Calling a composer “maverick” can seem somewhat
redundant, as the mere process of pulling music from thin air is, at the very
least, original. But there are those artists whose voices are particularly
singular, composers who push accepted boundaries so far that people look back
and think, “Dang, that composer was a real lone ranger.”
Enter Charles Ives, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and
Steven Mackey
These three took their visions of what music
could be and created works that are truly distinctive and forward-looking.
Charles Ives, steeped in the Western musical tradition, tore rhythm and harmony
apart and stitched them back together to create a new fashion. Ruth Crawford
Seeger took modernist serial techniques that were being used to organize pitch
and extended them to rhythm and form. Steven Mackey brought popular and
classical styles together to forge a completely new style altogether. Their
individualism continues to inspire composers today; it is this sort of
ingenuity—the ability of a composer to redefine “normal”—that propels the JACK
Quartet forward.
New music often seems, at the time of its
composition, rudely confrontational with the norms of its time; this is no less
true of Charles Ives’s String Quartet No. 2. The work is dense with odd
combinations of familiar melodies (“Dixie”; “Turkey in the Straw”; excerpts
from symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky) and the mixing of
tonalities. The work commented on what Ives considered to be the increasingly
“trite” and “weak” compositions of the time. He later wrote, “I started a
string quartet score, half mad, half in fun, and half to try out, practice, and
have some fun with making those men fiddlers get up and do something like men.”
About 15 years later, as men were steering music
toward new systems of tonality, Ruth Crawford Seeger blazed a new path with her
String Quartet. In addition to using popular serial techniques of the time, in
which a fixed series of pitches could form the basis of an entire piece, she
developed methods of applying serialism to rhythm and form. This became a
wildly popular method of music composition after the Second World War: Recall
the music of Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt, for instance.
Much later in the century, Steven Mackey began to
smash together elements of classical, rock, jazz, and avant-garde music. Physical Property combines a string
quartet with an electric guitar to create a new world of sound and style.
Mackey writes, “The piece demands that an unlikely combo—the quintessential
classical music chamber ensemble and the symbol of adolescent rebellion—work
together with consummate discipline in the service of joyous freedom.”
—John Pickford Richards