Pierre Boulez (1925–2016)
Livre pour quatuor Ib (1948–9)

Eva-Maria Houben (*1955)
Nothing More for String Quartet (2019)

I. Adagio appassionato
II. Presto, quasi delirando. As fast as possbile
III. Misterioso. Legatissimo
IV. Allegretto gioviale – Trio amoroso
V. Largo tenebroso

Pierre Boulez
Livre pour quatuor IIIc

Anton Webern (1883–1945)
Six Bagatelles for String Quartet Op. 9 (1911–3)

I. Mäßig
II. Leicht bewegt
III. Ziemlich fließend
IV. Sehr langsam
V. Äußerst langsam
VI. Fließend

John Cage (1912–1992)
String Quartet in Four Parts (1949–50)

I. Quietly Flowing Along (Summer)
II. Slowly Rocking (Autumn)
III. Nearly Stationary (Winter)
IV. Quodlibet (Spring)

Intermission

Pierre Boulez
Livre pour quatuor Ia

Austin Wulliman (*1982)
Escape Rites for String Quartet (2024)

Anthony Cheung (*1982)
Twice Removed for String Quartet (2024)

I. Stretto House (after Steven Holl/Béla Bartók)
II. 830 Fireplace Road (after John Yau/Jackson Pollock)
III. Meditation on Motion (after Dean Rader/Cy Twombly)
IV. Journey to Mount Tamalpais (after Etel Adnan)

Commissioned by the JACK Quartet with support from the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, 92nd Street Y, and Wigmore Hall

Pierre Boulez
Livre pour quatuor II

Between Experiment and Idealism
An Homage to Pierre Boulez

Thomas May


When they initially met as participants in the Lucerne Festival Academy, the members of the JACK Quartet forged a connection with Pierre Boulez, the Academy’s founder, that left a lasting impression. Tonight’s program pays homage to their mentor by juxtaposing excerpts from his landmark Livre pour quatuor with works that resonate with the excitement and idealism that the young Boulez channeled into this radical reimagining of the string quartet.

Between 1949 and 1954, Boulez and John Cage exchanged a series of letters (mostly in French) that illuminate this pivotal moment in the evolution of each composer’s aesthetic. Their correspondence was charged with “the furtive energy of their young friendship as well as the anxiety of influence,” according to JACK Quartet violinist Austin Wulliman. “Both were so anxious to prove their originality to themselves and to each other in these letters.”

The dramaturgy of the Quartet’s Pierre Boulez Saal program was inspired by their “idealistic way of thinking and their optimism about what they could achieve through their experiments in new sound,” Wulliman notes. Works by Anton Webern and Eva-Maria Houben represent two points on the continuum of European serialism: Webern as a pioneer and Houben as a composer who has reimagined this legacy from a contemporary perspective. Their pieces for string quartet reflect Boulez’s deep connection to the Western musical tradition, demonstrating his ability to balance radical thought with innate musical expressivity.

Commissioned specifically for this program, San Francisco-born Anthony Cheung’s Twice Removed presents the voice of a prominent fellow American composer from the JACK Quartet’s generation with a unique connection to 20th-century French music. Spectralist composer Tristan Murail, who became a colleague of Boulez at IRCAM in Paris, numbered among Cheung’s mentors in New York.

Wulliman’s own piece, Escape Rites, meanwhile looks at the experimental energy of the postwar moment during which Boulez and Cage made common cause, plus its aftermath, from an American Expressionist perspective. As a motto for his new work—and for the program as a whole—Wulliman cites an aphorism by John Cage: “Activity involving in a single process the many, turning them, even though some seem to be opposites, towards oneness, contributes to a good way of life.”


Leaves in a Book
Pierre Boulez’s Open-Ended Livre

Framing the program, and interspersed throughout, are excerpts from Boulez’s Livre pour Quatuor—a monumental string quartet project begun in 1948 (the year he completed the Second Piano Sonata). Boulez focused intensively on Livre at the end of the 1940s and then returned to complete the final, sixth movement in 1959 and continued to revise the score at various points later in his life.

