Schubert’s youthful appetite for chamber music—he was barely 13 when he wrote his first string quartet—was nourished by the happy circumstance of having a family quartet under his own roof. His brother Ferdinand fondly recalled the “uncommon pleasure” of playing first violin to young Franz’s viola, while their brother Ignaz and their father rounded out the ensemble. There was no question of who was in charge: “Whenever a mistake was made, were it ever so small, [Franz] would look the guilty one in the face, either seriously or sometimes with a smile; if Papa, who played the cello, was in the wrong, he would say nothing at first, but if the mistake was repeated, he would say quite shyly and smilingly: ‘Sir, there must be a mistake somewhere!’ and our good father would gladly be taught by him.”
The comparatively modest demands made by the dozen or so string quartets that Schubert wrote in his teenage years presumably strained neither his father’s instrumental technique nor domestic harmony. But when the composer returned to the quartet medium in December 1820 after a hiatus of about four years, his musical language had evolved far beyond the capacities of the average amateur musician. Indeed, Schubert himself seems to have been somewhat overwhelmed by his newfound range and intensity of expression. After completing the first movement of his C-minor quartet and drafting some 40 bars of a slow movement in A-flat major, he either set the score aside temporarily or abandoned it altogether. The “Quartettsatz” (“Quartet Movement”) remained a tantalizing torso, unpublished for more than four decades after the composer’s death. The compression of this orphaned Allegro assai is unusual for Schubert, and may offer a clue as to why he left the quartet unfinished.
Even today, the untamed dramatic power of Schubert’s music is profoundly unsettling. Like Beethoven, he felt driven to push vigorously against the envelope of the Classical style that had defined his earlier quartets. Although the “Quartettsatz” observes the conventional classical proprieties, with its two complementary themes—in darkling C minor and burnished A-flat major—and the pleasing symmetry of its almost mirror-image halves, the shifting chromaticism of the development section effectively negates a clear sense of tonal balance. Rhythmically, too, the music simmers with a repressed, pulsating energy that periodically explodes but never quite reaches a full boil. The ending is as enigmatic as it is electrifying: The taut, swelling tremolos of the recapitulated opening theme are abruptly cut short, leaving the listener hanging on tenterhooks. The three monumental quartets of Schubert’s brief maturity lie just around the corner.
Described as “some kind of musical Thomas Edison—you can just hear her tinkering around in her workshop, putting together new sounds and textural ideas” (San Francisco Chronicle), composer Katherine Balch is interested in the intimacy of quotidian objects, found sounds, and natural processes. A collector of aural delights, field recordings are often at the heart of her work, which ranges from acoustic to mixed media and installation.
A recipient of the 2020–2021 Rome Prize, Balch has had work commissioned and performed by leading international ensembles and presenting organizations that include the New York Philharmonic, Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Tanglewood, Suntory Summer Arts, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and the symphony orchestras of Tokyo, Darmstadt, Minnesota, Oregon, Albany, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Dallas. Her music is published exclusively worldwide by Schott Music.
Balch is assistant professor of composition at Yale School of Music and holds a doctorate from Columbia University. When not making or listening to music, she can be found building windchimes, gardening, free-ranging with her flock of hens, or taking cat naps with her feline sidekick Zarathustra.
musica spolia seeks to capture the mischief, playfulness, and microcosmic world-building of childhood. I wrote this piece when living in Rome, Italy and found my own meanderings around the city as reminiscent of my dawn-till-dusk explorations of the desert canyon outside my house growing up in San Diego. The city of Rome is a pastel rendering of the brown and sage-green scraggly desert flora of my childhood. It is overgrown with spolia, like the campanula and ivy that spill out of the walls, statues, and ornate treasures that decorate the ancient monuments haphazardly, sometimes frantically. These found, recycled, or stolen materials and their misplaced, agitated energy find their way into this short piece, which I composed like my childhood hunter-gather self, collecting scraps and mementos from miniature adventures.
musica nuvola was written as a new companion piece for this version of musica spolia. In nuvola, the peculiar ensemble (two flutes, oboe, bass clarinet, percussion, and bass) depart from the same harmonic world as spolia but as one unified, long melodic line that splinters into contrapuntal dialogue. This little piece is dedicated to my friend, composer and pianist Sarah Gibson, who passed away last year. Though largely solemn in tone, it is not a piece of mourning, but rather a piece of reflection that tiptoes into the whimsy and playfulness of Sarah’s own compositional world.
