Ferneyhough - String Quartet No.4 (1989-90) (with score)

As in Brian Ferneyhough's Sonatas for String Quartet, which alludes (albeit obliquely) to Henry Purcell, and his Lemma-Icon-Epigram, which references Schoenberg's Opus 23 piano pieces, Ferneyhough's Fourth String Quartet (1989-90) contains within it a reaction to and consideration of an existing musical work. The work in question is again by Schoenberg, his String Quartet No. 2, Opus 10. Like Schoenberg's piece, Ferneyhough's Fourth includes two movements with soprano; the text is part of Ezra Pound's Canto LXXII and Jackson McLow's gloss on the same Canto. Like Schoenberg, Pound, and McLow, Ferneyhough's concern is with the nature of language and the use of (practical) language as an experiment in expressive purpose, and the possibility of the "mutual illumination" of the music and text. The dialog between different movements or between the quartet and the voice seems to be a discussion between the archetypal-traditional and the philosophical-speculative. That is, relative straightforward motivic presentation and development using distinct gestures in the first movement contrasts with sections of virtually static and hermetic music, like a kind of chorale, in the second, in which the voice is grafted onto a pre-existing form. The third movement (for strings alone) is again lively and involved, the four instruments examining in turn or together a melodically constrained, skittering, scale-based gesture; in some ways the movement seems to be a struggle for primacy among the parts. The fourth movement begins with similarly active material, which is taken up and transformed but which remains aggressive. The soprano in this movement is virtually independent; the voice and quartet parts overlap only by some thirty seconds before the soprano continues alone, developing eventually three levels of virtual counterpoint with quick shifts in linguistic stance, vocal register, and articulation. The strings return only for the very end of the movement. (Robert Kirzinger)

Performers: Arditti Quartet and Claron McFadden, Soprano