Review Summary: Immensely rewarding if you're willing to commit to it 100%. Possibly impossible to listen to otherwise
(Quite a bit of this ludicrously long review might best be summarized by watching the videos I link to at the end)
Though he was a 20th century composer, Shostakovich’s string quartets are part of the classical tradition going back a few hundred years, at least back to Josef Haydn. But his quartets definitely don’t
sound much like Haydn, not at first anyway; they’re much noisier.
String Quartet writing after Beethoven was a really big deal. Beethoven’s quartets were so acclaimed that critics used them as a way to measure how good you were as a composer. With some exaggeration, writing them was a minimalistic challenge that went something like this: “All you’ve got are four instruments, all with basically the same tone-color, and your knowledge of 4-part harmony. Now write a masterpiece or else be criticized for your mediocrity.”
Haydn, living before Beethoven in a less critical environment, wrote sixty-eight quartets; Mendelssohn and Schumann, living after Beethoven, wrote a combined total of only nine. Schubert wrote a larger number of them, but they were regarded as mediocre by critics during his lifetime. Brahms was so intimidated by the standards set by his famous predecessor that he reputedly burned around twenty string quartets before allowing a meagre three to be published.
(I recently experienced a similar frustration while in the middle of this review, the kind of problem that possibly plagues all amateur artists. I logged onto Sputnik to submit the original version of it, but as usual I glanced over the new reviews on the frontpage first. There, I read Staff Member Dewinged’s review of Mechina’s album Cenotaph. In going back over my own introduction after reading Dewinged’s excellent one, I found that I was totally disabled from publishing it. Introductions are easily the most challenging section for me to write in an essay, and I’m pretty much never satisfied with them. Looking at mine after reading his was like driving past a restaurant surrounded by delicious odors and coming home to an empty fridge with nothing to eat but a plain potato and some mushy kale. I had to scrap the intro and rework the whole damn review into something I could live with).
Anyway, Shostakovich’s style is much noisier than what we usually think of when we hear the term “classical music.” But for someone like me, who enjoys all kinds of “hard” music, the noisiness is part of the appeal.
The fifth quartet has three movements:
I. Allegro non troppo (which means roughly
“play it fast, but not too cheerfully”)
The piece begins, like a flock of finches in a tree, with a dialogue between the instruments cheerfully singing the kind of chirp-like melodies so often created by Haydn, as for example the second themes of his “hen” symphony and “bird” quartet. But this relatively consonant music soon plunges into an intensely dissonant section, led by a driving bassline on the viola and cello. The emotions this music generates aren’t the usual emotions most of us experience when we listen to “classical music.” Really, these emotions can’t even be found on The Voice or, for that matter, on most of the radio stations available in my part of the U.S. (I have about one-and-a-half metal stations where I live, which tend to overplay Godsmack and Metallica classics and mix them in with Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, stations which play only Pop-Punk of the Green Day and later Offspring variety, and which play nary an Industrial song outside of one or two tracks by NIN). No, to find an analogy you really have to go to something harder, some form of Metal or Hardcore or Industrial. I’ve long wished some band would borrow sections from this quartet, adapt them to electric guitar and play them over the top of some double-bass drumming. Of course, you can probably “metalize” any kind of music. But bits of this particular passage sound like they could generate some killer riffs.
Movement II. Andante — Andantino — Andante — Andantino — Andante — (which means roughly
“play it slow, then a little faster, then slow again, then a little faster again” and so on).
Shostakovich belongs in the same tradition as Bach, Brahms and Beethoven, but unless you’re really into classical music you might not know it by listening to this middle movement alone.
The reason Shostakovich sounds so different and abrasive compared to traditional “classical” compositions is the differing system of harmony. Or rather, he uses the same harmonies in different ways. In this loosening of the rules he was influenced by early 20th century composers like Schoenberg and Webern, who abandoned traditional harmony completely and wrote strictly atonal works. Atonality works well in my opinion in harder varieties of music; see for example a piano cover of Slayer’s Raining Blood found on the link below; there, the chromatic nature is more obvious than on the guitar, obvious
visually if you’re familiar with a keyboard, but also obvious
aurally because Raining Blood is not the kind of music that most of us associate with the piano.
