled Departure, Absence and Return.
Musical quotations from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” Sonata complement Crumb’s own ghoulish gestures, while use of the Dies irae (Day of Wrath) plainchant reinforces the religious undertones. The sonic textures in Crumb’s music are as important as the actual notes, and here he magnified the expressive possibilities of the string quartet by amplifying the instruments, and also calling for the performers to strike percussion instruments and make vocalizations. The dark heart of the work is the central seventh section, with its disturbing shouts and unhinged trills.
ANTONÍN Dvořák
Born in Nelahozeves, Bohemia, 1841
Died in Prague, 1904
String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, “American” (1893)
Antonín Dvořák came from a small Bohemian village, where his zither-playing father was the local butcher and innkeeper. His first big hit was a set of Slavonic Dances that drew upon Czech folk music, and even a steady stream of masterful symphonies and chamber music scores in the Beethoven-Brahms tradition hardly dispelled the notion that he was a provincial composer. While his embrace of that local cultural identity cost him credibility within the German-speaking world, he found appreciative audiences further afield. In the 1880s, a series of visits to London made him a local hero, and in the next decade he made an even bigger impact in the New World.
The job that lured Dvořák away from his beloved homeland was an offer to direct the National Conservatory in New York, with a mandate to help germinate an American style of composition. Besides teaching American composers and supporting them in their efforts to bring local inspiration into their music, Dvořák incorporated “American” sounds into his own compositions from the time. After finishing the Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” in May of 1893, he took his family into the heartland for an extended summer vacation in Spillville, Iowa, a small farming town populated mainly by Czech immigrants, where he composed this String Quartet in F Major.
Dvořák recognized Native American and African American traditions as the two main sources that could provide the authentic roots of an “American” school of composition. His understanding of Indian culture was mostly indirect, gleaned from his reading of Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and from melodies that appeared in heavily edited songbooks published by Eurocentric scholars. (Dvořák did apparently encounter members of the Iroquois tribe that summer in Spillville, and he was thrilled to hear their songs and drumming firsthand.) He had the benefit of more direct contact with Black musical traditions through a student at the conservatory, Harry Burleigh, a singer and composer who introduced Dvořák to spirituals passed down from his formerly enslaved grandfather.
Spirituals and Native songs shared a reliance on a collection of tones known as the pentatonic mode, a hallmark of many folk music styles around the world (including Czech folksongs). The quartet’s opening melody, starting with a cheerful presentation by the viola, makes artful use of that pentatonic sound. The Largo movement leans into the mournful model of spirituals, showing another facet of that same pentatonic pattern, and the fiddle-like tunes of the third movement bring out yet another spin on the same basic material. The unifying presence of the pentatonic mode continues into the finale, supported here by drum-like rhythmic figures that might have owed something to Dvořák’s contact with authentic Native drumming.
© 2024 Aaron Grad