String Quartet quotes

Question 1

The string quartet serves a common audience as a niche market

Answer 1

Gelbart (2022)

Question 2

Rise of conservatoires in C19- made to show young musicians how to ‘integrate’ “authentic” ‘folk roots’ with ‘international professional standards’ and vice versa

Answer 2

Gelbart (2021)

Question 3

‘One hears four intelligent people conversing among themselves’

Answer 3

Goethe (1829)

Question 4

‘Multiple agency’, ‘artful conversation’, ‘theatrical script’

Answer 4

Klorman (2016)

Question 5

4 people as ideal for a conversation, 5 will split into different groups

Answer 5

The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups (2023)

Question 6

C19- the quartet has moved into the bourgeois drawing room/salon instead of the public hall, especially in Vienna/Leipzig

Answer 6

Lott (2015)

Question 7

Schuppanzigh’s Classical Concerts- ‘untrained, unsocialised, but enthusiastic audience’

Answer 7

Gingerich (2010)

Question 8

Beethoven’s music ‘more than mere admiration’ in Paris, ‘delirium’

Answer 8

Johnson (1995)

Question 9

Hensel 1st movement- ‘goal-oriented, tonal conception’, ‘formally diffuse’, ‘fantasia’ like

Answer 9

Todd (2009)

Question 10

Hensel transposed Mendelssohn’s ‘Sonate eccosaise’ from F sharp into Eb, ‘elaborates’ by extending the dominant harmony at the start from 2 to 6 bars

Answer 10

Benedict Taylor (2024)

Question 11

100 years after Grosse Fuge’s composition, Beethoven has been ‘justified’, and Grew’s students at Birmingham start to see value in the complex score

Answer 11

Grew (1931)

Question 12

Scarlet tanager or red-eyed vireo inspired Dvorak ‘American’ 3rd movement, we can say he was ‘really there’

Answer 12

McKone (2021)

Question 13

Verbunkos- ‘a highly hybrid and multicultural mix’ of folk and Viennese urban music

Answer 13

Loya (2008)

Question 14

Hungarian gypsy music- ‘pronounced syncopated rhythms’, ‘fiery fourth-beat emphasis’, ‘pervasive dotted rhythms’, ascending refrains, but leads to common gypsy stereotypes at the time
Schumann op. 41 no. 3

Answer 14

Brown (2013)

Question 15

C20 quartet as ‘a medium conducive to experimentation and formal innovation’, but ‘positive re-engagement with tradition’

Answer 15

Gloag (2003)

Question 16

Schoenberg as guiding light for the C20 quartet, ‘the ideal measure of absolute music’ and experimentation

Answer 16

Kralik (1918, Wiener Abendpost)

Question 17

Schoenberg

Answer 17

Quartet no. 4 (1926), if comprehensibility is limited in one aspect, it must be simplified on the other side- tonality vs form

Question 18

Julian Carrillo- Modernist composer, but no “teleological” sequence of events
His atonal style is not a ‘transitional stage’ between tonality and microtonality, like it was for Schoenberg, tonality and 12-tone music

Answer 18

Madrid (2015)

Question 19

Early post-WW2 avant garde European music- ‘renunciation of traditional genres’, instrumentation and titles, but the quartet was an exception, given its ‘prestige’ from late Beethoven and the SVS

Answer 19

Toop (2014)

Question 20

‘The quartet has come to a standstill’
‘who does not know the quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and who would wish to say anything against them?’

Answer 20

Schumann (1842)

Question 21

Nora Clench’s quartet was ‘courageous’ and ‘skilful’ for playing Grosse Fuge, but better left to students than on the public stage if even Joachim couldn’t play it

Answer 21

Reviewer (1906)

Question 22

‘Too often national musics are considered “dialects” of a so-called German mainstream’

Answer 22

Beckerman (1986)