The Claremont Quartet

Since the Claremont Quartet played three modern works Thursday night, the question naturally arises of how radical each quartet was--traditional? tonal? or dissonant? "formless"? But assigning each work its spot on a spectrum of radicalism is quite irrelevant to experiencing them, because dissonance, tonality and the like have a quite dubious bearing on the actual emotional content of the music. Indeed, the quartets of Billy Jim Layton and Robert Moevs (both Assistant Professors) were more "shocking" than that of Anton Webern. You don't have to consult the dialectic before calling any of them modern.

If the most striking side to this music is its intensity, the quality magnifies the problem of relating the kinds of feeling the music advances with one another. Moevs chose to separate his basic musical ideas into four movements. A brusque second movement and a flighty fourth are each largely homogeneous, and the first movement alternates perfunctory quavers with grinding quartertones. But the third delves into matters more serious and varied. It combines the brutality common to the other movements with an intense thoughtfulness and ends with an untroubled relaxation. By this excellent juxtaposition Moevs gave this central movement a prominence it needs and kept its final loss of tension from becoming a let-down.

The quartet may be stormy, but its violence has no chaos or uncertainty, and the Claremont Quartet captured that assurance. Moevs's brash lines knew their they were going, and good coordination kept their melodic independence clear. The Quartet made the piece's kernel patterns of rhythm make good sense, most of all the second movement's curt syncopations.

Billy Jim Layton's String Quartet in Two Movements is a more complex and venturesome work. Moevs's lines are always aware of their direction; Layton's stab this way and that and hover with despairing trills and tremulos through long, stirring passages of static progression. The brutality of the quartet's chords and textures is not only searing but tormented: their writhing raises questions quite beyond Moevs's solid ideas. To call this powerful expression "romantic" is meaningless; only the term introspection recognizes the heaviness of the music's human implications.

This quartet naturally demanded a form of its own; for categorizing these feelings as movements would sap their strength and question what such emotions really have to do with one another. The two movements present a succession of moods, often with sudden changes. One passage superimposes a subdued counterpoint in the violins over coarse grindings from the other pair and thereby stresses each feeling all the more. (It is interesting that Elliot Carter did the same in his first quartet--here, if you demand it, is a Zeitgeist.) But unlike Carter and Moevs, Layton does not set slow, soft melodies sweetly, but gives them a sustained, restful plainness. The work ends unpretentiously on that note.

The Claremont Quartet caught Layton's tastefulness with remarkable accuracy. The group did not inject intensity into the calm ending; they kept the changes of mood from being obvious, and mastered excellently the enormous difficulties in the quartet's violence.

Their ability to sense change of tone made comprehensible the austere 12-tone style of Webern's Quartet Opus 28. After all, the only basis for judging a technique as rational as this one is whether or not it works, and the kaleidoscope of feelings this quartet displayed showed how good a tool it can be, when performed accurately. Since a major problem for modern music is careful performance, this group is a boon.