String Quartets Nos. 1, 2 and 3

"These string quartets demand to be heard" 

FANFARE Magazine

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From The Composer:

One of my composition teachers and mentors was Stephen Albert. When I told him I was writing a string quartet-my first he bellowed back at me “How can you even think of writing a quartet after Bartok’s?!” I remember being taken aback, thinking about it for a moment or two and then responding “Stephen, then how can one possibly write symphonies after Beethoven or songs after Schubert or piano music after Chopin and Liszt?! (I write this using exclamation points as Stephen only spoke hyperbolically and thus my response had to be of the same order of magnitude of intensity.) As I remember that stopped him in his tracks.
Because either the forms are filled up and there is no more to say in them, or one concludes that they are still viable and pregnant with possibilities. Certainly the string quar tet medium remained an important medium for expression by composers at the end of the last century. Any list of them would include Lutoslawski, Brown, Druckman, Ligeti, Wernick, Crumb, Rochberg, Corigliano, Carter, Tower, Lerdahl, and Tsontakis, among others.

This CD is in some ways a response to Stephen’s outburst, although maybe mostly in jest. They are written over a time span of about thirty years and thus show a good amount of change and development in style during that time. If most composers’ outputs can be divided into three regions- beginning, middle, and ending- these three quartets fit nicely into each of those categories (unless I live like Carter to 103, which would put me still in the muddle of the middle). of today’s exceptional string quartets and are Ensemble-in-Residence at Florida International University in Miami. Their sound has been called “complex” but with an “old world flavor.” Strad Magazine described the Amernet as “…a group of exceptional technical ability.” Earlier in their career, the Amernet won the gold medal at the Tokyo International Music Competition before being named first prize winners of the prestigious Banff International String Quartet Competition.

Prior to their current position at Florida International University, the Amernet held posts as Corbett String Quartet-in-Residence at Northern Kentucky University and at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

Additionally, the ensemble served as the Ernst Stiefel Quartet-in-Residence at the Caramoor Center for the Arts.

In their 20 years on the concert stage, the four members of the San Francisco-based Cypress String Quartet played thousands of concerts together throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Praised by Gramophone for their “artistry of uncommon insight and cohesion,” and by the NY Times for “tender, deeply expressive” interpretations, they recorded over 15 albums and are heard regularly on hundreds of radio stations throughout the world. They have also been heard on the Netflix original series “House of Cards,” and collaborated with leading artists ranging from Michael Franti of Spearhead to modern dance companies.

The first is rather brash and direct: each of the movements is short and sweet and together create a satisfying unified architecture, one that builds in tension to a high point and then releases. The second, built from my piece Marimba Music (for that instrument played with four mallets and going as low as the cello), is all about variations, as I was eagerly developing my technique in this regard. The third is the most extended and varied, with rather long movements juxtaposed with very short, almost micro, movements.

String Quartet No. 1 (1975) was written while I was studying at the Yale School of Music, although I wouldn’t consider it a student work. It won an intra-school award but I can’t remember which it was. Then again, Ives said awards are for sissies. I don’t know about that, but I am still happy that it was considered a strong piece by my compositional mentors. It was first performed by the Rymour Quartet, who were then the student quartet- in-residence. The group performed the piece splendidly and made the first recording. I later was colleagues with the group’s violist and found its first violinist in the concertmaster’s chair when my piano concerto was performed in Chattanooga.

The work is in five moments almost all played without pause. The voice is energetic and exploratory in its quick alternations of the macabre and frightening, the quiet and serene, the rhythmically intense and gently lyrical. Architecture is clear, with graceful and satisfying changes of intensity. The full resources of the instruments are used, as the strings are bowed, plucked, and scraped, the bodies of the instruments are rapped and tapped, and the bow is used both normally and with the wood striking or being slid across the strings.

String Quartet No. 2 (1985) is a set of variations based on a three-part theme. The variations are gathered together in four movements, each with its own shape and mood, although cross references and relationships abound. The first movement presents the theme and four variations. The general character of these variations is improvisatory and probing. The final variation, a presto, brings the first movement to a breathless finish.

The second movement, comprised of variations 5-7, is somewhat of a continuation of the last variation of the previous movement. It moves quite quickly in steady sixteenth notes and triplets (although with a bit of rubato). This gives way to a collage cadenza; here the musical movement is again somewhat hesitant and pondering. It is characterized by quick changes of mood, from Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, MacDowell and Tanglewood Fellowships, a DAAD Fellowship, Copland Fund grants, the NEA (four times) and Koussevitzky Foundation, the Fromm Foundation, and numerous others. From 1991-1994 he was the Meet The Composer Composer-in-Residence of the Phoenix Symphony, and from 1977-1995 Music Director of the New York-based contemporary ensemble Musical Elements. Asia’s five symphonies have received wide acclaim from live performance and their international recordings. Under a Barlow Endowment for Music grant, he wrote a work for The Czech Nonet, the longest continuously performing chamber ensemble on the planet. He recently finished the opera, The Tin Angel, and Divine Madness: The Oratorio, after the eponymous books by Paul Pines, his collaborator of forty years. Daniel Asia is also a conductor, educator, and writer. He is Professor of Composition, and head of the Composition Department, at The University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music, Tucson, and is also the Director of the annual Music + Festival and Coordinator of the American Culture and Ideas Initiative. The recorded works of Daniel Asia may be heard on the labels of Summit, New World, and Albany. For further information, visit www.danielasia.net.

