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string quartet no. 6
string quartet no. 7
string quartet no. 8
April 25, 1943 I was inducted into the army. I became a radio operator in the Field Artillery. The 881st Battalion, Battery A of the 69th Division. “The Fighting 69th,” recently formed, stationed at Camp Shelby in Mississippi outside of Hattiesburg became my home for the next year. We trained hard and long, drank bottles of Coke incessantly, did maneuvers in the DeSoto National Forest with the coral snake for our neighbor. A year later we were in Caversham England poised to enter the war. It was here that I learned that my brother Jack had been shot down and killed in Germany. The Battle of the Bulge, crossing the Rhine at Remagen, liberating Leipzig, meeting the Russians at Torgau on the bank of the Elbe were the points in this constellation that was filled with tension and waiting, victory and grief. We became aware of the horror, and what we now call the “holocaust,” while freeing Leipzig. The war in Europe was suddenly over for us and I, now a technical sergeant was put in charge of a modest home on the outskirts of the city near the I.G. Farben Plant and ordered to respect its belongings. I was responsible for six GI's plus Little Hoop, an extraordinary American Indian, our machine gunner, who lived by his own code, and kept his own counsel. In the living room there was an upright piano and a view to the garden where we could see and be seen. I got hold of some music paper and for the next six weeks wrote the short score to the “Leipzig Symphony.”
The piece is programmatic. It tells of the preparation, attack, liberation and finally, a prayer concerning the events at Leipzig. This was a battle that lasted ten days, was initially ferocious and ended quietly with surrender.
I told my commanding officer Lt. Redmond about the work, intrigued, he asked me to come by his quarters the following Saturday at eight p.m. And, “By the way,” I remember him telling me, “Use the servant's entrance.” I felt like Haydn with the Esterhazys. I arrived promptly and found him with a group of officers and frauleins finishing their dinner with schnapps. I was the evening's entertainment. Forty-five minutes later, as the symphony comes to a gentle close in C major, a bewildered group looked at me bleary eyed. As I rose to leave, Redmond thanked me and bemusedly suggested that the Captain would have to hear this. And in the succeeding weeks, always on a Saturday night, this show would be repeated as I moved up the ladder, finally doing my act in front of the commanding officer, General Reinhardt.
The General informed me that they were forming a GI Symphony in Paris, and that he was ordering Lt. Redmond to escort me to Paris where there was the expertise to let him know if the “piece was any good.” On a cold drizzly early spring Sunday we traveled by jeep from Leipzig to Paris. Entering the city at dusk the Lieutenant went to the officers' hotel and the enlisted soldier to a pensione. I never saw Redmond again. Morning came, I pulled open the shade and beheld through a lattice of leaves the Eiffel Tower. A setting imbedded in my mind forever. On to 29 Rue de Beri Beri, headquarters of the Special Services European Theater, as well as the administrative offices of the Herald Tribune. There I met Captain Camilla M. Frank and Lieutenant Jane Douglas…they brought me to a piano…the first movement of the Symphony was played…they created a post for me as the orchestrator of the GI Symphony Orchestra (I arranged holiday tunes for the band)…
We were housed together with actors and USO performers (Mickey Rooney played a terrific game of ping pong) , in an old chateau overlooking Mal Maison, the home Napoleon built for Josephine. For the following year, first in Paris, then in Frankfurt as Eisenhower at De Gaulle's insistence moved the U.S. Army headquarters, life was lived to the fullest. I conducted my Symphony in Wiesbaden, and Metz, had the piece broadcast over the armed forces network, gave piano recitals, met conductors like Paul Paray, American soldier musicians like Eugene List, Stuart Canin, Sol Greitzer. I spent evenings with Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson and an afternoon with Paul Robeson. And then the bubble burst. Leslie Pearl on leave from his position at BBD&O (Burton Barton Durston & Osborne) suggested that we send by courier the score of my Symphony to Serge Koussevitsky for an evaluation. Lester Schur, a Hollywood agent was assigned to deliver the score and did so to Koussevitsky's assistant, Leonard Bernstein. A telegram soon followed from Bernstein to Pearl that read in part a hope that Laderman will someday develop a musical language that has sophistication. It was time to go home, back to Brooklyn where my parents had returned. I was discharged on April 22, 1946. I was almost 22. It was time to go to college.
