Ben Johnston – String Quartet No. 1, "Nine Variations" (1959)
6Composer: Benjamin Burwell Johnston Jr. (1926 – 2019)
Performer: Kepler Quartet, recorded in ~2009
Johnston’s Nine Variations manifests his belief in the progressive nature of serialism and embraces it as a satisfying means of creating musical order. There is no theme per se: each of the work’s brief sections may be thought of as a transformation of an underlying idea that is never directly stated. The piece is an instance of what Schoenberg called “developing variation,” a technique by which “variation of the features of a basic unit produces all the thematic formulations which provide for fluency, contrasts, variety, logic and unity, on the one hand, and character, mood, expression, and every needed differentiation, on the other hand—thus elaborating the idea of the piece.” The key central idea here is a twelve-note row, G# A G E D# A# D B C F F# C#, which is used in each of the nine movements in various forms: in variation 1, in prime form; in variation 2, in inversion; 3, in retrograde inversion; 4, in retrograde; 5, in both inversion and retrograde inversion; 6, reordered; 7, differently reordered; 8, prime; and in variation 9, in all of these forms together. Another idea, this time clearly audible, is the motivic use of two fragments from the row, often occurring at the beginnings of movements: the “head” motif, G# A G; and the “tail” motif C F F# C#, its pitches often combined dyadically into perfect fourths and fifths. The nine movements alternate between slow and fast, or between calmness and energy, with the even-numbered variations (“Sharp,” “Impetuous,” “Assertive,” “Nervous, driving”) passing by with Webern-like rapidity. Indeed, much in the work, especially in the slower movements, recalls Webern: the short breath of the phrases, which often consist of only two or three notes; the constant fluctuations of texture and of dynamics; the poetic quality of the silences into which the sounds frequently dissolve. Against that, one might say that Nine Variations is on friendlier terms with consonance than much of Webern, and more partial to regular, danceable rhythms. There is, moreover, another important influence on the piece: John Cage, with whom Johnston (in New York that year, on sabbatical from his teaching post at the University of Illinois) was then studying. Cage looked at the manuscript and offered various suggestions which Johnston incorporated. Cage’s criticisms touched on the nature of the material (which “needed to be more pointillistic”), the form (the middle variation originally seemed “too short”) and the use of silence, which Cage felt was different than his own (although this latter point was an observation rather than a criticism). One can imagine Cage approving of the overall modernity of the piece without fully endorsing the somewhat received nature of the compositional methods used. In any event, the final score stands as one of the most satisfying of Johnston’s early compositions, and one of his relatively few straightforwardly serial works. And yet Nine Variations marks the end of a chapter in his development rather than a beginning. He used his sabbatical year in New York to take the first tentative steps in exploring an even more radical compositional approach than serialism, one that, in his own case, had been “on hold” for a decade: the use of pure, non-tempered tuning elaborated to microtonal lengths, a technique that, within a few years, he would be calling proportionality.
-From the liner notes of the Kepler Quartet’s recording.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Variation 1. Clear and concentrated
02:46 - Variation 2. Sharp
03:27 - Variation 3. Still, spacious
06:54 - Variation 4. Impetuous
07:48 - Variation 5. Fluid, pulsating
10:30 - Variation 6. Assertive
11:40 - Variation 7. Rather ominous
13:34 - Variation 8. Nervous, driving
14:29 - Variation 9. Minute, atmospheric
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