BEN JOHNSTON Quartet #9 (1988) скачать в хорошем качестве

BEN JOHNSTON Quartet #9 (1988)

An electrifying performance by the LYRIS QUARTET at Pasadena's Boston Court at MicroFest 2019. I. Strong, Calm, Slow (0:35) II. Fast, Elated (7:38) III. Slow, Expressive (11:54) IV. Vigorous & Defiant (15:52) In 2012, following a MicroFest program of Ben Johnston premieres, LA Times critic Mark Swed wrote, “More than 20 years ago, the music critic John Rockwell described Ben Johnston in the New York Times as ‘one of the best nonfamous composers this country has to offer.’ What has changed is that Johnston is now, I'd suggest, our best nonfamous composer.” The 2016 release of all ten of his string quartets made headlines in the NY Times, and last year, at the age of 92, Johnston was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Is the world finally catching up to Ben Johnston? His biography reveals his early interest in intonation, as well as studies with Darius Milhaud, John Cage, and Harry Partch, though Johnston recalls Partch telling him that, "If I or anyone else ever claimed to have been a student of his, he’d cheerfully strangle us." Here is the late Bob Gilmore, treasured friend of both the composer and MicroFest, describing the work: String Quartet No. 9, completed in the summer of 1988, and premiered and first recorded by the Stanford Quartet. Much had happened in Johnston’s music in the fifteen years since String Quartet No. 4: What he calls the “humanizing” impulse behind the Fourth Quartet has intensified in his more recent music, and has become linked to a new and quite conscious immersion in earlier classical idioms. The impulse behind this is not a nostalgic one, nor is it a naïve form of postmodernism, but rather it is the exploration of a tantalizing prospect: how European music might have developed had it been freed of the constraints of equal temperament. This re-conception of earlier musical idioms in terms of extended just intonation is a form of musical revisionism, distinct in technique and intent from the neoclassicism of his earlier, pre-just intonation works. String Quartet No. 9 is an attractive four-movement piece that plays out aspects of this scenario. This is especially clear in the third movement, a lyrical and fully Classical slow movement that invokes Haydn, but with melodic embellishments that are not possible in the language of the great Austrian composer. The scherzo-like second movement perhaps suggests shades of Mendelssohn, but opens up his idiom to new harmonic adventures made possible by just intonation. The energetic finale is harder to link to any specific older style, but is nonetheless still classical in impulse (with perhaps a hint of a jazz walking bass). But the most extraordinary movement is surely the first, where Johnston achieves a real compositional tour de force in creating a six minute movement, the pitch world of which remains entirely between middle C and the C an octave above and yet retains our interest throughout. Here the richness of just intonation, with its luminous pure intervals and their microtonal variants, lets us hear as never before one of Western music’s most familiar clichés: the C major scale. Like all of Johnston’s best music, this movement looks both backward (to a musical heritage that he feels is still vital in our contemporary world) and forward, to a world of new sounds and untried harmonies that will continue to engage us as his compositional achievement becomes better known. — Bob Gilmore, editor of the award-winning collection of Ben Johnston's writings, Maximum Clarity (U. of Illinois Press, 2006).