Joshi 1

Rohan Joshi
Prof. Vajhalla
MH202
19 April 2018
Repertoire List/Rationale Paragraph
The works that I will be programming for my twentieth-century concert are, in order:
1. Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite for String Quartet
2. Bela Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet
3. Elliot Carter’s Second String Quartet
These three works, in my opinion, represent the flowering of completely different compositional
approaches to the hallowed string quartet. Many composers, famously Brahms and Faure, feared
composing string quartets due to the utter dominance of the genre by Beethoven. Nevertheless,
both Brahms and Faure composed string quartets, and both took a significant amount of time to
compose them: Brahms composed only 3 string quartets, after taking significant time
familiarizing himself with the genre through his other chamber music (notably, his sextets), and
Faure’s quartet was his very last. Berg, Bartok, and Carter are, in my view, three composers who
take quartet writing in the first half of the 20th century to its peak.
Berg’s Lyric Suite is, in his usual dodecaphonic style, unusually (as the title suggests) lyrical in
its writing. However, the compositional techniques developed in the work, owe a large part to the
classical developments made by Beethoven (a pattern we will see in all three of the composers);
Berg’s formal motivations for the work are quasi-neoclassical. The first movement is notable for
being a traditional sonata form, without the development. Rene Leibnowitz famously noted that
while there may have been a formal absence of development, Berg’s constant dodecaphonic
variation in the movement causes “everything in the movement to be developmental”.
Bartok’s fourth string quartet is without a doubt one of my favorite string quartets of all time, up
in the echelons of chamber music with Beethoven’s Op.131, and Schubert’s C major Quintet.
This work is relentless, fervent, and unstoppable in its drive. The structure of this piece, in its
five movement form, owes a lot (again) to Beethoven, but Bartok uniquely twists Beethoven’s
expansion of movements by pairing movements with each other. The entire piece ends up being
formally symmetrical (Movements I-V, II-IV, III is the center). On top of this, the harmony is
not serial/dodecaphonic. Bartok used his own, unique, harmonic system where he treats each
note of the chromatic scale equally. He aids his quest in equalizing the playing field chromatic
note by using a variety of colorful scales: in this work, octatonic/whole-tone/pentatonic scales
are widely used, as subsets of the chromatic scale. This work is a completely different approach,
both harmonically and formally to quartet writing, and has a specifically Hungarian flavor.
Regardless, the roots of the work firmly lead to Beethoven.
Finally, we end on Carter’s Second. This piece is aurally complex, virtuosic, riveting, and
shocking: for these reasons, it is grossly underplayed. Elliot Carter is [in]famous in the classical
 Joshi 2

world for developing a personal rhythmic/harmonic style that some consider overtly
complicated. In this work, Carter beautifully highlights his deconstructive methods view of
quartet writing. Each instrument of the string quartet plays a unique structural role, from the
outset of the work. The second violin serves primarily a “rhythm-based” role, while the viola is
primarily serves a “lyrical” role. In classic Carter style, when hearing instruments together, the
work sounds angular, jagged, and “incomplete”. Other instruments fill in incomplete rhythms
started by other instruments. Harmony is fragmentary, and players sit as far apart as possible on
stage as to make listeners feel as if they are playing four different works simultaneously. Of
course, Carter is also famous for introducing metric modulation in this work, but this is simply
another element of his deconstructive ability. By constantly, accurately, shifting pulse and
rhythm, Carter makes listeners have nearly nothing to hold onto. A new listener to this work
would consider it nonsensical (structure-free or meaningless), as it is nearly impossible to parse
anything from what Carter presents. However, this ungraspable chaos, this dense, structured
chaos, is exactly what Carter his listeners to hear. Indeed, Carter owes a lot to Beethoven, and
even Berg and Bartok, but it is clear that this work is a pinnacle of post WWII quartet writing.
There is no semblance of Beethoven’s classical forms in this work; rather, structure creates itself
through the meticulously crafted interaction between each instrument.