At the time of writing, late March 2020, the world is in an unignorable state. The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has reached the level of pandemic: thousands have died and probably hundreds of thousands are sick, and those numbers will exponentially increase in the near future. New York City is in pseudo-lockdown; we are encouraged to practice “social distancing” and the vast majority are either working from home or not working at all.
A major discontinuity in global society reminds us of the paradox of the size of the world. On one hand, the world feels small right now: a single virus has taken control of almost every corner of the globe and it is thus easier than ever before to empathize across vast social and geographical distances. The nature of exponential growth is such that no number is too large to conquer: unfettered, the spread of such a virus across all of humanity is just a matter of time, and not that much time, either. On the other hand, the world is still huge: efforts to “flatten the curve” will likely mean that despite the infectiousness of this virus, something like 1% of people in a given area will get it, and about 1% of those will die, meaning 9,999 of every 10,000 people will be more or less OK at the end of this. Personally, I still don’t know anyone with coronavirus, and I would not be surprised if nobody in my circle ever gets it. It is hard to mentally hold both of these size-observations at once. I hope my prediction about 9,999/10,000 being OK comes true; I try not to entertain the thought of a total global meltdown…
Focusing on musicians, I feel for those who previously went all in on playing live and especially with others. I am lucky that much of my musical energy is spent alone and that I don’t rely solely on live performance for income. For the less fortunate, I can only hope that the current restrictions breed creative solutions…I look forward to the outpouring of music at the end of this ordeal. Now is a good time to buy albums for a change, and to get back into listening to music at home, not just during commutes and exercises. I guess in such uncertain times, one might as well gamble on optimism.
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Today is one of the three days between the birthdays of two of the biggest Bs: Bach (March 21) and Bartok (March 25). I have been playing through Bartok’s second string quartet on the piano, trying to get into the details and all that. The second quartet forms a natural pairing with the first; those are the “romantic” quartets that come before the darker, harsher third and the progressive rock of the fourth and fifth. I had always preferred the first; it is easier to follow and I claim that as Bartok’s first masterpiece, it lays out a proof of concept or “abstract” for the rest of his career: a movement of post-Wagnerian heavy romanticism, a movement of uneasy musical symmetry, and a movement of raw folk energy. But now the second quartet is growing on me. It mixes those three colors rather than separates them by movement, and the romanticism/symmetry blend is particularly gorgeous. In the first movement, chord motion is so frequent and continuous that is impossible to hear a key center for more than a moment, and the keys of motives indicate large-scale architecture more than the fleeting tonalities do. Chords with symmetrical “cores” (for instance, an augmented triad plus one extra note a half step from a chord tone) are always close to their transpositions and inversions, and these structures afford Bartok much harmonic agility while also homogenizing the general sound of the sections, so that dissonant chords don’t “pop out” of a texture of simpler consonant ones. In other words, he manages to import all of the wonderful structural features of more traditionally tonal music into a mysterious world. This is different than the contemporaneous composers Schoenberg and Webern in their “free atonality” period. Those composers sought to express totally new ideas with totally new machinery, perhaps at the expense of a coherent system (12-tone music was the system that came about when Schoenberg felt too adrift in atonal freedom). That music speaks for itself; it is beautiful and important, but Bartok showed, at the same time, that one did not need to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. Old structures could be wrought into new ones; romanticism and atonality could flirt with each other and compromise.
The timing of the second string quartet is noteworthy, too. It was written amidst the throes of World War I, a far more terrible tragedy than COVID-19 (unless, God forbid, things get shockingly bad in April and beyond). The War shut down Bartok’s ethnomusicological expeditions but also probably forced him to really focus and extract as much as he could from his material. That shows in the quartet, where ideas are juiced to the max and little moments appear and reappear with the subtlest variations. An inspiring message: “You have enough! Make it work!” In the score, I am impressed with the organization of the rehearsal numbers: each labeled chunk clearly features a single idea or mechanism, so that a whole movement is a well-fastened chain of little episodes. There are macro-forms on top, but I find it easiest to listen and admire one chapter at a time. Last thing I noticed: the voice crossings are brave and omnipresent! Flies in the face of the traditional wisdom…
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Stay inside and listen to music. Work with what you have and be romantic even in dark times.