GUDMUNDSEN-HOLMGREEN: String Quartets Nos. 7-10 / Nordic String Qrt / Dacapo 8.226218
My regular readers know, at this point, how much I admire the music of the late Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen. His music is very hard to describe because it’s liner, yet it isn’t; it’s abstract, but not entirely. It always seems to follow its own unchartered course, and unfortunately it’s not easy for the average listener to grasp, thus it mostly just exists on records. I’ve not run across many live performances of his work on YouTube.
These four quartets were written over the incredible span of 27 years, from 1984 to 2011. Three of them were written for the Kronos Quartet, a group that, I am sad to report, turned its nose up at my suggestion that they perform and record Charles Mingus’ utterly brilliant string quartet. Well, at least Kronos has played Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s music, which is a feather in their cap. Quartets Nos. 7 and 8 are first recordings, and Quartet No. 9, written for “string quartet and ocean,” includes electronically created ocean sounds courtesy of Wayne Siegel at DIEM, Aarhus. It should also be noted that each of these four quartets has a subtitle: No. 7, “Parted”; No. 8, “Ground”; No. 9 (written 20 years later), “Last Ground”; and No. 10, “New Ground.” Only the seventh quartet is divided into four separate movements; the last three are one-movement works. For some strange reason, the download I received did not include the third movement of Quartet No. 7, so I had to go online and record the streaming audio. (Oh, the lengths I go to sometimes to review a CD!)
From the very beginning of Quartet No. 7, one is aware of the oddity of Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s compositional style. The strings play in a distorted manner, somehow or other squelching their string to produce an ugly rather than a beautiful sound, almost like rustic folk fiddlers with little training. The 6/8 theme hovers between bitonality and atonality, with the players sometimes simply hitting their instruments with their bows and, when they do play together, constantly breaking up the line with almost violent percussive effects. It’s music that takes you several different places at once in addition to sounding abrasive—yet somehow it’s utterly fascinating and holds your attention, sort of like a surrealist train wreck in which three or four trains have collided simultaneously, strewing their debris in different directions. Other than have a score to dissect, there’s really no other way to describe this music.”Off the wall” almost seems too mild for it. Somehow or other, he also managed to get the strings to play in a percussive manner (and I don’t mean by hitting their instruments) that almost sounds like snare drum press rolls. You can hear this at one point in the first movement as well as in the opening of the third. The listener will also note that although there are four separate movements, they are linked. There are also moments, as in the midst of the third movement, when the music simply stops and one thinks it is over, only to have it start up violently once again. I would say that there is nothing else like it in the entire history of string quartet writing, but then there are the other Gudmundsen-Holmgreen quartets!
And the odd thing is that, if you read the liner notes hoping to get some idea of what you’ll be listening to, you’ll probably get even more confused. In describing the ultra-abstract Quartet No. 8, for instance, which sounds like the players snapping their strings like elastic bands while one of the upper strings (possibly the second violin or viola) plays one repeated note (A-flat) in a sequence that leans towards D-flat minor, and somehow Gudmundsen-Holmgreen kept this up over an extraordinarily long span of time without much varying of the music. But what does annotator Andrew Mellor say?
The baroque practice of looping a bass line (or ‘ground bass’) proved useful for Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, its enforced limitations acting as a stimulant. The composer would toy with the device throughout his later decades and for this eighth string quartet, extended its rubric by using rows of harmonic sequences in symmetrical upward and downward movements. The composer’s own explanatory note explains that his ground consists of ‘a continuously repeated 35 bar rhythmic foundation (constructed of polyrhythms), an equilibrium in a limited number of tones, a continuously repeated harmonic sequence (modulating between four different symmetrically arranged levels) and the overall form of a bow, consisting of many small bows.’
Here is yet another example of why “Academic-ese” really doesn’t do the average listener a bit of good in trying to describe what a composition actually SOUNDS like. I think, if you listen to it, that my description is much closer to what the ear receives than this academic gobbledygook. Later on in the quartet, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen also brought strongly percussive string playing into this quartet, establishing a steady pulse that does not really exist in the earlier part of the work. It’s yet another example of how his music did not follow any sort of traditional path. Even the avant-garde scores of Harry Partch were easier to follow than this; and by comparison with this quartet, the constant rhythmic changes in Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps sound like disco music. It’s much closer to the reality of what you hear to say that the latter part of this quartet sounds like alien insects from another planet rubbing their legs together as they slowly crawl out of the range of your hearing.
As for No. 9 for Quartet and ocean, I can tell you that you certainly get plenty of ocean, and as someone who spent many happy days in my youth at the New Jersey shore (which, I am told, scarcely exists anymore due to the damage of hurricanes), I can attest that this is what an ocean sounds like. Including the sounds of sea birds. Watch out that you don’t step on a broken sea shell with your bare feet, now! That REALLY smarts! Ironically, the music in this quartet, while certainly modern and somewhat abstract, sounds closer to what we would consider “real” string quartet music than the prior pieces. Yes, the music is still fractured, but not so much that you can’t follow it at least a bit, and I liked the fact that the sounds of sea gulls came back even when the ocean tide itself remained quiet. By and large, this quartet leans closer to tonality as well, or at least modality, staying in one chord for a protracted period of time; and the music develops in a slightly more conventional manner. The whole thing is more organic and not as fragments as Quartets Nos. 7 & 8.
And then, just to throw you a curve ball, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s last quartet sounds like the Pachelbel Canon! Go figure. If nothing else, it surely proves that he knew how to write conventional music. Of course, when he develops it he takes it in his own directions, including some crazy syncopation, quite a bit of which sounds like jazz and some of which plays against the rhythm as if the music were running sideways (or backwards, take your pick). This was surely a way for the composer to leave us with a smile on our faces after so many stark, abstract, and deadly serious works.
But Gudmundsen-Holmgreen can’t stay away from his basic nature for very long, thus the latter third of this quartet goes into some eerie microtonality, then returns to tonality but adds his characteristically edgy writing with its almost violent attacks on the strings. Thus Pachelbel’s Canon turns into a sort of violent-sounding hoedown at a pretty brisk pace. Then, slowly, Pachelbel tries to reassert himself, fighting the edgy hoedown music, generally winning the battle but sometimes losing. Welcome to Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s little musical universe!
This is quite the strange album, to be sure. If you can check it out and decide you like it, go for it!
—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley
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