John Sichel's Program Notes April 21-22, 2001  Igor Stravinsky  Three Pieces for String Quartet

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914)

 Thirteen years had elapsed between the composition of Haydn Opus 20 and that of the Mozart K 465.  Thirteen decades passed before the next work (chronologically speaking) on our program was written.  A lot had happened in the interim.  The Romantic period, with it’s emphasis on emotional expressiveness, had come and gone.  The tonal harmonic system, had become more and more chromaticized until the relationship between tonic and dominant, the basic building block of musical form, had broken down.  Debussy and his followers had rebelled against the emotionalism and dynamism of the Romantic style, writing music that aspired to be purely coloristic.  In Germany, expressionism had strained the idea of tonality to the breaking point and Schoenberg and his disciples were beginning to experiment with atonality.  Dissonance had been liberated from the necessity of resolution-- Mahler, in his 10th symphony, unleashed a chord that contained 11 of the 12 possible chromatic pitch classes, a primal cry of horror, prophetic, perhaps of the dreadful century that was to come.  And young Igor Stravinsky had unleashed the bracing primitivism of the Rite of Spring on the jaded Parisian audience,  causing a riot so severe that the police had to escort the composer secretly from the back of the theater and into the back of his hotel.
 A lot had happened to the string quartet, too.  From a commercial medium aimed at the amateur home market the quartet had been raised by Beethoven to the station of high art.  This in part reflects the Romantic period’s changing view of art:  no longer was it expected to edify and delight the public, it was now expected to astonish and to shock, and to strive for immortality.  As Beethoven remarked to a violinist who admitted being baffled by the strangeness of his late quartets: “Don’t worry, those are for tomorrow.”
 After Beethoven, the quartet suffered from the weight of his presence.  People didn’t play quartets in their home anymore, they played the piano.  Professional quartets gave occasional concerts, but new pieces were struggling to compete with the works of the past: Haydn, Mozart, and, above all Beethoven.  To write a quartet now meant to attempt the Everest of composition: the deepest, most intellectual, most philosophical, most serious of all musical genres.
 When Stravinsky wrote his Three pieces, in 1914, he was therefore being audacious not only in his use of dissonance, ostinati, stratification and all his other compositional trademarks,  but also in his very approach to the genre, for these pieces are terse, aphoristic, and-- on the surface-- almost deliberately trivial, a kind of Groucho-Marxian slap in the face to the most high-minded and refined type of piece.
 And yet they are wonderfully enjoyable in that they are the purest and most concentrated possible distillation of Stravinsky’s voice.  One might call them “Essence of Stravinsky.” The first movement is scarcely a minute long, and subjects each of the four instruments to the most severe limitations: the 1st violinist plays the same diatonic collection of 4 pitches over and over again while the 2nd violinist does the same with a different set of pitches.  Meanwhile the viola holds a dissonant drone and the cello plays a trenchant little ostinato over and over again.  The 4 repeating patterns combine and recombine in mechanistic fashion: minimalism in blessed miniature.  The effect of the whole movement is to sound like the sound track to a particularly twisted video game...a prescient sound image for 1914.
 The second movement pulls another Stravinskian specialty from his bag of musical tricks.  It juxtaposes seemingly unrelated scraps of musical material: melodies doubled in multiple octaves, nervous scraping sounds and a clownish melodic fragment accompanied by pizzicato (Stravinsky, when he later orchestrated this movement, titled it Eccentric).  Meaning is generated by the way these fragments succeed one another, fitting together like tiles in a mosaic.  The third movement is yet another classic Stravinsky device, the slow, soft, dissonant chorale.  The effect is one of emotional distance and dignified ritual and is suggestive of some of his later works.