Biava String Quartet: Too Much Is Never Enough

T  oo much is never enough.”
  —  Mick Jagger.

However big the repertoire for string quartets gets, it is not possible to have too many string quartets.

The Biava Quartet performed Saturday night at the annual black-tie gala/soiree benefiting the Friends of Chamber Music in Kansas City. Approximately 250 attendees enjoyed the concert-dinner-auction event in the Kirk Hall of the Kansas City Public (Central) Library, a 1906 historic building which was renovated/restored in 2004.

The Biava Quartet was founded in 1998 at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Its members were trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, the University of Southern California, Yale University, and The Juilliard School. Currently the Biavas are the Lisa Arnhold Quartet-in-Residence at Juilliard. They were also the winners of the Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 2003.

The Quartet is named after violinist and conductor Luis Biava, who has been a mentor to members of the group. Biava is Professor at Temple University Boyer College of Music and was previously Conductor-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra. A native of Colombia, Biava was a founding member of the Philarte String Quartet and continues to play first violin with the Philadelphia Chamber Ensemble.

The Biava Quartet’s repertoire features American composers John Harbison, Mason Bates, William Bolcom, and Ezra Laderman. Last year the Quartet premiered and recorded composer Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet No. 2 ‘Demons and Angels’.


    [50-sec clip, Stacy Garrop, String Quartet No. 2 ‘Demons and Angels’, Biava String Quartet, 1.2MB MP3]

The Biavas last night gave the gala attendees a dazzling 30 minutes of ‘bon-bons’.

• Schnittke—Polka, 1980 (arr. Sergei Dreznin): parts alternately take on serious and jesting poses; extreme rubato propels the circus theatrics; sheet music available from Sikorski; 2 minutes 30 seconds of ironical hilarity in B minor;
  
• Puccini—Crisantemi (chrysanthemums), 1890: a G minor caricature written in a single night, in memory of duke Amadeo of Savoy; Puccini later reused this work in his opera Manon Lescaut; ‘pneumatic’ phrasing heightens the lyrical and dramatic effects, which alternately call into question the authenticity of theatre and of so-called ‘real’ life; Biavas’ incisiveness succeeds in animating these questions in just 5 minutes; sheet music available from MusicForStrings;
  
• Turina—Oración del Torero (Bullfighter’s Prayer), 1925: opens quietly with stealthy pizzicato (What is this bullfighter praying for?); pace progresses impulsively and reveals out-of-control impetuosity and narcissism, then gets a grip in an expansive and calming melody; sheet music available from MusicRoom;
  
• Beach—Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, Op. 80, 1916: sometimes paired with readings from poet Emily Dickinson or American Indian folk literature; coloristic American/Macdowellian whimsy at its finest; sheet music available from RecitalPublications.com;
  
• Shostakovich—Age of Gold Polka (arr. Jason Calloway): incongruous dissonances that opine that ‘stuff happens’, humans are never really ‘in control’ of anything.

The Biava Quartet’s pacing is edgy and precise, neat, white-knuckled—exciting. Passages played expressively in other settings (conventional concerts; recordings) here come across as paradoxically stern (watch violinist Hyunsu Ko furrow her brow!), whereas rigid sections are in a festive mood read more lyrically and infused with humor and theatricality. The Biava Quartet devises a program that is perfect for a gala benefit!

The Biava Quartet’s members are:

• Austin Hartman, violin;
  
• Hyunsu Ko, violin;
  
• Mary Persin, viola;
  
• Jason Calloway, cello

This coming week the Biavas will be performing at the Juilliard String Quartet Seminar in New York. (Probably the repertoire there will be not quite so jocular as at the gala?)

It should go without saying that there is no ‘affluenza’ of string quartets, anymore than there is an affluenza of paintings or photographs or films: the threshhold of unmet market demand for excellent string quartets is still higher than the current supply. Instead of the growing classical musical wealth freeing us from ‘materialist’ preoccupations, it has the opposite effect—of making us more conscious of how much more there is to create and to have, and more conscious and less accepting of mediocrity. Not ‘acquisitiveness’ really; just a hedonistic joy in seeking out more of the experiences that the Biavas are providing!

Would there ever be ‘Enough’? If ‘enough’ means ‘satisfying desire’, ‘adequate to meet the need’, ‘sufficient’, I doubt it. What we have right now is, at best ‘in a tolerable but not super-abundant degree, denoting mere acceptableness or acquiescence, and implying a degree or quantity rather less than is desired’. As in, “This quartet was well enough, but I’m still hungry for more.”