Praised for their “intelligence” and “immensely satisfying” playing by the New York Times, the Amernet String Quartet has garnered recognition as one Movements Two, Four, and Six, can be heard in relation to each other, a subsidiary stream in relationship to the ongoing larger structure. Two and Four are almost palette cleansers and are song-like. While movements One and Seven are deeply conversational, these are more transparent, and with a clear sense of melody and accompaniment. Movement Six is the most extended of the three, and usually presents the instruments in simultaneous pairings. It is of a playful and singing nature, with a burbling rhythm that just about runs throughout. At the same time, in its structure, and the similarity of its opening and closing, it imitates the structure of the entire work.

This quartet accepts certain influences from popular music which are absorbed into its more complex texture and language. The keen listener may hear the very occasional shard of material that may remind of something heard from a television show theme, or even the movie The Wizard of Oz. While these associations don’t leap out, they are present, even if only on a subterranean level. It is a way of raising the vernacular to the refined, the mundane to the sacred, with the goal of creating a music of deep and true engagement.

Daniel Asia has been an eclectic and unique composer from the star t. He recently received a Music Academy Award from the American Academy of Ar ts Letters and has received grants from Meet the Composer, a UK Fulbright Arts pensive, wispy, and atmospheric, to slightly mad! This section gives way to a return of the sixteenth note motion of the opening variation, but always with a degree of hesitancy.

The third movement is marked majestic and includes variation 8 and a dance-like music that has the quality of a delicately distorted pavanne. These dance-like sections always give way to the variation material. At the conclusion, a final reference is made to the very first variation.

The final movement, formed entirely of variation 9, is based on variation 4, which in turn is based on the thematic idea played in reverse. More importantly, it is based on steady sixteenth-note motion in two groups of 3 and is played as fast as possible. A middle section of a more quiet, keening music presents a brief contrast before the quick-paced music returns. Seminal ideas of the theme are heard, as all aspects of the work are drawn together as the work races to a breathless conclusion.

The work, written in 1985 while I was living in Oberlin, was supported by a grant from the Ohio State Arts Council.

When I first discussed the possibility of doing a String Quartet No. 3 (“The Seer”) with the Cypress Quartet, we spoke of the implications of working with their Call and Response series, and various possibilities of influences and works to consider “ riffing off of ”. I concluded that it would be most interesting to consider the ramifications of working in the context of Dvorak’s Op. 96, also called the “American Quartet”. I was drawn to its musical landscape, but also by the implications of Dvorak’s ties to the old world as well as his sojourns in the new. It seems to me that an American composer lives very much in this place and time, but is also strongly influenced by past associations and past music. Being American, in many respects, means integrating multiple influences and identities. Therefore, this quartet, like Dvorak’s and perhaps Ive’s, fuses various influences.

Titles always come after the fact for me. While working on this piece, I visited the Phillips Gallery in Washington D.C. I have always been drawn to the visual arts, as they are another non-verbal means of expressing that which is deeper than words can describe. There were qualities of Adolph Gottlieb’s painting “The Seer” that seemed quite analogous to my quartet. The work is mosaic like in its larger structure. Certain shapes or patterns run through the work while others stand in isolation. Seemingly incongruous panels of shapes build up a pleasing and articulate form which is complex and has multiple layers of organization.

My quartet is structured somewhat similarly. Movements One and Seven are constructed on similar materials yet have different processes of development. The First engages its materials in a process of deconstruction and then reconstitution, while the Seventh starts almost hesitantly and in dissolution, and gradually works its way towards unity and reconciliation. The music is highly rhythmic, almost motoric, and explores quite angular shifts of register and Instrumentation.

Movements Three and Five are the other parts of structural importance, but are also quite independent of each other, or of movements One and Seven, for that matter. Movement Three is whimsical and quixotic. Thus, it is full of rapid mood swings, from its almost dance-like materials, to those which are of a breezy, more superficial nature. Movement Five is an adagio, a slow and somber musical utterance. It is clear and straightforward in almost all aspects, as its rhythms are simple and plain, and its melodies sharply defined. The trajectory is defined by register, as it starts very low, rises to the heights, and at its conclusion, comes to rest in the lowest register yet again. The climax of the movement is arrived at somewhat suddenly, and sections of repose are also heard, providing textural respites on the journey.

