Among the Living: Three Movements for String Quartet (completed September, 2001, premiered February, 2003)
I
All the Trees as One
II
Mirrorous Waters
III
Illimitable Distance
Notes on Among the Living:
epigraph:
I have died, but you are still among the living.
And the wind, keening and complaining,
Makes the country house and the forest rock--
Not each pine by itself
But all the trees as one,
Together with the illimitable distance;
It makes them rock as the hulls of sailboats
Rock on the mirrorous waters of a boat-basin:
And this the wind does not out of bravado
Or in a senseless rage,
But so that in its desolation
It may find words to fashion a lullaby for you.
Boris Pasternak, translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney
These three movements attempt to convey some of the passion and the intense imagery of the poem from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago quoted above. The first movement is imbued with the boundless energy of the storm that shakes the entire forest and the little dacha that shelters Lara, Zhivago’s lover. The style of the music is reminiscent of a baroque concerto grosso, with driving, athletic material for all four instruments, and soloistic passages emerging from a tight web of counterpoint. The second movement focuses on the calmer images of the central part of the poem, where Pasternak moves from the uncontrollable tempest to the image of the sailboats in the harbor, with undisturbed, “mirrorous” waters, and with perhaps the subtle suggestion of a rocking cradle. The descending fourth motive that was so active and propulsive in the opening movement returns in the second movement, but in a radically new, more plaintive context. The texture of this movement is influenced somewhat by Barber’s Adagio for Strings: sustained, lyrical lines, searching harmonies, and recurrent suspension figures. The final movement, with its longer melodic trajectory, traces out an imagined version of Zhivago’s lullaby against the backdrop of an “illimitable distance.” Overall, the focal point of the poem is the small, isolated cabin that holds the beloved; at the same time, the poem ranges across the forest, and extends outward beyond it to the distant harbors and the vast Russian countryside. The final movement tries to capture that expansive quality. The melodic material is influenced by renaissance polyphony, particularly the arching lines and fluid rhythms of Thomas Tallis.