"Death by X-Ray" - The Shostakovich Seventh Quartet

I wrote these program notes for a concert given in Providence in 2012 by the Jerusalem Quartet. This is an intense, short, and very weird string quartet, but worth the effort it takes to get to know it.

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH (1906-1975). String Quartet No. 7 in f#, Op 108 (March 1960)

1. Allegretto
2. Lento
3. Allegro

Written in the same year that Shostakovich was forced to join the Communist Party, this quartet is spared the tragic dimensions the composer put into his Eighth Quartet, a virtual suicide note in music. Although it cannot be separated from the times and circumstances in which it was composed, this is an intensely personal work, an elegy for the composer’s first wife Nina, who died in 1954.

The work was premiered May 15, 1960 by the Beethoven Quartet in St. Petersburg (then still Leningrad), and had its Moscow premiere at the Moscow Conservatory on September 17 of the same year.

It is the shortest of all of Shostakovich’s quartets, and there is the risk of writing notes that take longer to read than the quartet takes to listen to! But as is often the case with great music, composers can compress much into a small interval of time.

The composer had a life-plan for composing string quartets, intending to compose one in each major and minor key, doing for the quartet literature what Bach did for the keyboard in his Well-Tempered Clavier. That said, the Seventh Quartet should have been in Eb Major, following the scheme the composer was using. Instead, the quartet is set in the moody and passionate key of F# Minor, which puts it in company of Haydn’s “Farewell” symphony and Mahler’s withering Tenth Symphony.

Shostakovich often includes coded content in his work, and when you hear the first theme in the opening Allegretto, a kind of sardonic, skipping melody, you will immediately hear three repeated eighth notes, followed by a rest, quite literally a “knock at the door.” In German folklore, Death knocks three times at the door or window of a dying person, to the horror of family members watching at the bedside. Considering how many nights during the Stalin years, the composer expected a different kind of “knock at the door” that would take him to the Gulag, this gesture is richly suggestive. We are meant to recall terrible times. (In the Tenth Symphony, Shostakovich alternated the door-knock with the notes D-Eb-C-B, which are D-Es-C-H in German notation for the composer’s initials, meaning, “Knock-knock-knock! Shostakovich!”) So no matter how engaging the violin’s utterances might be, the knock at the door is embedded in the theme.

There is a break into hurried sixteenth notes, and a key change to Eb (the “home” key Shostakovich planned to use originally!) with the cello carrying the line, some very chromatic passages passing it back to the violin, and then a bridge passage played in block chords.

This bridge brings us back to F# Minor, with the main theme played pizzicato. This adds further to the grotesque atmosphere. It has the air of a hushed conversation, and the pizzicato requires leaving out the grace notes, so that the effect is a coded conversation, out of earshot of Those Who Watch and Listen. The movement ends with extensions of the “knock at the door” motif.

The Lento is an eerie, almost minimalist movement, with no key signature, played with the strings muted (con sordino). The second violin plays an unsettling succession of arpeggios, which look like a wave depicted on an oscilloscope. Viola and cello play glissansdi at one point, adding to the weirdness of the atmosphere. What is going on here? The clue, I think comes from the biography of Nina Shostakovich. She was an experimental physicist who spent months each year on Mt. Alagez in Armenia, engaged in cosmic ray research. Like many Soviet researchers, she was exposed to massive doses of radiation from radioactive materials, and from poorly shielded X-ray equipment. She died from a radiation-induced cancer. This music sounds to me almost like a science-fiction sound track depicting radiation. I would venture to give this Lento movement the nick-name “Death by X-Ray.”

The final Allegro has, for most of its length, no key indication. It is highly atonal, and since it is riddled with intermingled sharps and flats, it must be a daunting task to play. Even though the musical materials are spun out from motifs in the first movement, it would seem to be a Dance of Death, with the skeletons from the X-Ray now hammering away at a fiendish dance. The theme is passed among the viola and the two violins as a canon, the strictest type of fugue imitation (a melody played against itself, not against a second theme). Even though what we hear would give Bach convulsions, it is a Baroque concoction as conceived by a wrong-note revolutionary. This is angry music depicting a universe that kills capriciously. Then, abruptly, the “home key” of F# Minor asserts itself, with muted strings. As the quartet slows down and softens to its conclusion, there is no fist-shaking against Death (what is the use?), just a quiet slipping away, life sitting at life’s deathbed, and a hint of the ominous three-note “knock at the door.”

