CENTER STAGE: The Cosmos and the String Quartet
— On the Chamber Music of Robert Simpson
An on-going column by Edward Green
This column is the first of a series bringing to “center stage” composers of great merit who, for whatever reason, have so far been only on the periphery of the “New Music World.” Sometimes the slight takes the form of misunderstanding. A composer may be “known” in the sense of public awareness, but “unknown” when it comes to a true appreciation of his or her work. More often, the work is so little-known, it hasn’t even had a chance to be misunderstood!
My first composer falls in the middle. He is somewhat known—certainly in his native England, but largely unheralded here. I’m speaking of Robert Simpson (1921-1997). You may ask: why start with a composer who is no longer with us? The answer is: the neglect of Simpson is so large, it just calls out for immediate rectification!
For Simpson was an important composer: one who had a unique and deeply vital approach to tonality, rhythm, and the problems of form and counterpoint. He is most famous, I suppose, for his symphonies. He wrote 11, including one—the Ninth—funded by (of all organizations) the Rex Foundation: the administrators of the Grateful Dead’s charitable fund. And Simpson, for whom Beethoven, Nielsen, and Bruckner were musical idols, is anything but a rocker!
Meanwhile, the Ninth Symphony, (available on Hyperion Records), gives us a useful beginning point to see how audacious Simpson was. This symphony is likely the longest piece ever written in a single, unvarying tempo. Certainly, the longest piece that doesn’t bore you to death! A symphony in one movement, 50 minutes long.
Simpson’s approach can be called the correlative of that taken by a far more famous composer: Elliott Carter. Through metric modulation, through a constant flux (and superimposition) of various underlying tempi, Carter strives to make a one of speed and slowness. Simpson’s goal is similar, only his constant is truly a “constant.” He finds, within and above an unyielding pulse, all the drama he needs of fast and slow, steady and spasmodic, tranquil and agitated, subtle and blunt rhythms. Violent, the music certainly can be; but there’s also an Olympian calm in it: a sense of utter, even ontological unity behind, and in the midst of, all that diversity.
“In reality, opposites are one: art shows this”—wrote the great American poet and philosopher Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism. And that statement, true for all music, is blazingly clear in the case of Simpson. Would it surprise the reader to know that one of Simpson’s greatest passions, outside of music, was for Cosmology? For a rigorous and scientific sense of the workings of the universe? Simpson was a member of the Royal Astronomical Society; and in composition after composition one senses in him a desire to create a contemporary “Music of the Spheres.”
Like the cosmos, Simpson’s best music has a presence both of almost illimitable energy, and a vastness of space and time. His formal designs are breathtakingly spacious. Some of his critics have noted the “cosmic connection.” For example, Malcolm MacDonald, in a talk he gave in 1993 titled “Robert Simpson’s Symphonic Appetite,” (available on Dunelm Records), relates the climax of the Ninth Symphony to the “heart of a supernova.”
Yet, a critic ought to be candid. And, candidly speaking, my favorite Simpson is not his symphonic work. It is his music for string quartet. And his fifteen quartets are remarkably diverse. Some reflect his deep commitment to pacifism. The Tenth Quartet (1983), for example, is subtitled “For Peace.” Others arise from his profound knowledge of astronomy, evolving, as they do, in a manner reflecting the forces of the cosmos: its energy, and its vast time-scale.
Yet the cosmos for Simpson was not just grand and sublime; it was also playful and miniature. His Eighth Quartet (1979) has a scherzo subtitled “Eretmapodities gilletti”—a portrait of a mosquito which more than holds its own with the Flight of the Bumblebee for top-honor in the world of insect-inspired music!
If Simpson was anything, he was bold. During the 1950s and 60s—the heyday of atonal serialism—he was that rarest of composers: dedicated to tonality, but rejecting any facile (or ironic) imitation of the past. His tonality could be ferociously dissonant. And it was (in principle) what Stravinsky once called “pure interval music.” Said Simpson, in a conversation with Bruce Duffie.
I try to see what kind of energy can be got from the differences between, say, the 4th and the 5th and the 3rd and the 7th and all the intervals between the notes. They create resonances which created tonality in the first place and there are new ways of looking at that…It’s a question of deriving energy from the actual sounds themselves, from the intervals.