—Katherine Balch
A pioneer during the emergence of electronic and electro-acoustic music, Luciano Berio drew inspiration from a well fed by sources as diverse as 12-tone music, Italian opera, and semiotics. After a hand injury sustained at the tail end of World War II thwarted his ambition to become a concert pianist, he focused his creative energy on exploring the idiosyncratic personalities of various instruments in works whose idiomatic harmonies, timbres, and gestures are often infused with a keen sense of drama.
Composed between 1985 and 1987 as a 60th-birthday tribute to Pierre Boulez, Ricorrenze was inspired by Jean Dubuffet’s lithograph Terre chaleureuse (Heated Earth), a characteristically granular, pocked image evocative of an arid moonscape. The Italian composer gnomically described his highly virtuosic wind quintet as a plant whose “form, discontinuous and irregular, is indifferent to the periodic and regular nature of the fruits distributed on its branches.” Extending the organic metaphor, Berio instructs the five musicians to line up facing the audience at least two meters apart, like an allée of trees that are at once isolated and interlinked.
The title Ricorrenze plays on the dual meaning of the Italian word as both “anniversary” and “recurrence.” Berio’s music is chock-full of recurring gestures and motifs—sharp, pointillistic pinpricks of sound, sinuous melodic curlicues, tremulous repeated notes, and periodic sustained chords—that shapeshift and collide in a process that one of the composer’s foremost interpreters describes as “aural ping-pong.” Seemingly chaotic yet tightly organized, Berio’s sound world is a sonically rich amalgam of motion and stasis in which soft, Debussyan halos of sound are punctuated by stinging tonal shocks.
Upon arriving to Vienna from his native Bonn in 1792, Beethoven wasted no time in making his mark as both composer and virtuoso pianist. Boundlessly energetic, socially well connected, and self-confident to a fault, he made no secret of his impatience to step out of the long shadow cast by his revered mentor, Franz Joseph Haydn. By 1800, his 30th year, the young tyro had an impressive clutch of masterpieces to his credit, including his First Symphony, three piano concertos, the six Op. 18 string quartets, and the Op. 20 Septet. Beethoven recognized the septet as a crowd pleaser and featured it on a concert that he produced for his own benefit at the Imperial Court Theater in Vienna on April 2, 1800. The ensemble was led by the great violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh.
The septet is scored for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, and bass—essentially a seven-piece orchestra. In a note to his publisher, Beethoven emphasized that the parts were tutti obbligati (“all essential”), impishly adding that “I can write nothing non-obbligato, for I came into this world with an obbligato accompaniment.” Although Beethoven’s music could be extremely challenging—for players and listeners alike—he was not insensitive to the public’s desire for lighter works that could be performed by amateur musicians. Nor was he averse to earning money for his publishers (and himself): He facetiously suggested that his brother Carl arrange the septet for the benefit of amateur flutists, who “would swarm around and feed on it like hungry insects.” The enormous popularity of the septet, both in its original form and in subsequent incarnations as a string quintet and piano trio, eventually came to grate on Beethoven’s nerves. In later years, Carl Czerny recalled that “he could not endure his septet and grew angry because of the universal applause with which it was received.”
After a stately introduction with graceful violin flourishes, the strings launch into a perky Allegro con brio, with the winds following closely on their heels. The ensemble’s amiable banter follows many unexpected twists and turns, including a dramatic plunge into the minor mode in the development section. The roles are reversed in the broadly lyrical Adagio cantabile; this time, the violin imitates the clarinet, with the bassoon and horn sharing the spotlight. The two middle movements pair to form a lighthearted centerpiece: a genial minuet (whose halting theme is borrowed from Beethoven’s G-Major Piano Sonata, Op. 49, No. 2) with a set of five variations on a folk-like tune. The vivacious, triple-time Scherzo comes next, with the cello stepping to the fore during the more relaxed trio section. A majestic introduction harks back to the opening Adagio and leads to a frenetic Presto, in which the violin again steals the show with its soloistic bravura.
—Harry Haskell