Untitled (Kertész-Quartet)

2024
4 instruments (each from a different instrumental family [e.g. wind, brass, string, percussion] and always including 1 violin, viola, or cello). ca. 17m
part of Songs (Book 1)

I.
II.
III.
IV.
Coda (postscript)

Instead I wrote an ideologically deficient quartet that nobody needs.
— Shostakovich, letter to Isaac Glikman, July 19, 1960

String Quartet
• shaking hands
— George Brecht, event score from Water Yam, 1963

Kertész-Quartet responds to André Kertész’s 1926 print Quartet, thus also to its subject. Kertész was asked to make a publicity photograph for use by violinist Feri Roth, leader of the Roth Quartet (like the artist, the members of the Roth Quartet were Hungarians newly arrived in Paris). To fulfill this commission, he produced a composition whose severe cropping (only the players’ instruments and hands are within frame) and use of blank space (the lower two-thirds of the card on which the image is printed are empty) suggest to me a notion totally at odds with the classical string quartet model, namely the anonymization of the individual players — each of whom the 18th century quartet tradition renders not merely as an exchangeable, bigger-or-smaller violin-plus-hands, but as something akin to a self-possessed Enlightenment subject, discoursing and collaborating with coevals while retaining a unique role and identity in the whole.

Far from viewing the quartet along these lines as an agreeable meeting of complementary but distinct musical personalities, Kertész’s gaze seems to me to efface this possibility: the group’s members are not refigured as antagonists — one might expect this, conditioned as we are to look for a contrarian sensibility in the work of the early modernists — instead, they seem to be on the verge of disappearing altogether from their status as personally- and musically-discrete entities. By extension, Kertész’s string quartet — barren of any intersubjective relation which would be made possible by the individuality of its constitutive parts — distinguishes itself from the classical ideal of a(n implicitly European bourgeois) commons internally enlivened by this relation which the string quartet genre comes in the late-18th century to represent, indeed to emblematize.

Kertész-Quartet, then, was conceived as a “string-quartet-less string quartet” in which formal genre conventions (sonata, adagio, minuet…), traditional part-relationships (solo plus trio, two duo[s], etc.), and technical elements modeled on string playing (equivalents for “fingered” and “sounding” pitches for the natural harmonics) are applied to music not for four strings but for a variable mixed instrumentation. This approach — neoclassical and schematic but also phantasmagorically displaced from its object — seems to me to have produced a somewhat curiously detached or even satirical result.

After the four standard movements there follows a little “speech” for the true string instrument alone, a letter-to-pitch encoding of a famous remark of Goethe’s regarding quartet playing:

Dieser Art Exhibitionen waren mir von jeher von der Instrumental-Musik das Verständlichste, man hört vier vernünftige Leute sich untereinander unterhalten, glaubt ihren Discursen etwas abzugewinnen und die Eigenthümlichkeiten der Instrumente kennen zu lernen.

I’ve always found performances of this kind more intelligible than other instrumental music; you hear four rational people conversing amongst themselves, and imagine you get something from their discourse, and learn to know the peculiarities of the instruments.
— Goethe, letter to Carl Friedrich Zelter, November 9, 1829

For all this, the piece is not really a discourse. What I don’t understand in it is what it is, namely: just music.

(note February 27–28, 2024)