QUINTET
Scenes from the Life of the Listener
by Stephen Deutsch © 1998
This piece is a result of a commission from the Medici String Quartet with support from Southern Arts. It arose as a result of a number of factors, chief of which are that 1997 is Schubert’s bi-centenary year, and also, that there are very few pieces composed for this particular set of instruments. In 1992 I was fortunate enough to receive a somewhat similar commission, from the Gaudier Ensemble, for an Octet, again as a companion to the more famous one by Schubert. The result was a happy one, and I embarked upon the work before you with the confidence of one who has seen an audience pleased, stimulated and moved. It doesn’t take a composer long to learn (or shouldn’t) that a piece’s likelihood of performance rests on factors not altogether dependent upon its quality (alas). For example, a symphony by an unknown composer is far less likely to be performed than his/her string quartet; it follows that a piano sonata would have an even greater chance of performance, especially if the composer is a noted pianist and plays the work him/herself. This particular situation was of course the norm until the middle of this century. There are few recorded instances of Beethoven having played anyone's music but his own, and, in this century, the compositional careers of Bartók, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff were launched on the strength of their pianistic prowess. But I digress.
As a composer who has also been called upon to write for film and television, I have learned that music often has a direct effect upon the perceptions of an audience. In the case of music for moving pictures, the intention of the composer is to make the audience feel differently about what they are watching as a result of the music’s influence on their perceptions. Much post-war concert music (classical music) for reasons too complex to be discussed here, has been defined by some as that music which eschews the power to move an audience. In fact, when I was a student, and for too many years thereafter, I lived with the dread that someone might say that my concert music sounded as film music does, that is, that it had elements of an emotional language which might cause the audience to like it or be moved by it (gasp). Many eminent composers, who might have known better, intimidated others by rather bold authoritarian assertions (and those assertions were trumpeted as gospel by an establishment which regarded the avant garde as mainstream, a curious application of Orwellian “doublespeak”). The most important of these dicta were:
• every new piece should be a new departure, involving the composer on a quest for a new artistic paradigm;
• a work’s artistic quality is in inverse proportion to its popularity.
As a music student in the 60’s I believed this and tried to compose music that wouldn’t be too much liked, simply admired for its artistic rigour. Mostly, I failed to meet these criteria and sought happy refuge in moving pictures, where my obvious deficiencies (the ability and proclivity to compose melodies, and a respect for harmony) were mostly cherished, or at worst, ignored.
Yet I was still troubled by the thought that I might be selling my artistic youth and promise short. It truly bothered me that while I might have music for a Jacobean drama broadcast with the play on Radio 3, I couldn’t pass any audition as a “serious” composer. In my youthful insecurity I thought that there might be something amiss with me artistically.
I am older now.
This Quintet is designed for an audience to appreciate. It is a complex work, full of tunes, counterpoint and harmony. It is not a pastiche, but does not shy away from using gestures known to audiences. Structurally it is reminiscent of Baroque styles. The movements are rather short and plentiful. Each movement has a single unifying idea, usually preceded by an introduction.
The piece may be ‘read’ as absolute music, or can be seen as a suite of film music cues, each accompanying a scene supplied by the listener, background music for the listener’s own script, as it were. What follows is my personal script, designed as a template, to help listeners guide their own 'films'.
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For me the spectacles come first, the fragile wire frames and the two oval lenses. The face behind, round and cherubic, curly haired, as if by Renoir. He leans out of the window and shouts a greeting to one of his many friends (was it the beer advert that planted this image?), abandoning the work which comes so easily to him. Later, playing his newest work to admirers at jolly soirées. Dying of typhus (gastric), too soon. Mourned ever after. A comforting image, this, derived from Romantic biography, the cult of the genius and the expectations of American cinema.
There is another Schubert, more complex. Franz Peter, the idolater of Beethoven, a welcome visitor at his master’s deathbed, and torch bearer at the funeral. (And what folly to have been so self-effacing not to have pressed sooner for a meeting. Had LvB not said, three weeks before his end - almost as his last words, “You, Anselm have my mind, but Schubert has my soul”?) Or Schubert as the syphilitic and insecure enthusiast, dying mere moments before his inevitable fame (hadn’t Schott, Beethoven’s publisher, asked for almost all of Schubert’s works only nine months before his death?). Or as the younger brother of Ferdinand, who would have 17 children (from 2 wives), would himself compose over forty works, and would idolise his sibling in life and beyond. Once Ferdinand wrote to Franz, having heard the clock at the Ungarische Krone in Vienna play Franz' music:
This clock delighted me not a little, when one day at dinner for the first time I heard it play one of your waltzes. I felt so strange at that moment that I really did not know where I was ; it was not only that it pleased me, it went regularly through my heart soul with a fearful pang and longing, which at last turned into settled melancholy.
