#ben johnston
Biffy Clyro - Edinburgh’s Hogmanay - It’s Yerselll!
Video update from Biffy on the Edinburgh’s Hogmanay Facebook page.
They are back!
London here I come
While I like to think I am not lacking in spontaneity, I live with someone who is likely to respond to a suggestion of doing something impromptu with “Is that on the calendar?” So when I found out on Thursday morning that the Del Sol Quartet was going to be performing two quartets by Ben Johnston at Constellation that evening, I wasn’t sure I’d make it there. But sometimes the unexpected works in your favor, and I’m certainly glad I didn’t miss this program.
The Del Sol Quartet (from San Francisco) has a commitment to performing new works, and has done some distinguished recordings promoting new works, including works that require just intonation tuning, something many quartets shy away from. But it was precisely those works in just intonation that made the most powerful impression their program.
The concert began with “Mureed” by Michael Harrison. Harrison has done some gorgeous music for just intonation piano, and this quartet was just as lovely, taking the listener on a kind of spiritual journey. This was followed by Aaron Garcia’s noisy, dark work that was inspired by the temporary memorials created for victims of gun violence. The players shouted and spoke while they played, and the piece was both angry and strangely consoling. This was followed, after a short pause, by Ben Johnston’s 4th String Quartet, a set of variations on the hymn “Amazing Grace.” I vividly recall hearing this work for the first time in the mid-1970s (it was composed in 1973), at a time when American art music was still in thrall to serialism and European modernism at its most dissonant and arhythmic. Johnson’s glowing consonances seemed to shimmer and shine like no other music I had ever heard, bringing tears to my eyes in the closing measures, as the hymn tune soared forth in a kind of ecstatic song. I still find it one of the most emotionally satisfying pieces of music I know. After the anger of the preceding work, it became a prayer of consolation.
After intermission, the quartet presented what they said appeared to be the Chicago premiere of the Ben Johnston Quartet #10. Like the 4th, the 10th explores various aspects of just intonation, here utilized to take the music into some strange realms of off-kiltered feelings of harmony and pitch gone awry, Certainly, anyone with “perfect pitch,” and attuned to so-called equal temperament, must find this music deeply disorienting, as Johnston shifts the focal points for tuning from pitch to pitch, and the music seems to slide off the rails as it races merrily along. Yet Johnston’s music feels so human, so real, so deeply felt and imagined, that any sense of peril is balanced by the “grace” of the human heart that beats inside the music. The last movement seems to evoke the long history of Western art music, suggesting the 14th century polyphony of Guillaume de Machaut one minute, and then evolving into a sweet version of “Danny Boy,” before dissolving in nearly inaudible harmonics. Johnston seems to imply that our lives, our intellectual pursuits, eventually are dissolved (as Shakespeare put it) “into thin air.” No other American composer, in my not-so-humble opinion, comes anywhere close to what Johnston has achieved in these quartets.
As a final work, the Del Sol played Erberk Eryilmaz’s “Hoppa! İki” - a lively piece inspired by Eastern European folk music, that included foot-stomping, and nearly turned into a wild dance. I would be happy to dance wildly with the Del Sol players anytime. What a delight!
