Photo by David Bazemore
Saturday, November 22, 2008
It’s commonly believed that the string quartet is the best test of a composer’s ability and can be a similarly effective test of a musician’s capabilities. One might argue that speaking eloquently about a string quartet is an equally difficult challenge, but local composer Leslie Hogan and Peter Salaff, a founding member of the Cleveland Quartet, manage to make it seem easy.
Hogan has taught music composition at UCSB's College of Creative Studies since 1995, received numerous awards for her compositions, and in 1999 cofounded the Santa Barbara new music consortium Current Sounds.
Salaff has been a member of the faculty of the Music Academy of the West since 1996, and played in the Cleveland Quartet for all of its illustrious 26 years. He has taught at multiple schools including the Eastman School of Music and the University of Concepcion in Chile. Salaff is presently director of string chamber music at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
In an informal coffee shop conversation with Caitlin Crandell, Salaff and Hogan imparted invaluable insights, discussing everything from calling Beethoven on the telephone to the difference between first and second violins (hint: there is none).
How, in your experience, would you describe the potential of the string quartet? What are the challenges it provides? Its strengths and weaknesses?
Leslie Hogan
Leslie Hogan: For a composer, it is considered one of the more difficult things to write. I’ve never been entirely sure if it is because of the enormous weight of the repertory, or other factors. If you write a string quartet, you’ve got all of the repertory from Haydn forward staring at you. And even just in the 20th century you have the Bartok quartets, the Carter quartets—works that are just astonishing.
The kinds of sounds that these composers get out of the instruments, the kinds of subtlety that are possible, make me want to write for the string quartet. As I like to tell my students, if you take the four instruments you have at least two octaves of range that all of the instruments can play in—more depending on how high the violist and the cellist can really go. So you have this possibility of having different colors just by having people trade off lines within the same range—Bartok does that.
But it’s also a very austere thing to work for because you’re working with subtleties of palate. You don’t have an orchestra, you don’t have a piano to fill things out, and if you want certain kinds of textures and certain densities of counterpoint you have to be pretty skilled. You have to really know the instruments to make that happen, because it’s really just the four people. It’s not like writing for other kinds of mixed ensembles where you can just throw in an extra instrument, saying, “Oh well, I think I’ll add a flute now.”
Peter, what about your experience? How do you see the string quartet and its potential as a tool of performance? What are the things that are wonderful about it, and what are the things that provide challenges?
Peter Salaff: I think that the quartet has a tremendous range of possibilities. In fact, I think that Beethoven wrote some of his greatest music for the string quartet. Wonderful quartets that are some of the greatest works that mankind has created. At the same time, Beethoven expanded the range of the quartet to almost an orchestral force. If we take for example the Grosse Fuge, he actually strains the abilities of the instruments. When you hear the Grosse Fuge played by an orchestra, it loses something because it becomes too easy. What he wanted was struggle.
L.H.: You lose the impact of four people working really, really hard.
P.S.: So I think there’s a tremendous potential with the string quartet. Of course you don’t have the winds, or piano, or percussion, but ideally we all learn from one another. We learn from the articulation of the piano, we learn from the air column of the winds and we try to achieve the same things with our bows. Above all we learn from the voice.
Leslie, you were talking about how the string quartet can be considered the greatest test of a composer’s ability, or one of the really good tests. Why is that? Is it just because of the limitations?
L.H.: No. It’s kind of like talking about the symphony as a genre. The quartet is right up there with the symphony in terms of demonstrating mastery of the large form, for example. If you read what some musicologists write about symphonic development from the time of Beethoven into the 20th century, they’ll talk about things that are called symphonies but they’re not “really” symphonies. The same thing happens with the string quartet. Is Stravinsky’s “Three Pieces for String Quartet” an actual string quartet? Or is it three pieces for these four strings? They’re so short and concentrated.