It seemed to come so effortlessly, songs written on napkins in taverns, music which could move us even when played by civic clocks. Music which hangs effortlessly in the air inviting us to join with his brother in joyful melancholy. (Schubert once asked a friend, “do you know any happy music? for I certainly don’t”.) Franz Peter Schubert's music masters time for us; it can literally entrance us; it can make us genuinely care whether a theme is repeated in c# or g# (whether we know it or not).
Like everyone else, he died.
When Schubert’s effects were collected, his father signed an official inventory of his late son's possessions, as specified below:
3 cloth dress coats 9 neckerchiefs & pocket handkerchiefs
3 frock coats 13 pairs of socks
10 pairs of trousers 1 sheet
9 waistcoats 2 blankets
1 hat 1 mattress
5 pairs of shoes 1 featherbed cover
2 pairs of boots 1 counterpane
4 shirts
apart from some old music... no other belongings of the deceased are to be found.
This quintet begins with the first few bars of Schubert’s own quintet, and then departs. The listener is invited to use the music as accompaniment to their own film about Schubert (or anything else which enters their mind).
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Worry v. & n. 1. v.t. ... bite or seize, esp. at throat (rat, sheep, dog) repeatedly, shake or pull about with the teeth; attack repeatedly;... 3. v.i. give way to anxiety...
Worry eats at sleep. I'm not excessively prone to it, but sometimes it attacks. The worst time (for me) is about 4.30 in the morning. It's not like waking thought, this night worry. It isn't susceptible to lidding-down with reason. Silly, serious, and unlikely consequences for things we have yet to do, confront us, - they don't submit easily to our rationalisations. They hide under pillow and re-appear, taking no notice of the arguments we used 30 seconds ago to still them. Sometimes they emerge in groups, all speaking at the same moment, a cacophony of non-sequiturs, cross with us for not understanding their logic.
This movement worries me. It has much material in it, but it doesn't go anywhere. The fact that it is so designed doesn't help. I'll wait several weeks after the concert before I decide whether to scrap it. At least it's short. It doesn't last long enough really to bore the socks off the listener. And the first movement was quite short as well, so the audience might still be in a listening mood. But what if they don't pick up on the basic metaphor, that about "worry"? What then? Well, then I'll do what I said, wait a while, listen to the tape, and maybe re-write it, or think of another subject and compose another movement. And some of it is very hard to play. Perhaps the players are being polite to me, playing it out of charity. But how can I trust that judgment? It's so easy to be over-critical, to efface oneself into the dust. I'll sleep on it.
Other things which keep me awake in a similar way are fragments of music, bouncing about in my head, heedless of their place in the score, mindless of any attempt at conducting them into order. The same fragment might repeat over and over again, for what seem like hours. In the early days of my composing career this sort of thing never happened. My music was well stapled to the matrix of whatever system I used to compose it. But the instant one lets in a tune, say good-bye to sleep. It's a heavy cross, this tonality. Funny that this movement has never kept me awake...
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For all but eight years of my life, I have been lucky enough to live by the sea. As a child I used to take long walks with my mother between Bay Parkway and the 69th St. Ferry in Brooklyn (now defunct, as they built a large bridge there) . My memory is of especially cold, pink-sky'd days, with the sea lapping gently on the black boulders (this was before every surface in NY was spray painted), and the smell was of somewhere else (if I didn't have a cold). My sea in NY was calm and relatively quiet, compared to my bedroom. This room was overlooked by an elevated train station, and situated just above the very spot where John Travolta buys a piece of pizza in the title sequence of Saturday Night Fever. Quiet it wasn't, but the smell from Lenny's pizzeria was wonderful.
Later, when I lived in San Francisco, I would often stand under the Golden Gate bridge, watching the waves break onto different, Californian boulders and cement slabs. Here the sea is rough and windy in my memory, and I can still feel my longish hair (hey, it was 1967) mussing itself behind my view of Alcatraz.
Now I live in Bournemouth, and it takes me about ten minutes to walk to the beach. You can see the Isle of Wight from where I zig-zag down to the sea. The English Channel is big here, and above the beach there's a long esplanade stretching from near Hengistbury Head to Sandbanks, about 7 miles. I often walk some of this distance, and I've had so many good ideas come to me as I walked, that I've taken to carrying a miniature tape recorder with me, that I might speak my thoughts into it, for word-processing later. Music thoughts are harder to record in this way, as my voice describes a perfect third when I don't have a cold. For this, I use a pencil and paper, and when I reach my studio, transfer the music onto a computer.
The listener is invited to imagine a calm sea or large lake (or small one, if that's your preference), or a river (not the Danube), and see what the music does to it.
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There you are, just living your life, doing the shopping, addressing Christmas cards, more or less coping pleasantly with those hundreds of little bits of boredom that make art taste delicious and rare; there you are, and then something completely unexpected happens. A challenge. An offer. "Come with me, abandon your drudge and taste the world you were meant to have." And you look at where you are, and you see that your future will never really change unless you accept. So you say, "why not?", and you want to embark on this journey to happiness and self, the deep self only you have seen before.