Shostakovich's String Quartet No 8

I wrote these notes in 2005 for a performance by the Chiarra Quartet in Providence, RI. At this time, there were still people claiming that Shostakovich was a "good Communist" and a loyal supporter of the Soviet Union. At the time I left Providence in 2015, I was still getting in arguments with musicians and academics about this. Hard to believe, but political fantasies die hard, and the facts be damned. Here are the notes, and I shall link to a YouTube video of the quartet as well.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) String Quartet No. 8 in c minor, Op 110

Largo

Allegro molto

Allegretto

Largo

Largo

No work in the string quartet literature is more intense or more emotionally devastating than Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet. It was long assumed that this quartet was about “The Victims of Fascism and War.” So says the epigraph in the published score. So said all the program notes, and some of them still say so. There is no denying the tragic sweep of this work that seems to cry out like a dirge for millions of souls extinguished.

But since the publication of Shostakovich’s memoir, Testimony, in 1979, and more so the publication of the 1998 volume Shostakovich Reconsidered, we now know that the Eighth Quartet — however nobly it has served as a tombstone of the Holocaust and World War II — was composed as a purely personal self-epitaph, a suicide note in music.

The quartet’s obsessive use of the four-note “DSCH” motto which spells out Shostakovich’s name (Es is Eb and H is the note B in German notation); and its extensive quiltwork of quotes from other Shostakovich music have always seemed odd in a work that supposedly had a “public” purpose. At the very least, the work has always been understood to contain “I suffered too” as a sub-theme, including as it does quotes from works that were banned for public performance through the Stalin years. What was the Soviet Union’s “most loyal son” of composers doing and saying?

It may come as a surprise to many that Shostakovich did not become a member of the Communist Party until 1960, his 54^th year. According to his wife Irina, he was finally blackmailed into joining. In Testimony, Shostakovich says, “When I wrote the Eighth Quartet, it was also assigned to the department of ‘exposing fascism,’ You have to be blind and deaf to do that, because everything in the quartet is as clear as a primer. I quote Lady Macbeth, the First and Fifth Symphonies. What does fascism have to do with these? The Eighth is an autobiographical quartet; it quotes a song known to all Russians: ‘Exhausted by the hardships of prison.’”

It was not until 1990 that Shostakovich’s colleague Lev Lebedinsky further confirmed the Eighth Quartet’s link to this low point in the composer’s life: “It was his farewell to life. He associated joining the Party with a moral, as well as a physical death… [H]e had completed the quartet and purchased a large number of sleeping pills, he played the Quartet to me on the piano and told me with tears in his eyes that it was his last work. He hinted at his intention to commit suicide. Perhaps subconsciously he hoped that I would save him. I managed to remove the pills from his jacket pocket and gave them to his son Maxim, explaining to him the true meaning of the Quartet.”

The composer’s son, Maxim, at a conference in 1992, added, “My father cried twice in his life: when his mother died and when he came to say they’ve made him join the Party. […T]his was sobbing, not just tears, but sobbing.” Lebedinsky also reveals that “a much-trumpeted Party plenum” was called to present Shostakovich for one and all to see as a born-again Communist, and the event “deteriorated into a farce due to … the unexpected absence of the composer!” Abject apologies were made, and Shostakovich was dutifully enrolled as a Party member, but clearly one to be watched.

In the limited space we have to describe tonight’s work, it has seemed more compelling to tell the truth about this staggering composition than to engage in musical analysis. Moreover, those who know Shostakovich’s music in depth are “insiders” to this music, which resonates with themes from four of his symphonies, several other chamber works, and the opera Stalin hated, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. Better perhaps, to let the DSCH motto take over and view the work as a phantasmagoria of musical threads, woven with passion and musical genius. Since Shostakovich is one of the truly great quartet composers, this work deserves to be examined as pure music — but not now, and perhaps not for a long time to come. Accept this quartet as a message in a bottle, a cry of despair, a warning that collaboration with evil destroys the soul.

