FRANK STEMPER, COMPOSER
String Quartet No. 1 (1982)
One Movement [13 mins.]
Intensely Dramatic
Composed in under support of the George Ladd Prix de Paris
Premiered by the Paducah Symphony String Quartet
Opus 9
SCORE
Premiered by the Paducah Symphony String Quartet
Opus 9
SCORE
PROGRAM NOTES:
As a young self-taught Jazz piano player, hearing a string quartet, live, for the first time, changed my life. The Fine Arts Quartet playing Mozart caused an instant reaction within me. From that point forward, I was no longer interested in pursuing the piano or Jazz. I wanted to do what that bratty kid from Salzburg had done a couple hundred years before, that these four middle-aged men were recreating in Milwaukee Wisconsin, a couple hundred years later.
Initially, I was attracted to the art form: a three-tiered chain reaction: 1) a composer writes the music, editing until it was perfect; 2) The musicians fine tune the written pages, adding their subtle interpretations of nuance and clarity, refocussing the composer’s narrative; 3) Then the listeners do the third, final, and most important part. They listen, each personally internalizing its meaning and embracing the composer’s statement in their own way.
I thought that, if I could do that even once, my life would be a success.
But I was also enticed by the evolution of this art form. The composers who preceded Mozart, who one by one laid down new ideas, structures, diverse instrumental sounds, harmonic and rhythmic nuances, which allowed Mozart to write the way HE did. All kidding aside, those cavemen had something when they were banging on logs while they whistled, howled, and carried on. Then those two Frenchmen in Paris began turning their music into a written language, and others took to that idea and ran. Generation after generation of composers continually expanding the possibilities, searching for perfection. A hundred years before young Wolfgang was born, J. S. Bach re-tuned his klavier, shunning natural sound, opening up the possibilities, making way for everything that followed. Bach's ingenious new alteration was to music a little like splitting the atom was and discovering a cure for cancer will be. Mozart added his too musical sense, and the composers who followed him each added theirs, and music, like the wheels on the bus, went round and round. This is art, but it’s also science. It’s scholarly work if there ever was: i.e. digesting the the current body of knowledge in a particular field - Chemistry, Mathematics, History, Painting, AstroPhysics, etc. — and then — using the past advances to influence future advances. And so on.
This is what I was thinking about when I was a young would-be composer. I felt it was my job to push music’s boundaries. I thought that was every composer’s duty: originality and invention, and that merely making up some music within the current norm was just plagiarism. Thus, in order to accomplish all that I have just espoused, one must certainly have one foot planted in the past, balancing as the other foot lunges forward. It is a complicated conundrum, and, like any attempted description of art, nonsense.
I wrote this, my first string quartet in 1982 while living with my young family in England and France on a Ph.D. post doc from the University of California – Berkeley. I spent most of my time composing, but also a lot of time contemplating how I — a former jazzer from Shorewood Wisconsin — was going to alter the path of MUSIC! (or die trying.) In England, my wife and two small children lived in a cottage on the Coast of the North Sea in a little village called Brancaster Staithe. I composed at the home of Lady Margaret Douglas-Home. She was royalty! The widow of a former Prime Minister of England! More importantly, she had a piano, which I needed in order to compose. Every morning, I'd cram my 6'3" body into our borrowed Cooper-Mini and drive - on the wrong side of the road - to Lady Margaret's home to compose. Lady Margaret was a hoot! She'd greet me every morning and was thrilled that I was working at her home. Word got out in our small village, and a piano was moved into the local pub, and I had a paying job playing solo jazz for a slew of locals on New Years Eve 1981 — At any given time during the long evening, there were 10 or 15 pints of Guinness on top of the partially tuned upright piano. Then, in Paris’s 14th Arrondissement, I composed in the baby’s room, where we kept our cheap piano that we rented from Pianos Daudé. I also spent a lot of time walking the streets of Paris and as I did along the coast of the North Sea. I was looking for something. How far could the concept of MUSIC be stretched? And how was I going to participate in this quest? Nonsense.
String Quartet (No. 1) is the result. I think it’s extremely difficult to perform, although, in 1989 the Paducah Symphony String Quartet gave it a try. The music is purposely and consistently without an audible pulse. There is rarely a clear downbeat, and there are very few rhythmic unisons joining two or more instruments. It's chaos. Nearly every measure has a different time signature — meters, which because pulse and downbeat are not audible, are theoretically redundant! Actually, the constant switching of time signatures can only be visual and not aurally perceivable. The music is meant to be extremely over syncopated, even though syncopation — especially the jazz syncopation that is at the heart of all my music — is dependent on maintaining a clear, consistent, easily discernible pulse, that the syncopation bounces off of. And to make matters worse, within this pulseless framework, the tempo of the music changes 22 times shifting back and forth among 13 different tempos that come and go, sometimes immediate, i.e. without preparation, and often are retained for only a single bar before switching once again! No wonder the Padukah Symphony Orchestra cellist lost his place 4 or 5 times during the work’s premiere.