In keeping with his “open-ended” vision of a composition as an ever-evolving entity, Boulez allowed his ideas not only about the musical content but about how it should be presented to change. Eventually, he decided that the components of Livre could be presented in modular form as separable pieces, in an order chosen by the performers.

Indeed, Boulez never completed a “final” version of its six movements, which he referred to as feuillets (“leaves”). The title pays homage to a key inspirational figure for Boulez, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who devoted more than three decades to an unfinished “visual poem”: Le Livre, a utopian project intended to encompass “all existing relations between everything.”

The first and third movements consist of two and three parts, respectively, while the fragmentary fourth was finished only after Boulez’s death by his IRCAM associate and fellow composer Philippe Manoury. (It had its world premiere at the Pierre Boulez Saal in 2018, performed by the Arditti Quartet. Its first recording by Quatuor Diotima, which collaborated with Boulez late in the composer’s life, was released earlier this year.)

Both Livre and John Cage’s contemporaneous String Quartet in Four Parts manifest the importance of current technological research to these composers’ thinking, according to Wulliman. “They employ a lot of extended techniques that were extraordinary for the time but are still, in the end, acoustic works for string quartet.” The result is “a very fruitful tension between the practice of writing traditional acoustic music and the possibility that was opened up by electronic music and the age of recorded music. We hear Boulez and Cage trying to harness the possibilities that have been displayed to human ears by new technology.”


Mindful, Epigrammatic, Cosmic
Eva-Maria Houben, Anton Webern, John Cage

Born in 1955, the German composer and organist Eva-Maria Houben belongs to the so-called Wandelweiser Group, a collective of experimental composers with a close affinity for the aesthetics of John Cage and the ethos of performance art. Houben, who is additionally an acclaimed interpreter of Cage’s keyboard works, composed Nothing More in 2019. In a poetic preface to the score, she praises “the practice of close fellowship” among composers, performers, and listeners who together become part of “a widely spread network all over the world” in which boundaries between artistic disciplines and even between past and present dissolve so that “we can no longer distinguish between traditional, contemporary, and future works.”

Crafting a soundscape of profound mindfulness about the role of silence and the balance between what is unheard and what is left unplayed, Houben weaves together influences from Anton Webern, “who provided me with the twelve-tone row” (from his Op. 28 String Quartet); Alban Berg, from whose Lyric Suite she selectively borrowed his movement titles to label sections of Nothing More; and fellow Wandelweiser composer Jürg Frey, “who included a beautiful technique with harmonics for strings in his Second String Quartet.” But Houben’s inspirations reach back further, to Robert Schumann, “who composed musical accents causing an amazing disorientation” and to Anton Bruckner, to whom she extends “special thanks.”

Composed between 1911 and 1913 but not premiered until 1924 (with Paul Hindemith on viola), Anton Webern’s Six Bagatelles Op. 9 are miniature yet intensely concentrated expressions of the atonal language the young composer was forging following the completion of formal study with his mentor, Arnold Schoenberg. Webern inscribed into the score the perfect Latin aphorism for his compression of meaning into the briefest spans of musical time: “Non multa sed multum” (“Not many [in quantity] but much [in content]”).

The Six Bagatelles were published with a preface by Schoenberg, who marveled at his former student’s epigrammatic intensity as an achievement that was not only artistic but even moral: “Consider what moderation is required to express oneself so briefly. Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single indrawn breath—such concentration can only be present when there is a corresponding absence of self-indulgence.”

“This piece is like the opening of another door; the possibilities implied are unlimited,” wrote John Cage while working on String Quartet in Four Parts in 1949 in Paris. Another door was opened by his new friendship with the younger Pierre Boulez. Their encounter would spark a dynamic exchange of ideas—initially rooted in mutual admiration, but also in fundamental aesthetic differences that would later drive the two strong-willed artists apart.