Visiting Fallingwater

A house so beautiful that you almost burst into tears the first time you see it up close. I spent half a day yesterday at Falllingwater and it is everything they say it is, and more. The pity is that one cannot linger. We were on tour number 29 of the day and when we left, tour number 60 of the day was setting out. The walks and hikes in the woods are not hurried, however, so one can linger and enjoy the land, verdant with white rhododendron groves. I found a few native sassafras trees asserting themselves amid the pines and other tall trees. Photos inside the house were prohibited, so I cannot share the details of the house and its construction. You just have to go there. The best life of all is in a great city, with access to art and music and culture, but if one is to have second place amid the mountains, nothing on earth could be more joyous than this place. To awaken in a house like this is to arrive in a day in which great things are expected of you. Maybe some people could not deal with that, and for them, the trailer park, the cookie-cutter suburban ranch, the termite-nest apartment building.

Mini-Review: Japan's Longest Day

I was up till 2:30 last night watching "Japan's Longest Day," a 158-minute drama released in 1967 by Toho Films. I associate Toho with Godzilla movies and Samurai films, so this was a startling surprise -- a film that was not made with American viewers in mind. It covers the last 24 hours before Japan surrendered at the end of World War II. The isolated Emperor, absolute ruler -- the custom-bound bureaucrats and cabinet ministers -- and a group of crazed military officers who attempt a palace takeover to stop the Emperor from making a radio speech announcing the surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are mentioned with some bleak wide-angle photos of the devastation and some horrific close-ups of charred corpses. But the government officials seem numb to the scale of the carnage, and the honor-crazed military men want to hold out for a land battle in Japan. To watch this in the present moment is signficant. We who lost a couple of buildings in 2001 and thousands of troops we send off like rent-a-cops to overseas war that have no purpose, do not know defeat, have not suffered the deaths of millions.
There is a lot to think about in this film as some leaders talk about what the future can be for the future innocent, and what it would be like to live in a country that vowed not to make war again -- against the madness of ideology and blind patriotism. Intriguingly, the power of the media is also at the center of the film, as all realize that the Emperor's radio address would make the surrender irrevocable. The most telling moment in the film is a crazed soldier holding a revolver to the head of a radio broadcaster, who sits defiantly with the threat of a bullet inches from his head. This will be a hard film to forget.
See Wikipedia Page on Japan's Longest Day

Adirondack Mountain Man

Hikers in the Adirondacks know Pieter Vanderbeck as the mountain-man artist, who spends about five months of each year doing conte crayon drawings and line drawings all around the region. Pieter is also a poet and novelist, and was my neighbor in Providence for many years. He and I co-authored a book together, Twilight of the Dictators, and Pieter illustrated my book, Poems from Providence. A while back I bought tripods and lamps and umbrellas so that I could photograph more than 100 of Pieter's drawings for a DVD he was making. I'm delighted to see these photos are now on Pieter's own website. Enjoy!

Visit the Pieter Vanderbeck Site

Jack Veasey's Poetry

A young poet named Jack Veasey was brought to my dooorstep in 1975 by poet Barbara A. Holland. Soon after, we published his first little poetry book, Handful of Hair. Jack left us in 2016, and here is the last book he gave us, and the world. A posthumous collection of sonnets is in the works. Now you can have the ebook for less than the price of a cup of coffee, and get enough mind-jolts to keep you awake for weeks. The cover art is the oldest-known image of a dancing male figure (the full painting is shown here, and I used the figure on the left.)

Purchase Veasey Ebook

Doctor Jones and Other Terrors

No poem cost me more to write than "Doctor Jones," a stark confrontation with a rural Pennsylvania horror: a demented country doctor who enjoyed cutting off the arms and legs of little boys. Was he real? Or only partially real? Or the imprint of unspeakable abuse? All I know is that writing it, hands shaking, was a trauma in itself, and a liberation. The second poem, "Torrance" explores, in narrative poem and in photographs, the Pennsylvania state hospital where ordinary mental patients were mixed with the criminally insane, an Arkham Asylum if ever there was one. It was a leap of imagination to place Doctor Jones on the staff of Torrance, where I made him "The Night Doctor." Meet Doctor Jones in ebook format.
Purchase Doctor Jones Ebook