Regardless, I've always thought it was the best piece I've written, but it's always bewildered me - especially as I've aged. My music has mellowed a bit, as I've gotten older. I've pushed my left foot further and further back in the past. I am no longer trying to change/progress the art form. My recent music is just music. I've just written a couple of string quartets (nos. 2 & 4) that I like very much. But, while I've was writing these two quartets, I've wondered what it is about my 1st string quartet? I've been studying it. Trying to get into my 1982 head.
And I've figured it out:
Around Halloween 1987, I was at Michigan State U., as a guest composer at a symposium on new piano music. Lukas Foss was the honored celebrity Composer. Prior to the performances of the works, there were rehearsals of the pieces attended by all the guest composers. Lukas was also there and would listen and make comments. When he heard my FOUR PIANO PIECES, he told me that he presumed it was a 12-tone work. I said no it's not. He argued with me, pointing out a few things, but eventually, after I also pointed out a few things, he agreed that the piece was not serial. But then I told him that it sounds like serial music, even though there is not a system of any kind.
You see, as a student, I really took to the music of the serial composers, Schönberg and Webern, Babbitt and Boulez, etc. I loved their music, but I didn't like using their methods when composing. Composing with various mathematical methods and systems not only bored me, but I couldn't hear it. I just heard the music. And I liked it. Compared to Mozart and Duke Ellington, serial music in addition to the dissonance and pulseless rhythm. It was flat, formless, monotonously without beginning, middle, or end. This is not a criticism. This is what I loved about it. It started nowhere and went nowhere. While listening, it was almost impossible to predict what was coming next. Although the harmony was dissonant and vague, it was also very emotional, perhaps over-emotional.
So instead of composing using the appropriate and mandatory methods, I proceeded to compose serial music by ear. And that's what my String Quartet No. 1 is. Of course! So is my quintet CHAMELEON and my DOUBLE WIND TRIO, FOUR PIANO PIECES, HUMBLE CAKE, and my VIOLIN CONCERTO, and a few others written back then. Thus, as I've been studying my first string quartet I've learned about it finally. I've been pleasantly pleased with it. I've answered the conundrum that I've had about it since 1982. Not having a recording of its first and only performance, I've have created a performance by my computer. It's not bad. But it is true. It's dissonant, ugly at times, especially when I ask the players to play flatly without vibrato. The piece seems to go nowhere. Nothing seems to be predictable except that the form is mostly without purpose — just like any serial piece. But when you hear the 1st violin start the piece with the repeated pitch of - perhaps - a melody (meas. 1), listen for the recapitulation of that "melody," in bar 232.
Take a listen to my computer's "performance" of it.
P.S. As part of my musical "bucket list," I am revising my 1st string quartet. I'm re-writing it. Me at 74 years old is collaborating with me at 30! So far the two are getting along. I'm looking forward to what these guys will come up with.
Stay Tuned!
As a young self-taught Jazz piano player, hearing a string quartet, live, for the first time, changed my life. The Fine Arts Quartet playing Mozart caused an instant reaction within me. From that point forward, I was no longer interested in pursuing the piano or Jazz. I wanted to do what that bratty kid from Salzburg had done a couple hundred years before, that these four middle-aged men were recreating in Milwaukee Wisconsin, a couple hundred years later.
Initially, I was attracted to the art form: a three-tiered chain reaction: 1) a composer writes the music, editing until it was perfect; 2) The musicians fine tune the written pages, adding their subtle interpretations of nuance and clarity, refocussing the composer’s narrative; 3) Then the listeners do the third, final, and most important part. They listen, each personally internalizing its meaning and embracing the composer’s statement in their own way.
I thought that, if I could do that even once, my life would be a success.
But I was also enticed by the evolution of this art form. The composers who preceded Mozart, who one by one laid down new ideas, structures, diverse instrumental sounds, harmonic and rhythmic nuances, which allowed Mozart to write the way HE did. All kidding aside, those cavemen had something when they were banging on logs while they whistled, howled, and carried on. Then those two Frenchmen in Paris began turning their music into a written language, and others took to that idea and ran. Generation after generation of composers continually expanding the possibilities, searching for perfection. A hundred years before young Wolfgang was born, J. S. Bach re-tuned his klavier, shunning natural sound, opening up the possibilities, making way for everything that followed. Bach's ingenious new alteration was to music a little like splitting the atom was and discovering a cure for cancer will be. Mozart added his too musical sense, and the composers who followed him each added theirs, and music, like the wheels on the bus, went round and round. This is art, but it’s also science. It’s scholarly work if there ever was: i.e. digesting the the current body of knowledge in a particular field - Chemistry, Mathematics, History, Painting, AstroPhysics, etc. — and then — using the past advances to influence future advances. And so on.
This is what I was thinking about when I was a young would-be composer. I felt it was my job to push music’s boundaries. I thought that was every composer’s duty: originality and invention, and that merely making up some music within the current norm was just plagiarism. Thus, in order to accomplish all that I have just espoused, one must certainly have one foot planted in the past, balancing as the other foot lunges forward. It is a complicated conundrum, and, like any attempted description of art, nonsense.
