Illuminating Inspirations

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The next time I hear someone bewailing the moribund state of classical music, I’ll point them to the Herbst Theatre, where last Saturday morning (a dreary day) a couple hundred music lovers paid to hear a couple of string quartets and an hour of explanation about them.

Alexander String Quartet

It helps that San Francisco Performances’ new Inspirations series features the excellent Alexander String Quartet, whose performance of each complete work is preceded by a half-hour lecture demonstration by the veteran elucidator Robert Greenberg. After focusing on a single composer for the past few years, SFP’s casual-dress (both musicians and audience) Saturday series now pairs a recent quartet with another that may have inspired it.

There’s no evidence that Maurice Ravel’s iridescent 1903 quartet actually did inspire Lou Harrison’s 1979 String Quartet Set, but both composers shared an inspiration: Asian music. As Greenberg noted, the appearance of a Javanese gamelan at Paris’ 1889 Universal Exposition amazed Claude Debussy and Ravel. Harrison, enthralled by gamelan recordings in his early 20s, later founded the American gamelan movement, composed some of the century’s finest music for Indonesian and American gamelan, and, through diligent study of Chinese, Korean, and other non-Western sounds, created the sturdiest synthesis of classical Asian and Western music.

Though Ravel’s general Asian influences are undeniable, Greenberg asked the players to demonstrate purported gamelan textures in the Ravel quartet’s predominantly pizzicato second movement. However, he never actually explained how these incomparably beautiful Indonesian percussion orchestras work. If you’d never heard one (perhaps unlikely in the Bay Area, which boasts several), the connection would remain unclear at best. A recording of a real gamelan might have helped, but scholars differ on this point, and I’ve played gamelan music for years and remain unconvinced.

Still, it’s hard to fault the ever-entertaining Greenberg, himself a composer and music historian familiar to local audiences from his decade leading the San Francisco Symphony’s Discovery Series. He had to cover a lot of ground — the differences between French and German classical music (longer melodies, slower harmonic development, the musical implications of the French language); between Asian and Western music (cyclical and static vs. narrational and developmental); and a brief biography of Ravel — all of it sprinkled with doses of humor (”without the French and Italians, we’d all be running around in pelts and eating English food”).

Just after Greenberg had noted the leisurely aesthetic of Ravel’s muse, the Alexanders promptly contradicted him by charging into his quartet’s opening movement at a breathless pace — the better, it turned out, to demonstrate the extreme contrasts of tempo and dynamics that characterized their interpretation, as they then slowed down the succeeding segment dramatically. Perhaps it wasn’t the most elegant, “Frenchalicious” (to use a Greenberg term) take, but the Alexanders’ bracing performance certainly captured much of the beauty, if perhaps not every sparkle of enchantment, in this most magical of chamber masterpieces. This was pretty impressive for a prelunch performance, or even an after-dinner one.

Looking Back, Looking East

Pairing the Ravel with the sole work for string quartet by the West Coast’s greatest composer, whose music definitely veered to the French side of the Continental musical divide, was not without irony. First, Harrison frowned on the lecture-demo format; he once told me that he thought it made the audience focus on the sections that had been discussed rather than on the piece as a whole. Second, as Greenberg noted, Harrison’s “set” (so-called to indicate the suitelike nature of the five movements) is one of his few works of that period that didn’t incorporate gamelan influences.

Instead, it reflects another of his great passions: pre-Classical music. As a teenager, Harrison sang Gregorian chant at San Francisco’s Mission Dolores, then played in a Baroque ensemble (a rare thing in the 1930s) at San Francisco State University. His love for early music permeates nearly everything he wrote. Yet Harrison’s music effortlessly embraces many other styles. He loved Brahms and wrote ravishing melodies any Romantic composer would envy. He studied personally with two apostles of ultramodernism, Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell, and the latter’s influence appears in an exciting percussion part, requiring cellist Sandy Wilson to whap his instrument just so — a reminder of Harrison’s pioneering San Francisco percussion concerts with John Cage in the 1930s.

The quartet’s concluding movement — a Turkish form called an usul — nods to Harrison’s pioneering world music explorations and exemplifies his philosophy of East-West rapprochement. It’s no accident that Harrison pairs a Baroque movement with a Turkish one. Music of the Turks was the exotic gamelan-equivalent of the 18th century, the connection between Europe and Asia. Likewise, Harrison begins his quartet with variations on a Crusades song, Plaint and Variations on Walter Von der Wogelweide’s Song of Palestine, which he had started decades earlier in San Francisco. The song’s words urged Europeans to respond to the Pope’s call to invade the always-embattled Holy Land, but Harrison, a lifelong pacifist, sets the tune in such a mournful way as to lament intolerance through the ages. Tellingly, in 1979 he added a taqsim — that is, an introspective Arabic improvisation — as a kind of answer to Vogelweide’s call.

Harrison’s immensely expansive ambit poses challenges for conscientious performers. For instance, do you maintain the austere emotional distance of the medieval melody that supplied the opening movement’s theme? Then how do you handle the third movement’s lyrical Baroque rondeau, and the pulse-pounding second movement estampie, a favorite Harrison device? Besides issues of tuning (the quartet was originally intended as part of a series of just-intonation guitar pieces, and ancient tunings were quite different from modern ones), how much vibrato, dynamic range, and other such devices should a performer apply?

Such tensions give Harrison’s deeply informed music much of its power. The Alexanders’ careful, somewhat restrained performance, on the fifth anniversary of the composer’s death, made a persuasive case for the set’s inclusion in the repertoire of any string quartet interested in 20th-century sounds. For all of Greenberg’s enlightening explication, in the Alexander Quartet’s sensitive hands, the work’s wide-ranging beauty truly spoke for itself.

Brett Campbell writes for The Wall Street Journal, NewMusicBox, and many other publications. He and Bill Alves are working on a biography of Lou Harrison.