But at the same time, it can be really hard to get a performance of a new string quartet. So many composers now, myself included, who write string quartets that aren’t commissioned end up writing much shorter works, works that are kind of the equivalent of the orchestral overture—a 12 or 15 minute rather than a 40-minute work. Not something that could take the place of a Beethoven quartet, because that’s a lot less likely to happen. When it comes to programming, there are so many other issues that feed into it, right down to what a performance organization wants to hear, what performing quartets will play, and the opinions of the audience.
Peter, would you say that the string quartet is also an excellent test of a musician’s ability?
P.S.: Oh yes! Definitely.
Would you say that there are different challenges being a solo performer and a chamber performer. [Chamber music is music played by a small group, traditionally in a salon with an intimate atmosphere.]
P.S.: Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist of the famous Guarneri Quartet, made an interesting comment. He said that there is really chamber music in all music forms. You play chamber music when you perform unaccompanied Bach playing one voice off another. When you play a concerto, you’re really playing chamber music with the orchestra. George Szell said that he wanted his orchestra to sound like a string quartet. Chamber music permeates everything.
L.H.: The thing I love about working with the string quartet is that you always have the four individual players, but the group itself is like a single organism.
P.S.: That’s beautifully put because there are moments while you are moving together, like in a chorale, but at other times it is a conversation. It’s most often a conversation, whether a heated conversation or a loving conversation.
L.H.: It’s that intensity as a force.
P.S.: It’s a community.
L.H.: Yes, an intimate kind of communal relationship.
P.S.: That’s what excited me about music. That’s why I wanted to become a musician. When I was 11, my parents took me to hear the Juilliard and the New Music quartets. I saw them as a community interacting and I was so excited. I remember it was like they were talking to one another and it was so alive, and exuberant, and filled with emotion. It lit a fire in me.
When I’m working with groups I try to bring them together so they interact in this way about the music and really bring it across to the audience. It’s a very exciting form.
Did you grow up knowing that you wanted to play chamber music?
P.S.: I was playing violin and it didn’t mean very much to me at all until I heard these quartets. Then I started to practice and practice knowing that I wanted to become a violinist and my father would have to call me out to cut the grass and other things.
There’s something about the string quartet, just the four string instruments. It’s like a chorus—soprano, alto, tenor, bass. And you have all the strings playing off each other.
L.H.: Yes, it’s homogenous and yet it’s not.
P.S.: You have the sound of the two violins. (Someone once came up to me and asked what’s the difference between the first and second violin. I looked at my violin and said, “Oh, it’s the same instrument.” [Laughter.] Often the second violin was played traditionally in a slightly lower register than the first violin. And you have the darker sound of the viola and the cello that is the bass of the quartet.
Getting back to contemporary music, it’s very important as performers that we do perform contemporary music, the music of our time. I almost say it’s a responsibility to communicate the works of our time. We, the Cleveland Quartet, played quite a bit of modern music. We commissioned several string quartets. It is very important to be in touch with, see, and hear what is being composed today. Audiences need to put old and new works side by side to see the similarities and the differences. They’ll grow as a result.
What would you say about opportunities with really contemporary music when the composer is still alive and around to ask questions?
P.S.: That’s great. I wish we could pick up the phone and call Beethoven, or Mozart, or Bartok. It’s exciting to be able to have composers nearby and to get the different reactions from composers. I remember working really hard on a work by Takemitsu for quartet and oboe. Every note had something written on it. Either vibrato, no vibrato, crescendo, diminuendo—we worked so hard on it. Finally we arrived in Japan, jet-lagged, and then the composer came in sooner than we expected during our rehearsal and wanted to hear what it sounded like. So we played it for him, did the best we could, put ourselves into it, gave it everything we had, and the first comment was, “More romantic.” [Laughter.] He wanted all of these small elements to become something grand and large.
