Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

the requested counter-review

I had one or two quibbles with Jerry Bowles's review of the recent Naxos disc containing Peter Maxwell Davies's 3rd and 4th Naxos Quartets. Since Jerry asked for it, here goes: One of them is just about a crack which seemed just gratuitous--"a near-great composer making a valiant late grab for the gold ring of music immortality." I have to say that, for me, Max is more than near great and he's come as close to that gold ring as just about anybody going these days--although, of course, none of us really has any way of knowing, so maybe better not even to try.

However the statement that the 3rd quartet indulged in music numerology is not exactly correct (it applies much more to Bach). Starting in the late 1950's, Max began to develop a more or less serial technique which was derived not so much from Schoenberg as from late medieval and early renaissance isorhythmic practices. The pieces in which this sort of writing was most highly developed are Worldes Blisse, Revelation and Fall, and, most especially, the Hymn to St. Magnus (which was also the first major piece after he moved to Orkney.) In about 1975, starting with Ave Maris Stella, Davies began to use Magic Squares in his compositional processes.

Exactly how he did this is a little too complicated to go into here, but suffice it to say that Magic Squares basically gave him bigger and better isorhythms; he has used them consistently since then. Early on he used the squares given in a book by John Mitchell called The View Over Atlantis; these were "classic" squares which did had associations with the Ptolemaic planets in various kinds of numerology and necromancy, but his use of them is not occult of numerological, but rather tend to be iconographic (the way painters during the renaissance, for instance, might use keys to represent St. Peter or a lion to represent St. Jerome). (As one example--a piece called A Mirror of Whitening Light uses an eight square--the square of Mercury. The title of the piece is the alchemical name for Mercury. He was using the name as a metaphor for Hoy Sound in Orkney, which he saw from his house at the time.)

More recently Davies has been using different kinds of squares and often times uses them for their abstract structural qualities. Most of his pieces use two squares, which produce materials which are then used a little like opposing keys. In the 3rd quartet one of the squares is a very complex square which has a 3 square nested in a 5 square which is in turn nested in a 7 square. The other square, technically not actually a "magic" square, is a 9 order one.

During the composition of the 3rd quartet, Davies was increasingly preoccupied with concerns about the moves toward the Iraq war, and those concerns did manifest themselves in the composition of the quartet in various ways.

Davies's program notes often raise as many questions as they answer, since they are often both allusive and a little evasive in their references to Magic Squares and the like, and the note on the record is not an exception, but it is, nonetheless, an accurate, albeit very little explained, statement about what goes on in the piece technically and how it got there. My feeling is, though, that, however difficult it may be, one shouldn't judge a piece by its program notes (or simply on the basis of its techniques.)

Jerry has ever right, of course, to find the 3rd quartet gray and wet, and I can't prove that it's not, but I can say that it doesn't seem to be to me. I very much like the first movement, which starts out rather like a sonata form movement, builds to a very harsh and grotesque march, leaving in its wake a "recapitulation" of the most basic materials of the piece devoid of any of their structural affect. The second movement is a sort of Elizabethan fantasy which once again dissolves into very high scurrying music (which turns out to be a quotation of a movement of the first quartet). The third is a series of Inventions of increasing (and increasingly impressive)contrapuntal fireworks, ending with a cloying sort of Victorian hymn-tune harmonization of the plainsong material that the whole quartet is based on. The last movement, called Fugue, but intended as the alternate and original meaning of "Fuga"--flight. It ends with a slow quiet mensuration canon reminescent of the end of the first movement, overlaid with extremely violent and loud jabs.

The third quartet is a kind of piece not much in favor with many of the correspondents of Sequenza21. I suppose it might be considered "uptown" and "academic," and people who don't care for that kind of music probably won't care much for this either. I can't offer any defenses or deflections of that kind of criticism, but I can say that I like the sound of it a lot, though. As it happens I know the third quartet quite well, having just written an article about it for Tempo. I've just begun to make any acquaintance with the 4th quartet, though. I do agree with Jerry's opinion of the performances by the Maggini Quartet, which, like those on the earlier disc containing the first Naxos Quartets, are majesterial.

posted by Rodney Lister 5/10/2005