Opus 18 Immortal Misbegotten Performance

Beethoven started to work on these quartets in 1798, around the same time his hearing loss was becoming evident and not a passing episode. One can speculate how a person confronts these afflictions, but with Beethoven, his output during these times of mounting deafness was tremendous. This music touches me. Music composed during a time of fearful realization of a loss of faculties is stirring. My reworking of the Opus 18 quartets is not so much a critique as it is an homage to Beethoven, to the moments when another suffers; and to the experience of empathy that these open in me.

In composing the piece I incorporate a scoring method that constructs a distinct relationship between the musicians and the original Beethoven score. By applying specific processes, interventions and literally cutting up the score, new movements come to life. I applied a single process to each musical movement to complete a total of four movements, with the titles: Clashing, Expanding, Condensing, and Effecting. These titles have reflected the process used to compose the music.

The I Clashing section takes small segments of notation from one of the Opus 18 pieces and combines these together with other measures from other Opus 18 quartets building up a stanza or line of music. There is a “clashing” or combining of varied and unlikely parts where each of the four instruments (first violin, second violin, cello, and viola) might have their own music time and key signatures within the same stanza, including abrupt tempo changes in the instruments’ own musical lines.

II Expanding, takes six measures from Opus 18’s #5 quartet and duplicates them in new combinations over and over again, expanding the five seconds it would normally take to play to over two minutes.

The third movement, III Condensing, uses music from all of the Opus 18 works, #1 through to #6, but only those measures with a solitary instrument playing, the other instruments being at rest. There are two sections to this movement, each working with the same ‘solo’ measures. The first segment takes all the solo 1st violin parts and puts them in a row, then the 2nd violin solo parts are put in a row underneath the 1st violin, and the same is done for both viola and cello. These measures are combined linearly, one right after the other. The second section acts like the first, but instead of lining up the measures like a graph, the measures are placed one after another, like a continuous line of ‘mini solos’.

The forth movement, IV Effecting, takes the opening sections of the six quartets that comprise Beethoven’s Opus 18 work and adds new “effects” or interventions, one effect per quartet