L.H.: It sounds to me like he was trying to micromanage. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I was listening to a student play something at a lesson one day; he was a jazz pianist, and he was playing this thing for me that he had been working on. Every note he played had a different articulation and a different dynamic—natural to the style of his jazz playing. I stopped him and said, “Let me show you something. This, what you’re playing, has the same level of detail as this piece by Babbitt.” Sometimes, a composer can be so desperate to get a particular kind of expressive quality that he over marks the score instead of putting in the most important thing or writing “espressivo” or “in a romantic style.” One of my teachers, Leslie Bassett, was a big fan of multiple adjectives. If it’s soft, put your piano, and then add something. Is it lyrical? Is it expressive? Is it sweet? What is it? Put in that information.
I find as a performer that scores with that level of detail [like the Takemitsu] can be intimidating. It’s so much work. You figure because it’s on the page it must be important to get it exactly right. It takes a tremendous level of concentration.
So what might you recommend for performers studying older pieces, like the Haydn quartets for example, that have very few markings? It’s sort of the opposite problem. One has to look at the notes and the voicing and work backward to figure out what was intended that you don’t get in the form of directions.
L.H.: It’s a historical thing. You play trying to be true to the period in which the music was written.
P.S.: Right. Exactly.
L.H.: In that sense, even a composer’s choice of tempo, when you’re dealing with the Italian, tells you something. Allegro is not fast, allegro is cheerful. So allegro ma non troppo, is cheerful, but not too much. All of these things give you clues as to how you should play something.
P.S.: Sometimes when I hear a quartet playing a work, let’s say a Mozart quartet, and it doesn’t sound quite stylistically right, I’ll tell them, “Play this like Brahms,” and they’ll play it mushier. And I’ll say, “Play it like Ravel,” and they’ll use a more shimmery vibrato to get a luster. “And now play it like Mozart,” and of course Mozart or Haydn has a more spoken style, using vibrato in a different way from how you would use it with Brahms.
I have a personal question, from my experience. I had a coach from the St. Lawrence String Quartet working with my chamber group on a Mozart quintet. Almost all of the times we were having trouble the problem could be solved by our coach saying, “Think about this like an opera,” because that is another genre that Mozart spent a lot of time working in. Do you think you can apply this as sort of a rule of thumb to other composers and works? Maybe by placing a piece in the general environment of the composer’s other works it’s easier to see what was intended?
L.H.: To some degree, yes.
Perhaps the case of Mozart works so well because, as many people describe it, the music is always talking or laughing.
P.S.: I think you can also find very operatic elements in such composers as Beethoven and Haydn as well. One sees and hears the different characters entering and leaving the stage. They are always interacting with one another. It’s incredibly important that we are aware of the vocal aspect. As string players and instrumentalists we try to sing and talk to each other through our instruments.
L.H.: The interesting thing, and I’m talking about the composers that I teach, is that when they write for strings, they’re all well aware that strings don’t have to breathe in order to play. I have to remind them that the phrases of the music have to breathe; that they should imagine that they’re singing it and have to breathe because that articulates the line and phrases in ways that can take a piece from okay to good. The ideas can be nice, but just changing the way things are phrased, singing through the lines and inserting pauses in the lines, can take it up about five notches.
P.S.: It’s so important for string players to breathe. We finish a phrase and we have to take a breath. And when leading, if we breathe together, it helps us to play together.
I oftentimes tell my students to sing. You have to breathe while you are singing. Sing everything that you’re playing. Sometimes to find an interpretation, the best thing is to sing.
L.H.: Music is about the body. Any time you play, whether you’re pressing keys at the piano or playing something else, it’s all about the sound that comes up through your body.
P.S.: I think that’s the most important thing of all.
L.H.:In writing music, we have to have that kinetic sense that the music is coming up and through the body.
P.S.: It’s wonderful the way you’re explaining that.
L.H.: I think as a musician, every time you perform or write a piece of music and have it performed, you’re putting some part of your innermost being on the line…
P.S.: Ideally.
L.H.: Out there for public consumption. It takes a certain kind of strength to say, “I can do that.”
