December 3, 2023
St. John’s Episcopal Church
Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY – USA
Eriko Sato & Sasha Margolis, violins; Liuh-Wen Ting, viola; Benjamin Larsen, cello; Susanna Eyson-Jones, soprano.
Joseph HAYDN: String Quartet in C major, Op. 46 no. 1
Marjorie MERRYMAN: String Quartet
Arnold SCHOENBERG: String Quartet No. 2
Ben Gambuzza | 6 DEC 2023
And here I was thinking that “Viennese Schools” were something of the past. Oh, how wrong I was.
The “First Viennese School” of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven gave us structure. Their music was focused on the tonic-dominant relationship, was often phrased in four-bar sections, and relied on the tripartite sonata form (I’m simplifying, of course; read Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style for more). The “Second Viennese School” of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern dismantled and rebuilt that structure. They abandoned tonality for something less predictable, arriving at atonality (music centered on no tone—random sounding). Then they arrived again, this time at twelve-tone music (centered on all tones—still random sounding, but tighter), otherwise known as serialism. As for structure, just listen to Anton Webern’s fleeting, sub-thirty-second-long fourth piece from his Five Pieces for Orchestra (1911-1913) to hear how radically they deconstructed the eighteenth century’s beloved sonata form.
By mid-century, the Second Viennese School had left Vienna. Its practitioners, Schoenberg chief among them, were exiled by the war. The style went international, evolving in the music of Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others. Then, that stream gave birth to electronic music (tape loops, etc.). But it also got trapped in the universities (Elliott Carter, The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, etc.). All the while, Manhattan’s “downtown” minimalism—influenced by the rhythms of popular music and the philosophies of the East—flourished and conquered New York, thus conquering contemporary American classical music.
Or so the story goes.
But last Sunday afternoon, at St. John’s Episcopal Church in the neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, an ad-hoc string quartet put a wrench in this tired narrative, making a convincing argument that “uptown” music didn’t die, it just went way uptown—all the way to Boston.
The program, titled “The Viennese Schools,” was part of the Concerts on the Slope series, curated by cellist Benjamin Larsen, who played in the ensemble, along with Eriko Sato and Sasha Margolis on violins and Liuh-Wen Ting on viola. It was a provocative title. After all, the centerpiece was a 1995 string quartet by Marjorie Merryman. Hardly a name of someone you’d picture eating goulash at a café on the Ringstrasse.
Marjorie Merryman (family photo)
Merriman lives in New York but taught for 23 years at Boston University, Harvard, and the New England Conservatory, recently retired from teaching composition at Manhattan School of Music, and is the 2023-24 “Concerts on the Slope” composer in residence. So, not someone one would typically associate with either “Viennese School.”
And yet, what struck me most about Merryman’s quartet, which she wrote while teaching at B.U., was how seemingly untouched it was by the developments of the day. Played by the ensemble with the enthusiasm that comes with performing a little-known piece and the hesitance that comes with the same, the quartet showed its indebtedness to both Haydn and Schoenberg. Larsen even programmed it after Haydn’s Op. 64, no. 1 quartet and before Schoenberg’s second quartet.
This was programming that made a statement.
Merryman introduced her piece, telling the audience that although she never studied with any of Schoenberg’s pupils, she was born the same year the master died (1951). I’m not trying to say she’s a second Schoenberg, but surely his influence was absorbed by her somewhere in the transmigration of their souls, if not in her studies.
It was Haydn’s soul, though, that was particularly evident in the first and second movements.
The first movement began andante, grounded by a gentle sixteenth-note ostinato in the viola, which Ting laid down with tempered elegance while the other strings split into quiet, soaring, tonally ambiguous phrases. The ensemble ramped up until it was stopped dead in its tracks by a grand pause—the kind of interruption that Haydn loved (and Beethoven emulated), especially in his quartets. The old, cold, wooden church pews creaked in the silence. The cello then launched into a drunken, angular dance-like rhythm, the kind that Beethoven played with in, for example, the last movement of his Op. 31, no. 3, piano sonata. The rest of the ensemble riffed on this idea, before coming back, in true sonata-form style, to the initial, placid material. Margolis, on first violin, frequently drowned out the other musicians, but it didn’t stop the feeling that I was listening to music in a time warp.
The second movement, a scherzo-trio, mixed the airy, lunar atmosphere of Schoenberg with the humor and imitation games of Haydn. There was a marvelous ensemble-wide pizzicato sequence that built to another grand pause. The musicians played the build-up with infectious charm and mild rubato, tamer than the similar, accelerating section of Brahms’s first symphony, last movement. I only wished the movement was longer.
The third, slow movement was the final movement. Merryman told the audience there used to be a fourth, but she got rid of it because she didn’t like it—another deviation from the classical four-movement string quartet form. It was heartbreakingly lyrical and beautiful. The musicians relished the music’s staggered suspensions in melodic phrases that built passionately and then subsided. The players, with Margolis still on first violin, finally balanced out. A tragic narrative seemed to materialize before the music died out, violins recalling the ostinato of the viola in the first movement, unwinding like a sad music box.
When I spoke to Merryman after the concert, she told me that she and her fellow Boston composers knew about minimalism. And yet, I heard no trace of its influence in the quartet. It was almost like Schoenberg had written Transfigured Night (1899), gave it to Merryman, asked, “What next?” and she composed this. She also told me that Boston didn’t have a bifurcated downtown/uptown scene like New York. They were all in it together. So, this wasn’t “uptown” music; it’s just how Boston composers in her circle were composing. What I’m wondering is whether this “Boston School” was just isolated from all the fun happening in New York, or if it was a conscious attempt to further extend the style of the Second Viennese School.
The other performances on the program gave further food for thought on that question. In the Haydn, Margolis clipped the first entrance, a pick-up (which is so similar to the beginning of Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 4 quartet, it’s scary), but nailed it with a rich tenuto the second go-around, while Larsen, whose playing is full of personality and color, provided the energetic core of the ensemble, which struck a nice contrast of moods, from sunny to surprisingly serious.
In the Schoenberg, soprano Susanna Eyton-Jones was right at home, blending with the ensemble and, despite a couple small fallings-apart between singer and players, belted out Stefan George’s Symbolist text with siren-like declamation. Sato, now on first violin, shined with a soothing vibrato and a keen ear for balance.
Pigeon-holing a contemporary composer as a member of any bygone school is useless and a waste of time. But I don’t think that’s the point Larsen is trying to make with his programming. Instead, the concert activated that uncanny feeling you experience when you hear the return of a past musical style where you don’t expect it. I see it as a comment on time itself: The “progression” of music is a fiction; any style can be used at any time.
When Larsen programs Merryman’s music again on January 21, in a concert of piano trios, maybe we’ll hear some ragtime (she did write a rag), or hell, maybe even some bossa nova. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Concerts on the Slope: concertsontheslope.org
- Marjorie Merryman: marjoriemerryman.com
Read more by Ben Gambuzza.
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