Rock-based, as opposed to Classical-based, musicians have created breathtakingly powerful music using atonal patterns -- at least in the opinions of fans of Thrash Metal and its derivatives. But unfortunately the legacies of the atonal “classical” composers have only survived for the most part among a relatively small number of college-trained musicians, and in horror films, where atonality plays a major role in generating fear. The scariest parts of movies like The Shining and The Exorcist are dominated by atonality, as is the quiet but uncomfortable opening scene of Aliens and, most famously of all, in the shower scene from Psycho.
Shostakovich wrote some atonal works -- for example his 12th and 13th string quartets -- but he didn’t go as far as that in the 5th quartet; he toed the atonal line but never crossed it. Outside of thrash metal and horror-film soundtracks, where pure discordance is used to conjure up aggression and fear, what use are such harmonies? Shostakovich didn’t necessarily put them to work in generating fear, though like I alluded to before he might have had aggression in mind. What seems to dominate the mood of the middle movement of this quartet are emotions that I think of as
beautifully miserable. Comparing it to his earlier criticism of the third quartet, Stephen Harris wrote of this movement:
“This is not the ghost music heard…in the third quartet. In comparison that music is too animated. The music we now experience portrays the land where the ghosts dwell; it is a desolate world, observed with clinical dispassion; a still universe surveyed following the onslaught and after the rampage.”
Haunting. Dispassionate. Desolation. Such emotions, which dominate this movement and much of Shostakovich’s music, are only rarely to be found in traditional Classical. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, they all surely knew about misery. But their employers were extremely wealthy, privileged aristocrats and churchmen who for the most part did not experience misery, and did not want to hear about it; as a result a lot of the Great Master's music is often serious but only rarely what some might call "depressing." Shostakovich definitely knew about misery, though, not to mention onslaught, rampage and desolation: He fought in the defense of Leningrad when the Nazis laid siege to the city. In that two years of hell-on-Earth he witnessed the deaths of at least a million of his comrades from combinations of violence, disease and starvation. A fireman during the conflict, he had horror and fear and desolation and misery essentially baked -- more or less literally by means of fire -- into his personality. PTSD wasn't defined then, but I’m sure he was haunted by plenty of ghosts.
We need light-hearted music, yes, but a universe where music fails to capture these darker emotions is incomplete.
III: Moderato — Allegretto — Andante (which translates as
“play moderately fast, then slowish, then slow")
Mozart’s and Haydn’s divertimenti, which translates as
“diversions,” were written to be background music. They didn’t put a lot of thought into most of them, and didn’t ask much from their audiences. But the expectation had long been that the audience would sit rapt and pay full attention to the performance of their string quartets, and that tradition continued unabated for generations. Shostakovich’s Fifth Quartet is around thirty minutes from start to finish. That’s a lot of concentration to ask of attention-deficient people like me, who readily slip into day-dream land after about two minutes. But I can usually make it through a movement if I study the music first, and then listen for the landmarks the composer provided. The last movement looks a little like this:
D (the introduction) - ABAB - C – E- ABAB - D
If you’re not into Classical, the letters represent different melodies that technically represent different themes, but I think of them as different
emotional states. The introduction and final section are beautifully miserable, like the middle movement discussed above, but the AB sections are dance-like and filled with cheerful dissonance; the C section is an aggressive development of the A’s and B’s reminiscent of the first movement; and the E section quotes parts of the desolate 2nd movement.
All these sections, sloshing you around from cheer to misery and back, makes for horrible background music. Thrash metal, Hardcore, Industrial -- they all get regular play in my background; I work easily to many kinds of noisy music. But Shostakovich’s music doesn’t work in the background at all. I either have the patience to completely immerse myself in it, focus on it, and wait for the next landmark, or the music MUST be turned off. Unlike Mozart’s divertimenti and quite a bit of what is usually called "hard" music, Shostakovich forces me to pay attention to him, and
only him, and he becomes an annoying -- nay, intolerable -- distraction if I’m not in the mood to pay attention.
But when I
am in the mood it’s some of the finest music ever written.
* Link to a Piano Cover of Slayer’s Raining Blood:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBtyBtRAaOw
* The best expression of Shostakovich’s aesthetic might be found on this particular link to the 3rd movement of his 3rd quartet (and the performance of the players on this is also amusing to watch):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ3zzNI0oRc
* Link to Stephen Harris’ historical background and criticism of Shostakovich’s quartets:
http://www.quartets.de/articles/Lady_Macbeth.html