There can never be too many string quartets—not compositions; not ensembles; not performances—especially when carried off with such panache. The Biava Quartet’s wonderful performance contributed significantly to reaching the Friends of Chamber Music’s fund-raising goals. A heart-felt thanks to the Quartet members for generously making a place for these sorts of promotional events in their busy schedule of teaching and concertizing! (It’s hard maybe for performing artists to place a value on promotion and audience development. But presenters know well how vital and valuable promotional events are. Without such events there would not be nearly so many commissions for composers, not nearly so many opportunities for up-and-coming performers and ensembles, and, ultimately, a less vibrant community in which publishers, recording companies, and presenters and other stakeholders also can thrive.)

Gala promotional events may not be ideal from acoustic or musical aesthetic perspectives, but they are a life-blood to the classical music community and privately funding chamber music in the U.S. These events are vital not only for retention and bonding with the usual, older philanthropist-patrons in the community; they are also vital for attracting new corporate sponsors, for whom the events have a certain desirable cachet.

F  ind an ‘in’. Find a Board member or even a LinkedIn connection who can introduce you [to the business person you intend to solicit for sponsorship of your chamber music organization] so you’re not ‘cold calling’. I always respond to people who come recommended by someone I know, and businesspeople do, too. Start your sentences [addressing potential corporate sponsors] in the right way. Instead of ‘This is what we do,’ say ‘[Look at this.] This is what we can do for you.’ ”
  —  Katya Andresen, NetworkingForGood, 17-MAR-2008.

Besides this, gala events also attract a fair number of under-40s who see black-tie experiences as a sort of musical ‘adventure travel’. (‘Tourism’ would be the wrong word; too passive. To this group, gala cultural events are ‘expeditions’—opportunities to visit an esoteric place and society that few members of the group would encounter otherwise; a cross-genre dual art of ‘elegant conversation and dining’-plus-‘chamber music’, ‘hybrid art’ as the Australians would say; an ‘extreme contact sport’.) Participating in a civic cultural event, clustered in dinner tables of ten, these under-40s actively create memories. The uncertainties and risks and thrills involved are very much the same sort as arise in travel abroad, to places where you don’t speak the language.

A  spirited and thoughtful volume. One of Bruner’s greatest contributions is his constructivist position, from which he views cultures as continually reinventing themselves. Tourist practices are seen as neither simulacra nor ersatz, but as active social performances in their own right. This position allows Bruner to free anthropologists from their previous impasse of thinking along the binary of authenticity-inauthenticity, a persistent focus of tourism scholarship ever since Dean MacCannell’s 1970s writing on ‘staged authenticity.’ Because culture is always emergent, alive, and in process, every cultural act is authentic.”
  —  Miriam Kahn, review of Bruner’s book, in American Anthropologist, 2004.

Not merely sight-seeing or posing as explorers, they immerse themselves; they talk with the Biavas and bid against socialites for choice live-auction items. Respectful amateur anthropologists, they conduct themselves politely and with earnestness and interest, as they would do when abroad in a foreign country. ‘Destination Culture’ enthusiasts, they take ‘tribal’ photos of the scene and of each other (discreetly on cell phone cameras, to be uploaded later and virally shared), recording the historical facts of their night’s expedition.

This sort of high-touch ‘face-to-face’ audience development (of Bruner-style active destination-cultural ‘explorers’) just doesn’t happen in conventional concert hall settings or tamer pre-/post-concert ‘socials’. There is no doubt that encounters like these are healthy for all concerned—the ‘natives’ and the ‘explorers’.

W  hat we have is a circuit of embodiments and disembodiments, a passage of vivid sensations through bodies—first extracted from perceptions and affections, then rendered perceptible in the expressive matter of the artwork, then engaged by audiences swept up into the artwork.”
  —  Ronald Boque, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, p. 170.

Basically, vigorous, civic-minded ensembles like the Biava Quartet are, through gestures like their superb, unusual performance in Kansas City last night, helping to insure the future of chamber music in this country—by revealing wider, more improvisatory, and less ‘serious’ dimensions of chamber music—to a wider audience, many of whom never imagined that these dimensions existed. Too much gratitude from us for their generosity is impossible—too much is never ‘Enough’.

• Biava Quartet
  
• Friends of Chamber Music
  
• Friends of Chamber Music photo galleries
  
• Juilliard String Quartet Seminar 2008 (19-23 MAY), New York
  
• Fuel4Arts.com
  
• Andresen K. Ten Ways to Win A Corporate Partner. NetworkingForGood, 17-MAR-2008, Fundraising123.com
  
• Watts J. Necessity and Sufficiency in the Buddha's Causal Scheme. Philosophy East and West 1982; 32: 407-23.
  