Another crucial encounter informs the work. In 1946, during a time of personal upheaval, Cage had an epiphany when the Indian singer and tabla player Gita Sarabhai taught him that “the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.” This idea resonated deeply with Cage, reinforcing his interest in non-Western philosophies.

The String Quartet in Four Parts carries forward Cage’s exploration of the Hindu concept of the annual cycle, with each season representing four phases of existence: creation (spring), preservation (summer), destruction (fall), and quiescence (winter). The starting point is summer (when Cage arrived in France). Despite the familiar four-movement design, his sound world is strikingly alien. Rather than develop themes or motifs in a conventional manner, Cage constructed the piece from a carefully pre-arranged “gamut” of fixed sonorities that remain unchanged each time they appear. The absence of vibrato results in a strangely detached, archaic sound—neither fully modern nor resembling early music.


Unseen Machines and Reflections Multiplied
Austin Wulliman and Anthony Cheung

As he immersed himself in the Boulez-Cage dynamic, Austin Wulliman sensed a connection with a project the composer Henry Cowell undertook together with the inventor Léon Theremin in the early 1930s to design the Rhythmicon—an instrument built to explore the relationship between rhythm and the harmonic series by generating (from a keyboard) polyrhythmic patterns that correspond to each successive number of the partials of the overtone series.

Wulliman initially intended simply to translate the Rhythmicon idea into the string quartet medium but expanded his concept as he delved into the exchange between Boulez and Cage about the potential of complex overtones and their implication for orchestration. As he thought more deeply about how polyrhythmic and microtonal practice have changed in the 75 years since Boulez and Cage concentrated on writing string quartets, he decided to address these concerns from a contemporary perspective. The death of Wolfgang Rihm last year, another formative influence on Wulliman, additionally affected the direction taken by his musical thoughts.

Escape Rites filters all of these impulses through an American Expressionist lens. A just intonation–based scale of 25 pitches “is serialized to create micro- and macro-level details of the work,” explains Wulliman. Every note that occurs in the piece is given a characteristic extended playing technique—left-hand pizzicato or grinding and clicking sounds, for example—that is based on its harmonic meaning in his system. The “payoff” arrives near the end, as the overtone series becomes clearly aligned with distinct rhythms as prescribed by the Rhythmicon model—“unseen machines from another time,” as the composer describes it in the prose poem that accompanies the score.

Commissioned for the JACK Quartet’s 20th anniversary, Twice Removed comprises Anthony Cheung’s musical responses to four artists working in various media who themselves respond to pre-existing works of art—an approach the composer identifies with the literary technique of ekphrasis (such as the Shield of Achilles passage in the Iliad, in which Homer describes an object in vivid visual detail). “Sometimes a trace of the original remains through conscious or even subconscious allusions, whereas others have been filtered into something very different,” notes Cheung.

His string quartet thus multiples the process of ekphrasis. The first movement reflects on Steven Holl’s Stretto House (located in Dallas), an architectural design inspired by Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. The point of departure for the second movement is 830 Fireplace Road by the poet and art critic John Yau—a poem structured as a variation on a quote from Jackson Pollock (“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing”). Cheung even alludes to Pollock’s drip technique in his treatment of timbre. The third movement engages with the writer Dean Rader’s poem Meditation on Motion, which is in turn inspired by the fluid, continuous lines of Cy Twombly’s radical 1966 painting Cold Stream. The mood becomes more meditative in the fourth movement, as Cheung reflects on the artist and writer Etel Adnan’s varied attempts to express the transcendence of Mount Tamalpais, a Bay Area peak that the composer hiked as a child—which resonates anew with music’s ability to inhabit both presence and memory.


Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work appears in The New York Times, Gramophone, and many other publications. The English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival, he is also U.S. correspondent for The Strad and program annotator for the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Ojai Festival.