— Ezra Laderman
Early in 1999 the Muir String Quartet premiered Ezra Laderman's Ninth Quartet. It marked the composer's return to his favorite medium after more than a decade of pursuing other projects. In the seventies, and again in the eighties, Laderman had issued weighty statements, entire worlds for two violins, viola, and cello. The first was his three-movement Fifth Quartet, composed in 1976; it lasts three quarters of an hour, incorporates historical models including a sonata form and a Baroque dance suite, and draws on “a rich palette of composing: tonal, serial, aleatoric.” In size and scope it matches such chamber masterworks as Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time and Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio. But its size makes the Laderman Fifth Quartet impractical to program in its entirety. More often, quartets program the work's movements individually, finding each to be a coherent and satisfying statement.
This performance history of the Fifth Quartet led Laderman to rethink his approach to the medium and to multi-movement compositions. A trilogy of single-movement quartets—the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth—comprised the next such weighty statement. The Sixth Quartet was complete by December 1980; the double bar line was put on the Eighth almost five years later, the composer having reached sixty-one years of age. The composer regarded these three quartets as “the payoff from this mother lode” of the Fifth. Each of the three was performed many times before the first performance of the entire trilogy took place, in May 1989 at Merkin Concert Hall's Music Today series in New York City. There the performers—the Audubon, Blair, and Colorado Quartets—gathered to celebrate Laderman's sixty-fifth birthday.
Trilogies like this in music are rare. Franz Joseph Haydn created one in 1761, with three symphonies titled, respectively, Morning, Noon, and Evening (his Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth). Times of the day may have a poetic aspect, too, with morning serving as a metaphor for youth, noon a metaphor for maturity, and evening for old age. This metaphorical side was not lost on the twenty-nine-year-old Haydn. The Morning Symphony, for example, opens with strings playing a rising scale in G major, suggesting perhaps a sunrise. But it also depicts a schoolboy scene: The “class” of strings playing the G major scale arrives at a “wrong” B flat note, corrected by the solo violin “teacher” playing B natural.
Laderman's trilogy is devoted as well to the three stages of life. His Sixth Quartet is a portrayal of youth, and in particular the then youthful spirits of the Audubon Quartet. Laderman had come to SUNY Binghamton as composer-in-residence in 1971. In 1974 he was “present at the creation” of the Audubon Quartet, and came to know the musicians intimately. According to the composer, the alternating bowed-plucked unison line that begins the Sixth Quartet characterizes the ensemble as an entity, while the four subsequent contrasting musical ideas limn each of its performers. Laderman weaves into three of the four subsequent sections some rhythmic pattern or melodic shape from the opening music, showing how the quartet's personality must be the composite of its individual members'.
He hasn't revealed which section corresponds to which musician, but it is fascinating nonetheless to learn from the music how different these players must be: The crabbed chromatic unison heard initially unfurls to an expansive diatonic tune “with gentle, caressing sound,” as Laderman has marked it. This gives way to a section that is “desperate, intensely controlled,” the pair of violins trembling together below the squeaky, mechanical gestures of viola and `cello. Giant, blustering steps from the first violin and cello interrupt, only to collapse into more serene, reflective music, marked “slow, with tenderness, with mystery.”
Throughout the quartet the five sections recur continually in this order, but each time developing in new directions. The proportions among the five sections are adjusted at each recurrence, so that during the second exposition of the material it is the third of five sections, with its harmonics and tremolo violins, which is doubled in length, while during the third pass the opening unison theme gains special prominence. As the layers of material deepen there is a gradual shift away from contrapuntal textures and toward homophonic ones, as if the personalities of the musicians were unifying to endure something momentous. A climax grows from a chord repeated four times, full of foreboding and then terrifying energy, before the opening music is unleashed again. The “quartet theme” brims here with newfound life, free from the alternate note plucking that had inhibited its flight. When the viola and `cello eventually do begin to pluck notes, they snap them in the manner conceived by Bartók, serving only to send the material pulsing toward its conclusion.
But Laderman had hardly exhausted his material. Three years later he had the opportunity to place “in the midst of life,” as he put it, this youthful music from the Sixth Quartet. The Colorado Quartet had recently won the Naumburg Chamber Music Award, and the Naumburg Foundation approached Laderman about commissioning a new string quartet for them. In the Seventh Quartet he once again presents five contrasting ideas in rapid succession. The first is another unison built from the same four notes that opened the Sixth Quartet—B, F sharp, G, and Bb—now reordered as intervals of major sevenths to take adult strides upward. The music soars, as if announcing that an ambitious search is underway. The opening pair of notes, which recurs throughout the section, is undermined by the `cello heading in the opposite direction. The `cello carries the music toward its next subject, a waltz that is as detached and subtle as the opening is ardent and thrusting. The upper strings that accompany the `cello play within the smallest of dynamic gradations, every cycle of three chords marked sequentially soft, then medium soft, then very soft. Next comes a delicate rustling, notes flying upward against the viola's more relaxed version of the opening; then follows its opposite, gruff repetitions of concentrated chords turning ever more inward. Finally, the opening line comes swinging back as a kind of cabaret tune, laid over the `cello's plucked walking bass.