P.S.: You have to let yourself be vulnerable. You have to let your inner self come out to touch the audience members. It you are holding back you’re not going to touch people.
L: I think that the pieces that we come back to, whether Bartok or Brahms or somebody else, are the pieces where the composer has dug deep and put that essential element down. Whereas, there are perfectly fine pieces of music that you can listen to three times and you’ve heard everything they have to say.
P.S.: When on tour, we’ve found that with Beethoven there was always more to find. You could keep digging deeper and there would always be more.
L.H.: Layer, after layer, after layer.
P.S.: Absolutely. And maybe another work, after a few performances, just didn’t have the same feeling.
How do you see the string quartet’s future? Composers sometimes seem to be moving away from classical instruments to look at new technological frontiers of music. Is the string quartet ever going to die out?
L.H.: I don’t think the string quartet is going anywhere. All of these things can be added to it, but the four instrument model is … I think it’s pretty safe. [Laughter.]
P.S.: And when you take electronic works, sometimes the mechanical just serves to offset the human element. The electronic makes the human more profound.
L.H.: One of the reasons I think the quartet is not in danger is because there are hundreds of thousands of passionately committed amateur chamber musicians. I’m part of an organization in town that holds two chamber music workshops a year.
P.S.: Wonderful.
L.H.: I know there are chamber players who would love to do nothing but string quartets, but we never have the right balance of instruments to do that. We’re either short a couple of violas or have far too many cellos, and you know, the pianists want to play too. But the passion and the dedication that these people bring to their instruments is remarkable. They all have jobs, and they practice, and they get together and play music several times a week.
P.S.: I have a very close friend who is a doctor. He works all day long and then when he gets home he picks up his violin and plays a couple of hours a night. He loves to play chamber music. It’s one of my joys to work with amateurs. These people are so passionate about the music and I love trying to help them realize their feelings about the music. It adds richness to their lives.
L.H.: And these are the people who buy tickets to chamber music concerts.
P.S.: And we’re losing audiences pretty fast.
L.H.: It’s one of the things we’ve been talking about recently in the Chamber Music Society of Santa Barbara. We’ve been thinking about increasing the size of our board so in addition to doing workshops we can have outreach.
P.S.: Music education has been cut out of public schools for the most part. On the one hand there are more students graduating from conservatories than there are jobs, and on the other hand the audiences are starting to shrink. It’s a serious problem, so outreach is really important.
L.H.: Years ago I played oboe, but in the public school that basically meant I was in the band program. Had I gone to a larger school, I would have also had the option of orchestra. So it was just big groups. It was only a few times a year, and only when we had a director who was willing to take the extra time that it took, that we could do chamber music for the annual solo and ensemble contest. I didn’t really play chamber music until my twenties and even then it was only an occasional thing, and usually contemporary.
I don’t think it’s a question of it being an elitist thing. I think it’s a question of exposure and what a music program at a school might chose to emphasize.
P.S.: Our quartet, the Cleveland Quartet, worked very hard to avoid any elitism at all. We were one of the first quartets to stop wearing tails and we would play concerts in turtlenecks and suit coats. We’d have concerts for kids and have them sit on the stage so they were nearby. We played in schools and did outreach. It was very important. That’s the last thing that Beethoven would have wanted, for only a few people to participate. He wanted his music to be universal, for all of humanity to be moved and to experience a feeling of brotherhood.
What are some of the highlights in your experiences of writing or playing string quartets?
L.H.: For me, I find that I can use the quartet as a medium to work out new ways of looking at the way music is put together. And if I can ever write anything as good as the Bartok second quartet, which is my favorite, I would be very happy. Especially the first and last movements are astonishing.
P.S.: The connection between the Bartok and the Beethoven quartets is direct. I still get chills when I think about playing the late Beethoven quartets, or Bartok’s second or sixth quartets. There’s something in this music that gives me chills when I think about it. Playing this music has been some of the greatest high points of my life.
Caitlin Crandell is an Independent intern.