PotW#142: Johnston - String Quartet no.10

Good morning everyone, happy Tuesday, and welcome back to our sub’s listening club. Each time we meet, we'll listen to a piece recommended by the community, discuss it, learn about it, and hopefully introduce us to music we wouldn't hear otherwise :)

Last time, we listened to Hosokawa’s Violin Concerto “Genesis”. You can go back to listen, read up, and discuss the work if you want to.

Our next Piece of the Week is Ben Johnston's String Quartet no.10 (1995)

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Some listening notes from Philip Clark

Ben Johnston’s got to be some kind of genius. Anyone who can simultaneously make a string quartet sound like a hyper-sophisticated electronic gizmo which IRCAM, if it’s lucky, might hope to acquire by the year 3010, and like four boiled-as-an-owl cowboys busking their way through outback folk tunes, more than satisfies Schopenhauer’s criteria about men of genius hitting targets that no one else can see – while the talented merely hit targets others find a bit tricky.

Now 84, Johnston has largely sat on the margins as composers with broadly comparable interests, such as Harry Partch, Lou Harrison and Gloria Coates, have each enjoyed their renaissance. “Johnston explored European classical music and pondered the path it might have taken if not limited by equal temperament,” the booklet-notes explain, which is as good a précis of his approach as anything I can think of.

His mature works are written entirely in just intonation – extracting melodic intervals direct from the harmonic series, thus bypassing equal temperament’s harmonic gerrymandering – and this concentration on tuning is Johnston’s portal into reimagined pasts and dizzying futures. His String Quartet No 10 (1995) hallucinates about the past lives of the archetypal Classical string quartet. Structural scaffolding, which ought to be supporting the sonata-form opening movement, wobbles like a Roobarb and Custard animation because just intonation trashes the required harmonic hierarchies; the last movement culminates with “Danny Boy” reclaimed from over-ripe pub balladry by Johnston’s even riper tuning.

And another note from New World Records:

By the time he embarked on String Quartet No. 10 in 1995 his music had evolved yet again. Johnston’s use of extended just intonation was a way of revivifying tonal relations in music without lapsing into a nostalgic appropriation of idioms from an earlier era, which has always seemed to him a kind of escapism, and aesthetically negligible.

Listening to the tenth quartet, especially on first encounter, we may feel as though we have entered a parallel universe in which Haydn has become a microtonalist with a predilection for complex proportional rhythms. The whole history of Western music flashes before our eyes—almost literally so in the last movement—but with all the colors different: seasons, decades and centuries all tumble into one another.

Ways to Listen

• The Kepler Quartet: YouTube Score Video, Spotify

• The Del Sol Quartet: Youtube Mv.1, Mv.2, Mv.3, Mv.4

Discussion Prompts

• What are your favorite parts or moments in this work? What do you like about it, or what stood out to you?

• How does this quartet compare to other string quartets you know? Especially string quartets from the latter half of the 20th century?

• Have you ever performed this before? If so, when and where? What instrument do you play? And what insight do you have from learning it?

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What should our club listen to next? Use the link below to find the submission form and let us know what piece of music we should feature in an upcoming week. Note: for variety's sake, please avoid choosing music by a composer who has already been featured, otherwise your choice will be given the lowest priority in the schedule

PotW Archive & Submission Link