• Amy Beach page at Univ New Hampshire
  
• Ambache Chamber Ensemble. Amy Beach. (Chandos, 1999.)
  
• Boque R. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts. Routledge, 2003.
  
• Bruner E. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. Univ Chicago, 2004.
  
• Composers in the Loft. (Cedille, 2007.) [Stacy Garrop, String Quartet No. 2]
  
• Kirshenblatt-Gimblett B. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage. Univ California, 1998.
  
• MacCannell D. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Univ California, 1999.
  
• McKercher B, du Cros H. Cultural Tourism: The Partnership Between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management. Routledge, 2002.

Shadows Over Grandeur: Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor, Chaconne

O  n one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.”
  —  Johannes Brahms, letter to Clara Schumann.

DSM: Christian Tetzlaff’s new CD is phenomenal! And the Partita No. 2—the Chaconne—is gorgeous. Many virtuoso violinists’ gestures aim to arouse the eye as well as the ear. The use of slight detuning of the strings or oddly difficult bow techniques can draw attention to their skill. But Bach’s sonatas and partitas are not conducive to (or tolerant of) such showiness–which tends to support the argument that Bach wrote them for his own use. Tetzlaff’s interpretation of Partita No. 2 is deeply true to the spirit of this composition—this four-bar harmonic progression with sixty-four variations.

CMT: The length of the Chaconne—about 15 minutes—is interesting in itself. Profundity requires time. The artist has to have enough space to capture the audience's attention, plant some seeds, and let them grow. Tetzlaff handles this nicely. Nothing is exaggerated or played merely for ‘effect.’ It is personal and absorbing, poetical yet natural and unadorned. Tetzlaff captures all the tireless circumnavigations around this single idea, making you wonder at Bach’s rhetoric. In Partita No. 2, Tetzlaff evokes the melancholy beneath the Bach’s tribute to his first wife, Maria Barbara. There is pliancy, grandeur, musical freedom. Tetzlaff’s playing displays no desire for ‘show’ but only the desire to engage with the musical core of this piece.

DSM: Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor follows a ‘da chiesa’ “church sonata” pattern, in which the slow and fast movements alternate with each other. And the Chaconne is not a short story or a novella; it is a full-blown novel! A novel has enough space to support introducing and developing a number of characters. This famous Chaconne is positively monumental in its scope and scale.

CMT: The arrival of every four-bar phrase on D is a striking aspect of the Chaconne’s beauty and poignance. It’s an emphatic eternal return, as though it were a physical “law.” The impression is one of inescapability, of inevitability. There’s also the ‘monumentality’ of the sheer variety that emanates from the solo violin as the performer progresses through the 64 variations that comprise the Chaconne. The music and the soloist become an omnipotent force. The piece evokes a transcendent ‘Other’—the Divine, if you wish.

DSM: The sheer diversity of the 64 variations compels us to acknowledge the Other. The diversity is so enormous as to boggle the listener’s mind and cause the jaw to drop. Boggling not in awe at a virtuosic human performer, but in awe at the mysteries of Life, of the Universe.

CMT: All of Bach’s compositions are, in some way or other, variations on a thoroughbass. With the first statement of the four-bar theme, the harmonies first move in halves and quarters. Then they accelerate to quarters at the cadence. Then they speed up to sixteenths.


DSM: Many of the variations occur in pairs—the second, for example, is similar to the first, but intensified. The opening eight bars comprise the theme and its first repetition, where the first three bars of the second statement are identical to the first. Then it broadens in register and introduces thirty-second-note rhythms. In terms of our cognition, Bach's 'haptic update rate' and the hypermeter of the variations’ cycling are what impart this transcendent quality to the Chaconne. Have a look at Choi and Tan paper in this month’s issue of the virtual-reality journal, Presence.

CMT: This presages the predominant dotted rhythm of the next four variations. The dotted-rhythm variations occur in pairs. The first pair is diatonic; the second pair introduces chromaticism—the descending tetrachord goes from tonic to dominant. And now this! And now this! Layer upon layer! World without end!

DSM: The texture perpetually evolves throughtout the Chaconne as well. As the velocity increases, the texture diminishes from the three- and four-voiced chords at the beginning, to single-line writing later in the piece.

CMT: As the texture becomes thinner, the chromaticism increases—the introduction of F-sharp and E-flat in the eighth statement, for example—and the registral ‘span’ increases, from the tenths in the first two statements, to about two octaves in the eighth statement and beyond.

DSM: This process—where some elements diminish while others grow—adds to the sense that the meaning intended or the theme that Bach is referencing is a commentary on life itself, on Nature, on the Cosmos.

