Ben Johnston: String Quartet #9 (1988)

Called “Transcendent“ by the LA Times when performed at MicroFest 2018, the wonderful Lyris Quartet previews their interpretation of Johnston’s ninth quartet which will be featured on the forthcoming MicroFest Records release “Lyris plays Ben Johnston“ (2020). NOTES “String Quartet No. 9, completed in the summer of 1988, and premiered and first recorded by the Stanford Quartet. Much had happened in Johnston’s music in the fifteen years since String Quartet No. 4: What he calls the “humanizing” impulse behind the Fourth Quartet has intensified in his more recent music, and has become linked to a new and quite conscious immersion in earlier classical idioms. The impulse behind this is not a nostalgic one, nor is it a naïve form of postmodernism, but rather it is the exploration of a tantalizing prospect: how European music might have developed had it been freed of the constraints of equal temperament. This re-conception of earlier musical idioms in terms of extended just intonation is a form of musical revisionism, distinct in technique and intent from the neoclassicism of his earlier, pre-just intonation works. String Quartet No. 9 is an attractive four-movement piece that plays out aspects of this scenario. This is especially clear in the third movement, a lyrical and fully Classical slow movement that invokes Haydn, but with melodic embellishments that are not possible in the language of the great Austrian composer. The scherzo-like second movement perhaps suggests shades of Mendelssohn, but opens up his idiom to new harmonic adventures made possible by just intonation. The energetic finale is harder to link to any specific older style, but is nonetheless still classical in impulse (with perhaps a hint of a jazz walking bass). But the most extraordinary movement is surely the first, where Johnston achieves a real compositional tour de force in creating a six minute movement, the pitch world of which remains entirely between middle C and the C an octave above and yet retains our interest throughout. Here the richness of just intonation, with its luminous pure intervals and their microtonal variants, lets us hear as never before one of Western music’s most familiar clichés: the C major scale. Like all of Johnston’s best music, this movement looks both backward (to a musical heritage that he feels is still vital in our contemporary world) and forward, to a world of new sounds and untried harmonies that will continue to engage us as his compositional achievement becomes better known. — Bob Gilmore, editor of the award-winning collection of Ben Johnston’s writings, Maximum Clarity (U. of Illinois Press, 2006).