Conversations Across Centuries

Tuesday, June 11 | 7:00 p.m.

Temple Beth El
Sponsored by Plante Moran

Program Notes | © Ty Bouque 2024

It’s often said that chamber music is the medium closest to the dinner table. In small
settings, we say that instruments talk, they speak to one another like family: as in we
can talk about anything and pick up where we left off and finishing each other’s
sentences, but also sometimes talking over one another or agreeing to disagree or
pushing buttons. So it’s no accident that chamber music has historically been music
for the living room. Salons and foyer recitals were spaces of intimate exchange
where music served as a kind of audible extension of lifelong companionships:
think of young Wolfgang and Nannerl Mozart playing trios with their father Leopold,
or Clara and Robert Schumann, reading duets together. The music written to fill
the chamber—in its archaic form, that word means the privacy of a bedroom—is
first a testament to the invisible web of memories, personalities, and relationships
tying together the people who are playing it. We, the audience, are like voyeurs,
eavesdropping on a private chat between loved ones. (The root of the word
converse means the familial, after all.)

Tonight, we’ll hear that, though the vocabulary and content of those “chamber
conversations” has changed over the centuries, the bedrock of care that defines
any surrogate family—the tenderness of parental figures, the jocular gentility
underwriting sibling rivalry, the love that makes transparency and exchange
possible—is what unifies the genre across time. To make music together remains
among the most vulnerable of shared activities, and the best chamber music creates
space for individuals to enter into dynamics of compassion and trust, whereby
families—with all their frustration, pain, and joy—are knit in real time.

Marc Neikrug is no stranger to the familial in music. The child of two distinguished
cellists, he spent his earliest years listening to his mother compose at the piano, and
there was a constant rotating door of musicians in his family’s New York apartment.
His later career—he’s best known as Pinchas Zukerman’s pianist of preference—was
dominated by the give-and-take of duo recitals, and his compositional sensibilities
come predisposed to how musicians locate themselves in social relation to one
another. He is, almost by birth, a musician’s musician: his music thinks first about that
sociality.

Tonight’s oboe quartet works like ten versions of the same conversation among
family. Think of it like a hanging mobile, variations on the same general shape
all suspended in close proximity. Each part takes roughly the same structure: the
wedge, or <>. They start from a single point (usually a sole note or a sparse chord),
spiral outward in both chromatic directions until achieving maximum density, then
cleave a path through the bramble back towards a solitary exit. Within that wedge,
however, the roles played by individual instruments can vary drastically. Who starts,
who accords, who resists, who, having heard the first note, sets off a “conversational
tangent” that sends the music wheeling on its trajectory of expansion—these roles
shift with every iteration. The wedge is a kind of common ground on which the
internal dynamics of conversational space are subject to constant renegotiation,
and by the end, the four have exhausted every possible pathway that the shape
can take. But that exhaustion never sours into resentment: on the contrary, the four
grow closer and more comfortable with every variation. Effortless conversation, as
anyone can tell you, takes practice.

And if we zoom out a bit, the quartet as a whole forms a similar cross-movement
diamond, announced by a return of the opening material in the eleventh hour
of its final movement. Except the knotty byways we’ve taken to get there have

fundamentally changed the group along the way. The lonely oboe note on which
the work sets out is conspicuously absent from the final chord, which instead
comprises its three closest neighbors. We can “hear” the perfect closure of the
circle only in its failure to arrive, a ghostly kind of echo: the ensemble, though the
same as it was when it began, is different for having traveled this far together. And is
conversation with loved ones not like that too? After a certain period, one no longer
needs the promise of clean resolution, of every thread tied neatly; coexistence is
synonymous with change, and transformation is not only permissible here but healthy:

“I love you enough to change alongside you.”

Brahms’ Piano Quintet, meanwhile, is a kind of mixed family, a second marriage
maybe, a group of people who know what they want only after having had time to
go out into the world to explore other less-satisfying options. The work began life as
a string quartet, finished in 1862 and later destroyed by its composer (Brahms was
in the habit of doing this, to the endless frustration of musicologists). Then it became
a piano duo sonata, published as Opus 34b and premiered by Brahms himself
alongside Karl Tausig. It was only after these two separate versions had come and
gone did Brahms opt to bring the two together, following the formula laid out by
Robert Schumann’s Quintet twenty years earlier, and the result has been the genre’s
enduring masterpiece.

The beauty of this mixed family is how audible traces of their individual pasts are
brought to the table not as points of unspoken conflict but valued viewpoints.
The piano part slips in and out of its Opus 34b virtuosity, never as a means of
dominating the conversation but without abandoning itself totally to secondary
accompaniment. The strings move as a unit, they talk like a well-oiled machine with
a century of discursive practice, but never at the exclusion of the newcomer. The
instruments speak in the dialect of their previous existence, but still listen wholly to
what the other has to say: it’s a coupling of individuals who’ve been single for a while
and now know what they want to build together.

The key to this in musical terms can be spotted in all the linkages. Brahms—and we’ll
see this more clearly in the week to come as we explore his late clarinet works—has
a tendency to overlay his ideas like tectonic plates, one sliding seamlessly beneath
the rim of the other. The result is that tension doesn’t built to hard, structural apexes
or ultimatums but is instead continually stretched and released at the moment of
its appearance, like an exercise in patience and trust. For all its musical tension, the
Quintet is dominated by a sense that difference is not cause for oppositional rupture
but (this is the mixed family part) actually why they speak together so fluidly. Five
individuals with varying histories are rarely going to agree, but love knows how to
piggy-back, echo, juxtapose, or amplify without needing to prove anyone wrong.
Dissonance—especially in the famous chromatic staircase of the final movement—is
bargained as the ground and not the earthquake.

In both works tonight, the shared DNA is the ethics of compassion that give chamber
music its discursive magic. Instruments here leave space enough to always attend to
one another and their needs while maintaining independence in the conversational
network, as only the best families—chosen or otherwise—know how. © Ty Bouque 2024