August - The Silly Season, with Fascists Added

As August sets in, who wants to do any useful work? Here, "retired," it is all play (editing poetry books, creating music), but even so, I know that academic people and publishers to whom I have written and await word from, are likely at their beach or mountain houses, or traipsing through museums and sipping absinthe of an evening.
If the Republic were not in mortal peril, I could switch off and spend the "silly season" watching old movies and TV shows and drinking iced tea.
But I can't.
I don't know what's coming next, and if we don't watch out, people like me will find men in brown shirts cutting my internet cable and following me around. It will not be safe to walk past alleys.
I will have to resume plans to join the resistance, or to slip across the border, or find a commune somewhere in the deep woods.
I may have to re-learn how to build cannons.
I will have to know how many days I could live with the food in my pantry.
I will have to check in again with those people I know would hide me, and whom I would help if they were on the run and needed to establish a new identity.
I am far from the rising coastal waters, but not far from armies of Bible-waving fools.
"The silly season" is an old newspaper term to describe the nutcase stories that journalists used to use as fillers in August, when there was a shortage of hard news, and the thermometer seemed to provoke the crazies with conspiracy theories to come out from their basements. Higher temperatures also meant more crimes of passion. Plus a host of stories about people being eaten by sharks and alligators. Now the White House fills the Silly Season with endless headlines.
So, have your August fun, folks, but keep the computer on and pay attention.

Stalin and Shostakovich

What is it like to live in a country where the leader does not care for artists (except those that praise him) -- and where the leader can write your name on a piece of paper, and you will be killed? Composer Dimitri Shostakovich was just one of many who went through that hell, but he was one of the most famous Russians terorrized by Stalin. Here is the story, in a poem, from my book, Twilight of the Dictators:



STALIN AND SHOSTAKOVICH


It's three in the morning and snowing in Moscow.
The streets are dark--but here and there a light--
a solitary bulb throws out its beacon:
a yellow beam from Stalin's workroom,
steady when the Great Helmsman has an idea,
tilted downward as he studies his lists,
casting a shadow of his giant hand
as fountain pen
makes check marks next to offending names.

Tomorrow those names and their owners
will separate forever as People's Enemies
become "Former People."

The offices of Ministries are well lit, too--
memos to write, conspiracies to ferret out,
coffee to drain by the cup, by the gallon.
(If Comrade Stalin can work all night,
who dares to leave his tasks unfinished?)

At the Lubyanka Jail, one basement window
emits its light in slitted segments.
One could see--
if anyone dared to press his face there--
an arm with a truncheon--a mangled visage.
Dim slots of light--a doorway--come on and off.
Men in black coats are framed there.
Then slashing beams and feral tail lights
precede and follow the Black Marias.
 

2

The clock chimes four.
Another lamp is burning, too--
another hand makes nervous tick marks
as Shostakovich blocks out chords and melodies.
Even the vodka and cigarettes
are quite forgotten as the climax approaches.
Eyes blur with staves,
sharps dance like angry snowflakes.
He cannot concentrate.
Half his brain is listening.
Not to his inner Muses--
not tonight,
not any night this year--
listening for the Black Marias.
A car glides by--too slowly?
Someone is running at the end of the block--
why, at this hour?

An interval of silence--too long, too quiet.
A truck stops--how long until the doors swing wide
and heavy-footed steps
echo from the building fronts.

A street lamp winks out; across
the street a curtain parts,
a candle moves once
across a table--
is it nothing-- or a signal?

He cannot go to the window and look.
Watchers in raincoats
dislike being spied upon.
It's never wise to stand in a window, anyway:
rocks have been thrown
by zealous members of the Communist Youth
rocks with notes
that read: SHOSTAKOVICH--PARASITE--
FORMALIST!!!
What if one of them took a gun to a nearby rooftop--?
Open season on Formalist Anti-People Artists!

His hands make notes in jagged gesture.
Staccato---staccato---agitato--
Attaca subito--
 
Stalin condemned his last opera.
What will he think of this symphony --
its Mahleresque, giant orchestra,
its jarring, piled-on harmonies,
its bleak and withering quietudes?
Will this, too, be a "muddle instead of music?"
How can be help being himself? 
He writes not what he wants,
but what he has to.
He tries to be grand -- it comes out bombast.
Tries humor, only to ooze sarcasm.
He has no smile that convinces --
could a lobster smile
while dangling over the cooking pot?

He must put everything into this symphony.
It may be his last, anyway.
Ignoring the clock, he labors on.
This page: the whimper of the beaten.
There: the shriek of the victims' widows.
There: the whining voice of the apparatchik.
This horn sounds a denunciation.
This oboe betrays a friend for a dacha.
This violin divorces its partner,
disclosing her unacceptable class origins.
A clarinet warns of rootless cosmopolitans.
Let them guess what it's all about!
To hell with their need for uplift! 
Rub their faces in the ruin of Russia!
Let them try their dialectic on this one!


