Ben Johnston – String Quartet No. 2 (1964)
10Composer: Benjamin Burwell Johnston Jr. (1926 – 2019)
Performer: Kepler Quartet, recorded in ~2003
String Quartet No. 2 is based on a 53-note just intonation scale built from chains of perfect fifths and chains of major thirds (Johnston, following Partch, calls this a “5-limit tuning”). Because the intervals are pure and not tempered, the number of pitches in the octave is correspondingly larger. The chain of major thirds, for example, extends upward from C to E to G-sharp (and beyond), and downward from C to A-flat to F-flat (and beyond). In equal-tempered tuning E and F-flat would be the same pitch, as would G-sharp and A-flat, but here they are different: This segment of the chain of thirds, then, has five different pitches, whereas in an equal-tempered equivalent there would be only three (plus two octave duplicates). The microtonality that results from this approach to scale derivation is in fact a by-product of tuning by pure intervals. In the first movement Johnston uses a twelve-note row, a procedure that may seem almost anachronistic in this expanded pitch world; but the row is subjected to microtonal transposition as the movement progresses, and the resulting sound-world, which Johnston has characterised as “shifting and iridescent,” sounds nothing like the serial music of the 1960s. The beautiful second movement, marked “Intimate, spacious,” is considerably different in mood and technique. Because of the use of mostly consonant intervals and “diatonic” dissonances, albeit linked harmonically by unusual microtonal intervals, Johnston creates music that, as he has said, is “far closer in sound to Gesualdo than to Bach.” The calm of this movement is shattered in the finale, which contains more violent extremes than anything else in the piece—at the midpoint of the movement the music reaches a state of almost unbearable intensity. (This third movement is a palindrome, becoming a retrograde inversion of itself half way through.) The intensity of this music in fact reflects Johnston’s feelings about the era in which it was created. “If contemporary music produces images of tension and anxiety (and worse states),” he wrote in a 1963 article, “we cannot deny it is holding up a mirror. . . . A habitual psychological state of high tension such as contemporary life tends to produce is a matter for serious concern. Art can help us by bringing to recognition, analyzing and making intelligible the complex patterns of these tensions. To extend musical order further into the jungle of randomness and complexity . . . that is perhaps the fundamental aim of contemporary serious music.”
-From the liner notes of the Kepler Quartet’s recording.
Timestamps:
00:00 - Light And Quick: With Grace And Humor
04:35 - Intimate, Spacious
09:30 - Extremely Minute And Intense; Not Fast
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