Simpson believed that most of his contemporaries had been seduced by the world of “constant timbral contrast,” and had overlooked what was in his opinion a deeper, and far more potent creative resource: the pure musical energy—infinite in its variety—arising from the ever-changing play of the basic intervals. And nowhere did this conviction declare itself more forcefully than in his commitment to the (relative) uniformity of color that a string quartet presents. There is hardly anything that can’t be found in Haydn. With Simpson, it’s nearly all just simple arco and pizzicato. Like a medieval monk vowing poverty, he went out of his way to eschew the allurements of glissandi, Bartók snaps, scordatura—even harmonics! And microtones? Forget about it!
Bold as to tonality, rhythm (for he hardly ever shifted meter), and timbre—this is Simpson. Yet bold, too, in his love for strict counterpoint. He is, arguably, the greatest 20th-century master of the fugue, as well as various arcane and intricate forms of counterpoint. His Ninth Quartet (1982) is a set of 32 variations and a fugue on a theme of Haydn; and each variation is designed—as was Haydn’s minuet—as a perfect palindrome. Not even Webern ever attempted mirror-composition on so vast a scale. The concluding fugue is free from “mirrors,” but is astonishing in its own way: a study in sustained momentum. Bit by bit, by subtle bit, it grows ever faster over its nearly 13 minutes, and ends with a terrifying (and yet exhilarating) vortex of sound: a 40-odd measure coda in which the note G (the tonic of the work) acts almost as a “black hole,” pulling everything towards its “singularity” until all other pitches are gone. An awesome moment, with—to my ear—no true parallel in all of chamber music.
Simpson was also a fearless advocate of what could be called “composition by appreciation.” I offer this example: between 1973 and 1975, he wrote—as his Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Quartets—a trio of brilliantly inventive paraphrases (analogies might be the better word) of the Razumovsky quartets of Beethoven. The Eleventh Quartet (1984) is also inspired by Beethoven: the Op. 95. And yet, how original these four quartets sound!
Let me reiterate. Simpson’s music is never “easy.” At times its melodic and harmonic procedures resemble mid-period Bartók, yet without a touch of folk music. Instead, building on the work of Nielsen, he often exhibits a large-scale tonal dialectic based on the idea of “progressive tonality.” Frequently, a combat between two tonalities—sometimes resolved, sometimes left open—plays itself out over an entire quartet. One can hear this even in his very First Quartet (1951-52). All the way through, the tonal centers of E-flat and A fight it out. We might, with justice, call this “elliptical tonality.” (A term, I believe, of my own coinage). If the customary image of tonality is of a circle, with a single “focus” to which all its modulations relate, then Simpson is a lover of ellipses—with their dual “foci.” And let us remember his love for astronomy: for planets, comets, and pretty much all celestial bodies obey the power of the ellipse!
There is a 20 year gap between Simpson’s first three quartets (written in the early 1950s) and the remaining twelve. These resume in 1973 and pace themselves evenly across the next two decades. (The Fifteenth Quartet is 1991). Are they all of equal merit? Of course not! And at times Simpson gets stuck far too long in his “favorite” rhythm: the motion of triplet eighth notes—often in an implied cross-rhythm, where the motivic pattern shifts in units of two eighths. Moreover, for a dedicated pacifist, there are times when he seems needlessly (and disproportionately) aggressive in his musical textures: sometimes unremittingly so. Yet, over-all, these are minor faults compared to his great merits. And the composer who is without sin on the subject—whose music is a consistently sensible relation of tranquility and agitation, force and grace, charm and vehemence—let that composer sit in judgment. I, for one, refuse!
Having already pointed to several of my favorites quartets let me mention one more: the Seventh (1977), written in celebration of the centenary of the astronomer Sir James Jean. In design a single movement, it makes constant use of the open strings. Simpson chose to analogize this open tuning to the force of gravity, and the work is structured around the most “bland” of tonal procedures: the circle of fifths. Ah—but the result is anything but bland. I won’t give away how he does this. I just say: buy the CD, and listen!
And speaking of the CDs, the quartets are all available from Hyperion, and are performed by such fine ensembles as the Delmé, Coull, and Vanbrugh Quartets.
In sum: Simpson’s “string quartet cosmos” is both vast and intimate; bracingly dramatic and playful; audacious and yet subtly, carefully-wrought. It is a world of sound that deserves to be far better known. This column is meant to serve as an introduction, an invitation, a verbal foretaste, of that world. Be prepared to be moved, delighted, challenged, and fascinated.
[Edward Green, whose doctorate was earned at NYU, has been a professor of composition and world music at Manhattan School of Music since 1984. He recently composed three concerti for trumpet, piano, and alto saxophone—each released on a different label. Among his scholarly publications are studies of Partch, Ellington, Zhou Long, and Scelsi.]