John Exton: String Quartet V (1972)

Abstract

"John Exton's String Quartet V was first performed by the Oriel String Quartet at the Festival of Perth in 1973. The structure and indeed the placing of each event in the quartet were determined by use of the / Ching, a book which has impressed itself on the minds of Western listeners chiefly through the 'chance' music of John Cage. To embrace an Eastern aesthetic concept so foreign and often confounding to Western thought seems at first surprising for an English composer who has always claimed to be 'entirely European by musical taste, education and inclination'. However, unlike Cage's, Exton's use of the/ Ching has not been to exploit random operations or to introduce an aesthetic of chance into the musical argument. Rather the composer &ees the / Ching as a book of connections, providing a huge structural framework which contains an almost infinite number of possible relationships. Thus what for Cage is random is for Exton an attempt to tap into a small part of a kind of hyperstructure whose potential connections are too complex and whose possible scope is too vast to be assimilated or projected in one reading or in one musical work. Each work which bases its structure on the book becomes a reflection of a small part of the totality which it represents. As the composer has written, 'while every event in the Quartet Vis located by reference to the/ Ching, the music is endowed with a formal structure - and this not by "chance" but quite literally, through the design of the book itself. Chance in the Cagean sense p ays almost no part in the piece except at the very local level. Rhythmic values and the exact alignment of notes are mdicated by approximate placings on the stave rather than by exact rhythmic relationships, the actual realisation of which is entrusted to ·the co-operative interpretation of the performers'. The function of the / Ching has been rather to remove the durations from the control of metre, and to provide a floating, unpredictable quality to the· rhetoric which together with the simplicity of the. textural material encourages ·static' and contemplative listening tempered only by the sensuousness of the harmony. The piece alternately exploits two contrasting textures, the first of which consists of short repeated notes, usually articulating a single pitch or an interval in a fashion which grows and diminishes in intensity (see Figure 52). Contrasted to this (and in fact growing out of it) is the second texture which consists of sustained chords, the timbre of which is slowly mutated as the piece progresses by slight changes of bowing technique - sul tasto, sul ponticello with and without mute, etc. The chordal texture usually articulates more complex pitch structures, often moving up and down chordal blocks in which the register of each note is fixed (see Figure 53). As the piece progresses these two textures start to 'infect' each other: On the one hand,-the sustained notes of the chords are punctuated by the short staccato elements of the repeated note texture. Conversely, the sustained chords are focused on to the single note material. of the repeated note texture as in the final bars where all instruments converge on the B flat below middle C. The single movement divides into two large formal sections both of which exploit similar material, the beginning of the second section being marked by the introduction of quarter tone inflections into the repeated note texture. The use of the / Ching has produced one unexpected result, which the composer has mentioned with obvious delight. Although the durations throughout the piece are variable and left to the discretion of the players, the score has been divided, for convenience, into sixty-four units of duration which, while unperceivable by the listener, correspond to elongated bars. The point of golden section of these sixty-four sections is 39.5 which corresponds remarkably closely to the end of the first section at unit 40. Although not quite a 'chance event' of L'le order of L'le notorious army of typewriter bashing monkeys producing the complete works of Shakespeare through random key pushing, it does raise the question of just how random the chance operations of the/ Ching actually are." -- Peter McCallum Show more