I wrote this, my first string quartet in 1982 while living with my young family in England and France on a Ph.D. post doc from the University of California – Berkeley. I spent most of my time composing, but also a lot of time contemplating how I — a former jazzer from Shorewood Wisconsin — was going to alter the path of MUSIC! (or die trying.) In England, my wife and two small children lived in a cottage on the Coast of the North Sea in a little village called Brancaster Staithe. I composed at the home of Lady Margaret Douglas-Home. She was royalty! The widow of a former Prime Minister of England! More importantly, she had a piano, which I needed in order to compose. Every morning, I'd cram my 6'3" body into our borrowed Cooper-Mini and drive - on the wrong side of the road - to Lady Margaret's home to compose. Lady Margaret was a hoot! She'd greet me every morning and was thrilled that I was working at her home. Word got out in our small village, and a piano was moved into the local pub, and I had a paying job playing solo jazz for a slew of locals on New Years Eve 1981 — At any given time during the long evening, there were 10 or 15 pints of Guinness on top of the partially tuned upright piano. Then, in Paris’s 14th Arrondissement, I composed in the baby’s room, where we kept our cheap piano that we rented from Pianos Daudé. I also spent a lot of time walking the streets of Paris and as I did along the coast of the North Sea. I was looking for something. How far could the concept of MUSIC be stretched? And how was I going to participate in this quest? Nonsense.
String Quartet (No. 1) is the result. I think it’s extremely difficult to perform, although, in 1989 the Paducah Symphony String Quartet gave it a try. The music is purposely and consistently without an audible pulse. There is rarely a clear downbeat, and there are very few rhythmic unisons joining two or more instruments. It's chaos. Nearly every measure has a different time signature — meters, which because pulse and downbeat are not audible, are theoretically redundant! Actually, the constant switching of time signatures can only be visual and not aurally perceivable. The music is meant to be extremely over syncopated, even though syncopation — especially the jazz syncopation that is at the heart of all my music — is dependent on maintaining a clear, consistent, easily discernible pulse, that the syncopation bounces off of. And to make matters worse, within this pulseless framework, the tempo of the music changes 22 times shifting back and forth among 13 different tempos that come and go, sometimes immediate, i.e. without preparation, and often are retained for only a single bar before switching once again! No wonder the Padukah Symphony Orchestra cellist lost his place 4 or 5 times during the work’s premiere.
Regardless, I've always thought it was the best piece I've written, but it's always bewildered me - especially as I've aged. My music has mellowed a bit, as I've gotten older. I've pushed my left foot further and further back in the past. I am no longer trying to change/progress the art form. My recent music is just music. I've just written a couple of string quartets (nos. 2 & 4) that I like very much. But, while I've was writing these two quartets, I've wondered what it is about my 1st string quartet? I've been studying it. Trying to get into my 1982 head.
And I've figured it out:
Around Halloween 1987, I was at Michigan State U., as a guest composer at a symposium on new piano music. Lukas Foss was the honored celebrity Composer. Prior to the performances of the works, there were rehearsals of the pieces attended by all the guest composers. Lukas was also there and would listen and make comments. When he heard my FOUR PIANO PIECES, he told me that he presumed it was a 12-tone work. I said no it's not. He argued with me, pointing out a few things, but eventually, after I also pointed out a few things, he agreed that the piece was not serial. But then I told him that it sounds like serial music, even though there is not a system of any kind.
You see, as a student, I really took to the music of the serial composers, Schönberg and Webern, Babbitt and Boulez, etc. I loved their music, but I didn't like using their methods when composing. Composing with various mathematical methods and systems not only bored me, but I couldn't hear it. I just heard the music. And I liked it. Compared to Mozart and Duke Ellington, serial music in addition to the dissonance and pulseless rhythm. It was flat, formless, monotonously without beginning, middle, or end. This is not a criticism. This is what I loved about it. It started nowhere and went nowhere. While listening, it was almost impossible to predict what was coming next. Although the harmony was dissonant and vague, it was also very emotional, perhaps over-emotional.
So instead of composing using the appropriate and mandatory methods, I proceeded to compose serial music by ear. And that's what my String Quartet No. 1 is. Of course! So is my quintet CHAMELEON and my DOUBLE WIND TRIO, FOUR PIANO PIECES, HUMBLE CAKE, and my VIOLIN CONCERTO, and a few others written back then. Thus, as I've been studying my first string quartet I've learned about it finally. I've been pleasantly pleased with it. I've answered the conundrum that I've had about it since 1982. Not having a recording of its first and only performance, I've have created a performance by my computer. It's not bad. But it is true. It's dissonant, ugly at times, especially when I ask the players to play flatly without vibrato. The piece seems to go nowhere. Nothing seems to be predictable except that the form is mostly without purpose — just like any serial piece. But when you hear the 1st violin start the piece with the repeated pitch of - perhaps - a melody (meas. 1), listen for the recapitulation of that "melody," in bar 232.
Take a listen to my computer's "performance" of it.
P.S. As part of my musical "bucket list," I am revising my 1st string quartet. I'm re-writing it. Me at 74 years old is collaborating with me at 30! So far the two are getting along. I'm looking forward to what these guys will come up with.
Stay Tuned!