Festival of fugues.
Composers are an opinionated bunch. They especially relish their ability to contradict any music that dares be popular with the public. Contemporary composers don't hesitate to question the validity of heavyweights from the past like Haydn, and romantic ideology took a beating throughout the 20th century as musical preferences moved away from tonality. So the consensus within the community about the indisputable genius of Johann Sebastian Bach is a rare honor.
To celebrate their 10th anniversary as an ensemble last year, the Brentano String Quartet commissioned 10 composers to reflect on Bach's legacy. More specifically, they asked the composers to write short pieces in response to his Art of Fugue, a work written toward the end of his lifetime and never completed. Densely contrapuntal (in fact, the piece-titles read "Contrapunctus"), the work is an exhaustive study of combinatory possibilities of a theme in a single key (D minor). Many posit that the theme was based on the letters of his name, although whether or not this was intentional is not known. With no definitive instrumentation named, simply four staffs, the intended ensemble for the work has been a source of great debate for 150 years. It has been adopted for pianist, brass ensembles and period instrument groups, among others, but the four-part structure lends itself well to string quartets.
The unfinished aspect of this work, along with his unilateral popularity, make Bach the prime suspect for a vision such as the Brentano Quartet's. The participants represent the diversity of musical languages open to today's composers. British composer Nicholas Maw, who openly advocates that contemporary music should demonstrate a strong link to the past, chose to focus on the tonal center of D in his Intrada, imagined as a prelude to Art of Fugue, while Bruce Adolphe, a renowned composer and educator, found his particular connection in the temporal dissonances of Contrapuntus 2 in the original and used these sounds as the textural building blocks of his ContraDictions. Working in materials from the original, but foregoing Bach's lean purity for drama, Eric Zivian describes his Double Fugue as "Bach seen through a Beethovenian lens, then put through a more contemporary filter."
Composers with a strong modernist vein, such as David Horne, Charles Wuorinen and Shulamit Ran, while all attracted to Bach's formal perfectionism, reacted in highly personalized ways to the assignment. For Horne, it was the rhythmic vitality of the sixth fugue that he strove to capture in his Subterfuge. Charles Wuorinen sets extracts from Bach's piece in the atonal soundscape typical of his output. Ran, on the other hand, opted not to work outside of Bach's harmonic language, but instead delicately altered pitch relationships and context.
As a counterpoint to the formalist side, Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina develops the mystical aspects of the original, and Chou Wen-Chung, a major figure in the unique hybrid genre that combines Chinese and Western music, incorporates traditional Asian modes. Wynton Marsalis, a highly regarded Baroque trumpeter in his own right, plugs his own harmonic language into Bach's predetermined structure. Capping off the diverse list that represents different esthetic and ethnic influences is Steven Mackey's Lude, a metaphor for the position of today's composer in an historical context.
To get you in the mood for a trip through the past, the program will be performed outside at Caramoor's Spanish Courtyard, cloistered by 12th-century Byzantine columns, and embedded within the former estate of Walter Rosen and his theremin-playing wife, Lucie.
Bach Perspectives, Brentano String Quartet, Fri., June 27, at Caramoor Gardens, Katonah, NY, 914-232-1252.