Review of Evan Jones, ed., Intimate Voices: The Twentieth Century String Quartet (Rochester University Press, 2009)

[1] This two-volume, 750-page tome, edited by Evan Jones, is a major contribution both to music analysis and to scholarship on the string quartet. It comprises essays by some of today's leading theorists, each one taking on a single composer and closely examining his or her approach to the string quartet. As such, it is truly a scholarly tour de force, a monumental assembly-both in size and essence-of analytical and historical approaches to the genre.(1)[2] The collection consists of twenty chapters, organized more or less chronologically according to each composer's years of productivity in the genre of string quartets, and grouped roughly around some unifying concept, school of thought, or relationship to other composers. To wit, in Volume 1 we find: "New Voices from the Old World" (Debussy and Ravel: Wheeldon; Sibelius: Kraus; Bartok: Straus; Hindemith: Neumeyer); "The Second Viennese School" (Schoenberg: Shaftel; Berg: Headlam; Webern: Clampitt); and "Inherited and Indigenous Traditions" (Villa-Lobos: Tarasti; Prokofiev: Minturn). Volume 2 continues with "Motive, Quotation, and Form" (Shostakovich: McCreless; Britten: Mark); "The European Avant-Garde" (Ligeti: Clendinning; Berio: Hermann; Xenakis: Jones; Sclesi: Drott); and "The String Quartet in America" (Cage: Bernstein; Babbitt: Mead; Carter: Bernard; Powell: Perry; Ran: Peck). The reader will thus find an impressive cross-section of exemplars from a variety of compositional traditions, albeit heavy on the male-dominated canon.[3] On the whole, Intimate Voices is an outstanding example of contemporary scholarship, consciously addressing the multifaceted nature of music analysis as a dialogue between the score, the sound, and the socio-historical context of any particular piece. Each individual contribution tackles these very elements in varying degrees, highlighting the many ways in which they interlace. Some authors single out and target one specific piece-sometimes even a single movement-within a composer's oeuvre, displaying formidable analytical dexterity and ingenuity (e.g., Wheeldon, Kraus, Bernstein). Others take a more historical route, providing a bird's-eye-view of a composer's entire output and situating the string quartet within a broader narrative of his artistic development (e.g., McCreless, Clendinning, Mead, Straus). Still others zero in on a single concept that may run through a composer's career, and illustrate how string quartets served as successive stages in its evolution (e.g., Shaftel, Tarasti, Minturn, Hermann, Jones). Especially interesting in this last group is Shaftel's chapter on Schoenberg, in which the author focuses on the idea of "comprehensibility" as one of the latter's central compositional goals, tracing it back to his theoretical and pedagogical writings and examining its application in the string quartets. Of particular note is Shaftel's starting point: a set of playing cards painted by Schoenberg himself (a full-color reproduction appears on the front cover of the book's dust-jacket). Here, Shaftel discusses how with just a handful of colors and alterations of shapes, positions, and textures, Schoenberg was able to achieve subtle variations while maintaining overall comprehensibility: characteristics that he was later to employ in his musical works.[4] To offer detailed summaries of all the chapters in this book would be impractical and most likely uninformative. Instead, I will opt for a close discussion of just one; namely, Jones's own contribution to the collection, an essay on the experience of musical forms in the quartets of Xenakis. Here, the author begins by stating that the experience of the listener, or the esthesic side of music (to use the familiar terminology from Nattiez 1990), was as much a consideration for the composer as the poietic perspective. Jones argues that such a distinction creates an "interesting dialogue" between formal segmentations and the use of pitch-class collections on the one hand, and, on the other, a "special logic" that emerges for the listener. …