But part of you is uneasy. Might it not be another something which seems good at first, but later reveals the small print, like those offers which come through your door? Is it really ecstasy you want? Anyway, you're really quite content. Everyone has things they simply 'get on with', even movie stars, even composers (especially composers, come to think on it). And what about the people left behind? What will happen to them? So you stay, and smile inside at the courage only you will know was shown. You have met your deep self, and are now on better terms.
The centre of this piece is a tango. A composer, this form embodies for me much of what can be wonderful in art. The combination of predictable meter, piquant harmonies, and passion gives us an insight into what music might become were the distinctions between classical and vernacular to disappear. Dream on.
For another listener, it might be that the tango is about entirely different things. It is a dance which is the apogee of sensuality. The tango speaks of love, and it also speaks of death.
There is yet another aspect to this movement, a footnote.
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Schubert is dead. Sad, but he would have been dead by now in any event. Loss isn't just about being dead - there are more terrible losses than our own personal demise, or even the death of those near to us. Because death is a quite natural state for humans (unless you are an American doctor, who has been taught to regard death of a patient as a failure).
The loss which prompted this music started as a scene from a film I was asked to compose, and some of the music has been taken from that score. The music was written to accompany scenes between a brother and sister, Tom & Louisa Gradgrind, as we watch them progress from their lonely childhood to their dysfunctional adulthood. They had material possessions, learnt much of the "ologies", but wanted, and wanted desperately, unconditional parental love.
I can't imagine any loss greater than the loss at the centre of an unloved child. When we see such children, part of us reaches out and part pushes away. In the child's pain, or in the guile which masks it, we remember to wince at shards of our own childhood rebuffs, even those insignificant moments later kissed away, but never totally forgotten.
There is another loss, not unconnected. It's the loss of the happy omnipotence from which all children (and some adults) suffer. Loss comes when we realise that we all of us are constantly making mistakes (when we saw this in our parents, it shook us). We lose something exquisite, childhood itself, when first we realise that we too now have to take decisions, that all of those decisions will be taken based upon insufficient evidence, and that we will nevertheless have to take responsibility for what we decide.
The hardest lesson, the biggest loss of innocence is when we realise that there is absolutely no-one to blame.
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To confess it outright, I can't dance. Not at all. I could jiggle a bit in the 60's, but there weren't any real steps then. As an incompetent in this area I am not the only composer. It is said that Prokoffiev was hopeless on the dance floor, despite composing ravishing ballets, so bad that no one would dance with him. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, he would ask women to dance, but once they had done so, few were prepared to risk his particular kind of enthusiastic foot mutilation.
My children dance naturally and happily (due in part to the encouragement of their mother, who was a professional ballet dancer), and I envy their physical spontaneity, although I sometimes wish to listen to music without someone moving energetically in my line of sight.
Dancing goes to the roots of who we are, and in every culture but our own curious "concert world", movement is wed totally to music. (Ask a young person what they do at a party.) Dancing is easier when the rhythm is regular (unless you are Balinese, or have learned the Nijinskii choreography to Le Sacre).
This movement celebrates dance, dance of a particular type. It begins with a complex rhythm (I'm a classically trained composer, after all), gives hints of a tune and then reaches a premature climax. A pause, and the real melody begins. This melody has its origin in the world of 14th century Spain, where Jews, having settled after the Islamic conquest of the peninsula, lived in great numbers, in (relative) freedom and influence. Those people were called Sephardim, as Sepharad is Hebrew for Spain. This music is subtle yet memorable, not very unlike the best dance music of that period in other parts of Europe, but flavoured with a semitic edge.
After the Christians re-established control, through the famous wars fought by Ferdinand & Isabella (who hoped to bring the catholic light to North America through Columbus' voyages), Jews were expelled from Spain. How so many of them wound up in eastern Europe is a mystery (but Koestler may have discovered the answer).
The music of the Jews of eastern Europe (Ashkenazim) is more direct than that of the Sephardim, and owes much to Slavic roots. This tradition has had a recent revival through the efforts of many "klezmer" bands, and through the enthusiasm of a famous violinist, Izaak Perlman, who has played and recorded this music, his music too, with them.
Back to the piece. After the pause several themes are introduced, all of which are in the Klezmer style (although to my knowledge are my own original material). There is a fairly successful attempt to bend them into a more sophisticated rhythm (in this case 5/8), but this doesn't last long, and the basic 2/4 pulse reasserts itself. There's even some serious counterpoint, where most of the themes rub together, and a canon at the semitone (the semitone, for goodness sake), but that’s just compositional vanity.
The piece asks us to imagine the past dancing, allowing us a glimpse of how a world where music and dance were at the centre of things (not at the concert edge) might bring us joy and fulfilment. Where my tango was designed to tease, this dance comes to us with all its banal vulnerability exposed. Inviting us.