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About the CD:

Featuring: Amernet String Quartet & Cypress String Quartet

Together, these three quartets give a wonderful view of the progression and development of this seminal composer’s compositional style generally, and in the medium of the string quartet genre specifically.

String Quartet No. 1, written in 1975, is a highly eclectic work in its stylistic inflections. In five movements of highly varied emotional content, it mixes the lyrical with the fantastic, the hyper-present with the remote, the galactically spatial with the intensely rhythmic.

String Quartet No. 2, from 1985, is in four contrasting movements, with much of it about a theme and its variations. Like the earlier string quartet, it mixes the ghostly and nightmarish with the serene and peaceful, as it pushes to the fullest the emotional and physical range of the string quartet.

String Quartet No. 3 (The Seer), commissioned by the Cyrpress String Quartet in 2006 as part of their call and response series, takes its title from Adolph Gottlieb’s eponymous painting, that sees quite analogous to my quartet. The works are mosaic-like in their larger structures. Seemingly incongruous shapes build up a pleasing and articulate form. Certain iconic shapes or patterns run through the work, while others stand in isolation. This quartet accepts certain influences from popular music which are absorbed into its more complex texture and language. While these associations don’t leap out, they are present, even if only on a subterranean level.

Praised for their “intelligence” and “immensely satisfying” playing by the New York Times, the Amernet String Quartet has garnered recognition as one of today’s exceptional string quartets and are Ensemble-in-Residence at Florida International University in Miami.

In their 20 years on the concert stage, Cypress String Quartet (CSQ) have been praised by Gramophone for their “artistry of uncommon insight and cohesion,” and by the NY Times for “tender, deeply expressive” interpretations.

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REVIEW:

Daniel Asia is a composer of fertile imagination, his music serious and, in its frequent complexity, inviting repeated listening. In his writing for string quartet, it feels like there is a concentration of expression when compared to his disc Breath in a Ram’s Horn(I interviewed Asia around that disc in Fanfare41:3).

Written while Asia was still at Yale, the First Quartet (1975) is far from a student work, and the composer himself does not consider it such. It was premiered by the Rymour Quartet, who subsequently recorded it for Albany. Here, it is the Amernet String Quartet that does the honors. The music itself is complex, unforgiving in its soundscape but simultaneously subtle and, at times, unbearably expressive. The advantage the Summit release has is Asia’s three quartets in one place, of course; the uniformly superb performance standards do not harm its claims, either. The piece is cast in five movements which are played without a break, although they are, helpfully, separately tracked. The long, slow expressive lines of the fourth movement (Lento) are particularly touching, revealing a Bergian intensity and bleeding into the enigmatic final “Misterioso”. Asia’s exploration of the sound capabilities of a quartet via extended techniques is remarkable in that one hardly notices it per se, it is actually so integrated into his musical argument and, indeed, his musical voice.

The String Quartet No. 2 (1985) is a set of variations on a tripartite theme; those variations are grouped into four movements. Asia states that it is “built from” his piece  Marimba Music. Whereas Asia’s first foray into the quartet medium was pithy (the finale, at four minutes, is the longest), the Second Quartet is far more extended, the first movement alone nearly ten minutes in duration; and, as we have seen, the movements are themselves formal segmentations of the overall variations structure. Although compositional rigor is still very much part of the formula, the overall effect is more lyrical than with the First Quartet. The superb performers here are the members of the Cypress Quartet (who in fact have been closely linked to all three quartets, and, indeed, show incredibly affinity for the music here).

It was in fact the Cypress Quartet’s “Call & Response” program of commissioned works was influential in the gestation of the Third Quartet, although it is the Amernet Quartet that performs it here. Composed in the context of a series that considered the ramifications inherent within older works, it was Dvořák’s op. 96 Quartet, “American,” that formed the basis of Asia’s inspiration, of that older composer’s links between old and new musics. Post-compositionally, Asia has linked the Third Quartet also to the abstract painting The Seerby Adolph Gottlieb, which the composer came across in Washington D. C.’s Phillips Gallery, particularly in the use of mosaic. Asia casts his work in seven movements, linking movements in a variety of ways while also including an influence from popular culture (“it is one way of raising the vernacular to the refined, the mundane to the sacred,” he says). The performance is remarkable, not least in the incredibly touching “Adagio, soulful” fifth movement, while the penultimate “Playful, cantabile” offers the equivalent of delicious shade on a hot Summer’s afternoon.

These string quartets demand to be heard, especially in performances as committed as these. Asia’s mind seems to be continuously exploring, and that freshness seeps into his scores. It is hard to imagine finer performances in finer recordings.

-Colin Clarke for FANFARE