CMT: When the next few variations featuring sixteenths evolve into an ever-expanding array of bowing patterns, wider and wider articulations, my impression is one of galaxies, of a universe that is expanding, of a supernova.

DSM: When runs of thirty-seconds first appear they are slurred (mm. 65-72), then they are separately bowed (mm. 73-76). More and more intensity. More and more and more.

CMT: The changes of mode—to the grand D major and back to D minor—are accompanied by returns to the slower rhythms that we had at the opening of the Chaconne. There is a renewal, another aspect of the eternal return.


DSM: But with each rebirth we have the beginnings again of the growing speed and chromaticism and intensity. Inescapable. Inevitable. Changes of changes. Wheels within wheels.

CMT: There’s a tension—for the performer especially, but also for the listener—between the elements of articulation, tempo, affect, bowing, fingering, and other aspects of technque. The variations call upon these in different ways—increasing the importance of one or another of them and diminishing the importance of the others. This is part of the ‘novel-esque’ character of the piece. Obviously, it's also part of why the Chaconne is such a showcase for virtuosic playing.

DSM: But it would be a mistake to dwell on technique. A technically brilliant performance of the Chaconne may be emotionally empty. Instead, the tension between these demands is the source of a cast of ‘characters’ in the composition.

CMT: These are different voices, I think—not the soliloquy of a single voice. The textures of the four strings, how Bach uses the violin's four strings, are, to me, at least four different voices in this Partita.

DSM: The developments in the Chaconne are logical and yet suprising. Its inordinate novelty—novelty begetting yet more novelty—is the source of much of the piece's profundity.

CMT: There’s an inherent urgency to the Chaconne as well. Something like the remark J. Tillman made upon hearing Josh Bell play the Chaconne in the Washington D.C. subway station last January – ‘the kind of music the ship’s band was playing on the Titanic, before the iceberg.’

DSM: In other words, the Chaconne “knows” that it must end. It is anticipating the end of the universe. In the beginning there was the Big Bang. The Chaconne is showing us the approach of the Big Crunch.

CMT: Yes, this Chaconne is not sticking to the script of Church dogma in the way that Bach’s sacred music does. This Chaconne is agnostic, or even atheist in its view. We feel the finiteness of our existence on Earth and are not exhorted to believe in any life hereafter.

T o prepare for a friend’s funeral service, I had been practicing the Chaconne every day—fussing over individual phrases, searching for better ways to string them together, and wondering about the very nature of the piece—at its core an old dance form that had been around for centuries. After the many times I had heard and played the Chaconne, I had hoped it would fall relatively easily into place by now, but it appeared to be taunting me. The more I worked, the more I saw; the more I saw, the further away it drifted from my grasp. Perhaps that is in the nature of every masterpiece. But more than that, the Chaconne seemed to exude shadows over its grandeur and artful design. Exactly what was hidden there I could not say, but I would lose myself for long stretches of time exploring the work’s repeating four-bar phrases, which rose and fell and marched solemnly forward in ever-changing patterns.”
  —  Arnold Steinhardt, Violin Dreams.

F rom the grave majesty of the beginning to the thirty-second notes which rush up and down like the very demons; from the tremulous arpeggios that hang almost motionless, like veiling clouds above a dark ravine ... to the devotional beauty of the D-major section, where the evening sun sets in a peaceful valley: the spirit of the master urges the instrument to incredible utterances. At the end of the D-major section it sounds like an organ, and sometimes a whole band of violins seems to be playing. This Chaconne is a triumph of spirit over matter such as even Bach never repeated in a more brilliant manner.”
  —  Phillip Spitta.

• Christian Tetzlaff, represented by Harrison Parrott Assoc.
  
• Big Crunch wikipedia page
  
• Josh Bell in D.C. Metro, L'Enfant station, JAN-2007. Washington Post article
  
• Video of Josh Bell in D.C. Metro, L'Enfant station, JAN-2007.
  
• Beach D. Aspects of Unity in J. S. Bach's Partitas and Suites: An Analytical Study. Univ Rochester, 2005.
  
• Choi S, Tan H. Perceived instability of virtual haptic texture: III. Effect of update rate. Presence 2007; 16:263-78.
  
• Efrati R. Bach: Interpretation of the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Schott, 1993.
  
• Mastroianni J. Chaconne. Damian, 2005.
  
• Schröder J. Bach's Solo Violin Works: A Performer's Guide. Yale Univ, 2007.
  
• Schwenger P. The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects. Univ Minnesota, 2006.
  
• Tetzlaff C. Sonatas and Partitas for Violin. (Hanssler, 2007.)