This disc completes the recording of the legendary ten string quartets by Ben Johnston (b. 1926).Footnote 1 The project took 14 years, partly because the first violinist lived a long way from the other players; the main reason, however, was the need to raise money and to find the techniques and time to master the music's unique difficulties.
Nine of Johnston's ten quartets (including the three recorded here) are microtonal, an unfortunate term suggesting arcane deviation from good old 12-tone equal temperament. But no. At work here is just intonation, or pure tunings, often with pitches in relationships extended as far as the 13th harmonic (‘13-limit’). In its truly rational pitch structures, this extended just intonation produces a sound world that makes twelve-tone equal temperament a limited artificial cart that we've put before an unlimited natural horse. (True even of 5-limit just intonation, which uses pure harmonics no higher than the 5th.)
I recommend hearing the quartets in the order 8, 6, 7, from least to most difficult, especially for those unprepared to have their ears freed of the compromises of equal temperament. The 13-limit Quartet No. 8 (1986) relaxes the formal complexity of Johnston's previous three quartets via a neoclassicism that he explores further in Nos. 9 and 10. The first movement is a sonatina. The ‘lazy, rocking’ second movement's inflections seem both French and American. The third, a fast, witty waltz, anchors dizzying infrachromatic melody to simple chords. The Reichian last movement employs irregular, shifting rhythmic figures in slowly changing harmonic fields.
Mellifluous and at times morose, the one-movement, 11-limit Quartet No. 6 (1980) was once likened by Johnston to a conversation among four disagreeable people. They don't argue, but interaction is constrained. Besides just intonation, the music's main structural bases are endless melody, elements of serialism and retrogression. Each instrument in turn spins its lines to sometimes radiant chordal accompaniment. After a brief but dazzling interlude in an 11/32 metre, the music proceeds in retrograde, but at a faster speed than the longer first part. Throughout, metres are governed by simple metric modulation linked to harmonic structure.
Quartet No. 7 (1984) comes with a particular reputation: the most difficult of all, unperformed for its 32 years, ‘mad’, ‘impossible’, because of its intensive, uncompromising extended just intonation. Even though Johnston makes it possible for performers to play the right notes by tuning theirs to others in the texture, it is an extreme demand when notes are short, the music is non-centric, textures are complex, or differences in pitch are very small.
The first movement is a manic, glittering prelude. With simple rhythms in complex harmonies, the second again contains palindromes and other hexachord manipulations, in a persistent but light sul ponticello scherzo that sounds like a sustained étude. Led by the viola, the long last movement completes the daring use of 13-limit just intonation by crawling structurally through an ascending octave by the most intricate constellations imaginable, including collaborative metric changes.
At the start of the movement, the viola plays 11 bars of winding melodies to go from C to the C# about 71 cents higher. The note it plays on the first beat of each bar along the way is barely perceptibly higher than that on the first beat of the previous; E is reached in the fifty-eighth bar, a little more than five minutes in. Projecting a scale that's unscalable, in music that seems not to move its pitch anchor yet does, navigating a fearsomely abundant pitch space, this movement enters another galaxy, far beyond air from another planet.
At a rehearsal of the seventh quartet a year ago, Ben Johnston expressed relief and pleasure that it could be played. In a concert, however, the pitches might not be as accurate. What's possible? How close to exact must/may notes be, in various contexts, when based on higher harmonics?
That we have the seventh recorded at all is a miracle. Then there are the other nine quartets and the short, intoned postlude (1996) included here, in memory of Salvatore Martirano. What the Kepler Quartet has accomplished on these three CDs is very unlikely to be repeated. They spared nothing in their shattering presentation of all the music.
Kyle Gann's lively, detailed notes and the fine sound quality complement well this completion of one of the most prodigious achievements in the history of recordings. Beyond spurring interest in these quartets, these CDs should spur other composers to explore just intonation, whether extended or not, in practicable performance media, as something acoustically and musically ‘right’, even crucial.
