Museon Polemos

Description

Violin 1, Violin 2, Violin 3, Violin 4, Viola 1, Viola 2, Violoncello 1, Violoncello 2 — The year 2012-2013 marks the 100th anniversary of classical music’s most notorious scandal: the world premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s epoch-making ballet Le Sacre du Printemps, usually translated as “The Rite of Spring”.xa0 This piece not only put Stravinsky on the map for all time; it is generally considered to be the “beginning of modern music”.xa0 But Stravinsky was a restless musical soul, and he didn’t stay in the Bad Boy Modernist mode for very long.xa0 By the mid-1920s and all through the 1930s and 40s, he evolved stylistically into a more polite neoclassical composer.xa0 When Texas Performing Arts commissioned me to write a double string quartet, it was with an eye to Stravinsky’s neoclassic ballet scores that I began work.Basically, Museon Polemos is a 25 minute ballet without dancers—but with two rival dance teams. When I say "ballet", I'm thinking of the classic Balanchine/Stravinsky works of the 30s and 40s, like Orpheus and Jeux de Cartes. xa0These arexa0pieces that don’t exactly tell a story, but that imply one; with that wonderful flexibility of mood, speed, and timing that those pieces have. xa0I concocted a scenario in which Quartet A is one "tribe", and Quartet B is another. xa0They sit not all together, but separated on the stage facing each other on a half-angle to the audience.The piece is in three big sections. xa0It's completely abstract, in that there's no real "story", but it has a scenario nonetheless. xa0Each quartet is a "tribe", or a "gang" with its own sonic identity and its own way of acting and reacting. xa0Quartet A is Apollonian, to a certain extent, and Quartet B is Dionysian: the former is cool, well-disciplined, thoughtful, "neoclassic", while the latter is a bit rougher: hedonistic, swaggering, governed by the senses. xa0Each of the two quartets has its own musical language: the various chords and scales that are used for Quartet A are different from the materials used for Quartet B.Part I is all about introducing the players, first as separate quartets and then with individual solos: it consists of a lot of connected short sections, about a minute each---just long enough to get one set of dancers into the wings while the next one skips on, though it begins and ends with both quartets in full sail.xa0 The individual “showoff” solos for each quartet are preceded by swirling introductory music, with a sort of “your turn” feeling, as one quartet cedes the floor to the other.Part II is a "challenge;” a standoff between the groups. xa0Quartet A plays chordal music, but Quartet B's first violinist decides to strut his stuff with a big cadenza.xa0 This happens twice, until it appears that Quartet B will win the day, but then Quartet A begins a slow, barcarolle-like motion that is emotionally contained, but nonetheless is very sad. xa0xa0WIthin a minute or two, all eight of them are rocking together on that boat---and after the climax (actually quite Romantic), the groups re-separate and leave the way they came.xa0 Separate, but equal.Part III is the actual fight; a sort of “rumble of the quartets”.xa0 The gangs take turns being the aggressor, and a hint of the choppy chords of Dances des Adolescents from Le Sacre du Printemps appears. The music is cast as a big tarantella with side-trips, and both groups and feverishly trading off material throughout. xa0There's a tragic highpoint to all this fast-and-furious fun, though, and it leaves us in the dust unable to move. xa0Gradually, though, we do move...and a song begins, rising slowly from the depths with a cantus firmus of Gregorian chant sounding in the violins, over and over. xa0The source-tune quoted here is the original fourth century music for the Latin Mass to the words Dona Nobis Pacem. xa0The piece ends with a frame of the very beginning: the two gangs know and respect each other now, and while they may never completely reconcile, there is harmony between them.