The five sections are thoroughly adult in their affects: ambition, sophistication, delicacy, preoccupation, and biting irony. As with the Sixth Quartet, the opening music of the Seventh finds its way into the quartet's subsequent sections. The first three notes, and later its transposition, comprise the chords that accompany the `cello waltz melody; in the third section, amid swoops and swirls, the opening line returns as a melody, and comes back as melody again in the fifth section. Also similar to what happens in the Sixth Quartet is the sequential recurrence of the five sections. After the second pass through the material, though, Laderman begins to erode the distinct qualities of sections. A free combination of motives propels the quartet to a terrific climax. But it is a climax subverted: The viola breaks free and intones a new line full of grief and protest. (Laderman had once before, in his First Symphony, struck down the musical continuum to invoke unexpected mourning.) The quartet concludes in this dark vein. It seems that the composer is telling us that the loss of innocence is partner to maturity.
Two years later Laderman felt ready to complete the trilogy. The Allard, Blair, and Colorado Quartets jointly commissioned the Eighth Quartet, composed in 1985. The composer has remarked that the work “begins one breath after the Seventh ends.” Gone are the five-section schemes of the Sixth and Seventh, replaced in the Eighth Quartet by a passacaglia theme that bathes the other musical ideas in its sadness. Kinship with the other quartets is maintained by the passacaglia's half- steps, a flattened version of the twists and leaps that launched the first two quartets in the set. Variations build, but are weighed down at first by continual returns of the dark half-step progression. It seems that the day has again been divided; the Eighth Quartet is night. This is a world of dreams, and much of the music in this quartet has an unreal quality, bizarre structures made from glissandi and tremolo attacks, sudden bursts and fades in dynamics. Each of the individual parts strives for greater independence in this world, culminating in a succession of solo passages. The dream-like music plunges again into more variations, though with some sense of sadness lifted. Lines wander into uncharted territories of emotion, to joy and celebration. Near the end the four instruments break into a giddy unison, marked Prestissimo, much like the kind of passage that Haydn would offer in his quartet finales, fast as the wind. Suddenly the opening passacaglia line returns, to remind us of the work's emotional origins, an how far we have come on the journey. The composer rejects this sad ending, preferring instead to close with three taut phrases of a lighter Presto. In the night of the Eighth Quartet, Laderman reveals the importance of confronting and conquering one's demons.
The Cassatt String Quartet
Muneko Otani, violin • Jennifer Leshnower, violin
Tawnya Popoff, viola • Caroline Stinson, cello
Hailed as one of America's outstanding young ensembles, the Cassatt String Quartet has captivated audiences throughout North America, Europe, and the Far East, appearing at New York's Alice Tully Hall and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, the Tanglewood Music Theatre, the Kennedy Center, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, and Maeda Hall in Tokyo.
The quartet performs a wide range of string quartet masterpieces and frequently commissions new works from eminent composers. With both the Juilliard and the Tokyo Quartets as mentors, the Cassatt won fellowships at Tanglewood and Yale, subsequently capturing First Prizes at the Fischoff and Coleman Chamber Music Competitions, along with two top prizes at the Banff International Competition and the Chamber Music America/ASCAP First Prize Award for Adventurous Programming.
The Cassatt currently holds residencies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Henry Street Music School in New York City, as well as Syracuse University, where they have created the Louis Krasner Graduate String Quartet Program for the training of young, professionally oriented string quartets. For the past three years they have also performed the Slee Beethoven Cycle in conjunction with a residency at the University of NY at Buffalo. They also serve as Quartet-in-Residence at such prominent modern music festivals as New York City's Bang on a Can and the Seal Bay Festival in Maine. Formerly resident artists at the Caramoor Center and the Bowdoin Summer Festival, they have also presented master classes and concerts at Yale, Princeton, Oberlin, Wellesley, Rice and Bennington. The Cassatt Quartet's recordings appear on the Albany, CRI, Tzadik, and New World labels.
The Quartet takes its name from the celebrated American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt.
This recording is generously supported by the Josephine Bay Paul and C. Michael Paul Foundation, Inc.
1 String Quartet No. 6 [20:38]
2 String Quartet No. 7 [22:50]
3 String Quartet No. 8 [23:51]
recording engineer: Eugene Kimball cover design: Oberlander Design cover photo: Ezra Laderman, age 21.
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