Customer Reviews

Ben Johnston String Quartets

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but until someone who is expert at explaining contemporary classical music does review it, I will just have to do. For this is very much a CD that deserves to be discussed and listened to.
I came to these quartets by Johnston with a little trepidation. Johnston has a reputation as a learned theorist. I have read that these quartets are more studied than played for Johnston's ability to, e.g., take a Partchian microtonal scale and apply serialist methods to it in a composition. Furthermore, he somehow takes that microtone series as implying a certain rhythmic sequence which is used in the piece. And let's not forget that the whole thing is in just intonation. Yikes! It all sounded so fierce.
And some of it is. And some of it has an amazingly simple beauty to it as well. The third movement of the 9th quartet, entitled simply "Slow, expressive", is like something Bach would have written if he were around to play with compositional material like this. (And anyone who doesn't think that Bach would have been playing with these kind of compositional techniques if he were alive today needs to go back and listen to more Bach).
String Quartet No. 4, The Ascent, uses Amazing Grace as the base melodic material. Bob Gilmore's liner notes talk about the three different tunings (all a type of just intonation)used in the piece. These create a "pitch world" (Gilmore's term)which seems microtonal even when it is not. Interesting stuff. But what is even more interesting to me is how Johnston creates stirring variations of that great theme. The man doesn't want us just to hear his experiments- he knows how to get us to want to hear his experiments.
I fear I may not be explaining my reaction to this CD well. This is deeply varied, beautiful and grave music. The Kepler String Quartet apparently coalesced around a performance of one of Johnston's string quartets. The composer is working with them and their intent is to issue two more volumes that will include the rest of Johnston's oeuvre in this genre. Amen to that. The twentieth centure gave us some magnificent string quartet cycles. Johnston, the Kepler Quartet and New World Records may be adding to that number.

I bought this CD initially out of curiosity about Ben Johnston as a composer of music in just intonation. I didn't know anything about it at the time.

To this date, this is the finest album in just intonation, or any other kind of microtonal music, that I have ever heard. Ben Johnston's writing demonstrated here shows him to have created some of the finest string quartet writing of the 20th century, comparable to the migthty quartets of Shostakovich or Bartok. Johnston's Quartet #4, in particular, is a masterwork.

But this music is also incredibly difficult to perform faithfully, and I can't say enough about the Kepler Quartet. They did an outstanding job with this album, which contains in it arguably some of the most difficult string quartet music that has been put down in audio format. Their attention to detail is awesome; I can tell that they spent a lot of time working out all of those mind-bending just-tuned harmonies and melodies, but in addition to the technical prowess, the performance is overwhelmingly emotional and powerful.

If you like contemporary string quartets, you'll love this album.

Ben Johnston's ten string quartets are exceptionally great music --- they are, indeed, the greatest such music composed by an American.

In his just intonation music, Johnston sweeps away the grime of centuries of forced temperaments in pitch to reveal what we might almost have always known: that the ear understands harmony far better than inventions like the piano would allow it to. The piano and most other instruments are a huge compromise, and a wretched one: they have to be out of tune to act in tune. The string instruments of a quartet tune their strings according to the way we hear; the piano does not.

Magnificently, Johnston removes pure harmonies from extinction. He resurrects something crucial, giving music back a life that we must know. Essentially, the sounds this CD represents disappeared from Western music centuries ago. This music both brings them back and extends them stunningly, revealing how much we lost, both actually and potentially, when they disappeared.

Although parts of this disc will be difficult for some listeners, other parts speak with passion, tenderness, humor, simplicity, and homeliness, with a sense of those mysteries that are both human and divine. And the performers go beyond beyond.

This CD does more than change the way we hear music. We have been listening through a glass, darkly; but now face to face. And the face smiles.

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(Musicians reading the above may recognize unacknowledged quotations (apart from the Bible). In particular, I honor Lawrence Gilman's unforgettable revelation of Charles Ives' Concord Sonata in 1939. Johnston's quartets are as important as Ives' Sonata; and I felt as Gilman wrote when I heard one of the first performances of Johnston's Fourth Quartet in the spring of 1974.)