3
Stalin works on. He sees the name
of Shostakovich. A memo asks:
Arrest and interrogate?
"I like a tune," he says to himself,
"and now and then even a poem."
The chastised artists would come around.
They'd write their odes and symphonies
to Russia and Comrade Stalin.
They'd do it willingly.
They'd trample one another for the privilege.
No action at present, the dictator writes.


4
Done for the night, the weary composer
dons coat and shoes, tiptoes
out door to the unheated hall.
Suitcase beside him, he curls up there
between the elevator and the apartment door.
Tries to sleep, tries not to listen
to the spiderweb sounds of the dying night.
The suitcase is packed for a long journey--
a cold one.
Better to wait in the corridor, he thinks;
better not to wake his sleeping wife and son
if this is the night that makes his life
another unfinished symphony.

Sunday Organ Madness

I just posted two new compositions on SoundCloud for your enjoyment. Curiously, the two pieces are based on the same score I created in Finale. The jaunty one is a fast Little Prelude in D major, which sounds a little like a Ragtime piece.

Then, perverse creature that I am, I took the same piece, slowed it down, shifted a few voices up an octave for clarity, added some staccato accents as needed, and, lo, a full-fledged Prelude in D Major for Organ emerged.

The Little Prelude in D Major for Piano: Listen to the Piano Prelude

The Organ Prelude in D Major:
Listen to the Organ Prelude

Rutherford's Gloomy Little Preludes

A work in progress, in that it is notated, but pedaling and dynamics are not really marked up yet. This was a Little Prelude from 1968 that I expanded into a brief Fantasy around 2003. Enjoy.
Listen to Prelude-Fantasy

And here is the Little Prelude in B-Flat Major, reposted in a louder MP3:
Listen to Prelude in B-Flat Major

And here is a gloomy Little Prelude in F Minor:
Listen to Little Prelude in F Minor

Finally, as evanescent as a firefly, the shortest and oldest of all my Preludes:
Listen to A Minor Prelude

The Piano Mystery

I am recovering my oldest piano music, entering it in Finale (a music notation program), and posting them on SoundCloud to share with friends. How I came to write this music is amusing, and surprising to me as much as to anyone else. I never learned to sight-read music, thanks to a spiteful second-grade teacher who refused to tell me what I had missed during a measles bout. Before my illness, we were happily singing in C Major. When I came back, everyone was singing in other keys with sharps and flats, and I was cast adrift. None of the itinerant music teachers I had in elementary school ever realized I was faking it, and that I could not read music.
My love for classical music began during the one term of high school I had in Connellsville, in the eighth grade. Miss Keller, who was not a certified music teacher, was a volunteer who loved music and who came to the schools to teach us. Music had bored me until them. She played the 1812 Overture on a record-player, and that was it. I was hooked. From there, to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and on and on. When I started visiting Pittsburgh and had borrowing rights to classical LPs, the madness intensified. Yet I never played a musical instrument and had no access to one.
When I got to Edinboro State College, I found empty practice rooms, with pianos. One of them had a Knabe grand piano that I fell in love with. I found that one church never locked its doors, and that I could creep inside, turn on the pipe organ, and play (I limited myself to the quieter stops so that I would not disturb the neighbors or get arrested).
I sat down at a piano with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and Chopin's G Minor Ballade, two pieces I knew well enough to know what they should sound like. I knew where middle C was. I knew what sharps and flats were. I made up my own system of reading, using numbers for notes instead of letters, so that I could speedily analyze what I was looking at. I used + and b for sharps and flats.
Seeing that a run of arpeggios up the keyboard was 1 3 5 1 3 5 or 1+ 4+ 6+ 1+ 4+ 6+, or  5 1 3b 5 1 3b 5 1 3b made a lot more sense to me than C E G C E G or C# F# A# or G C Eb C G Eb.
So, without any knowledge of fingering and certainly little sense of rhythm, I muddle through the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata and the first page of the Chopin Ballade.
Then, mysteriously, my fingers began to find melodies, chords, moods. One thing followed another and I began to notate my improvisations. I enrolled in a Music Theory class and learned a lot in the first couple of weeks, but I had to drop it because I could not sight-read. I could play my own homework assignments, but I could not play something placed in front of me that I had not studied. So I just went my own way.
A year later, I played a full program of my piano music in front of a huge audience at an arts festival at Edinboro. Such is the arrogance of youth.

Harpsichord Sketch

Listen to a harpsichord piece I created sometime around 2003.

SoundCloud File