Sony’s Fromm Collection: String Quartets

Portrait photographs of İlhan Usmanbaş and Jerome Rosen on the original cover of one of the recordings being discussed

Sony Classical’s ten-CD box set of the Twentieth Century Composers Series recordings, enabled by the Fromm Music Foundation, includes two discs of string quartets. These are divided equally across two ensembles. The first quartet by Benjamin Lees and the second quartet by William Denny were recorded in 1956 by the Juilliard String Quartet, whose members at the time were violinists Robert Mann and Robert Koff, violist Raphael Hillyer, and cellist Claus Adam. The second album was also recorded in that year but with the New Music String Quartet of violinists Broadus Erle and Matthew Raimondi, violist Walter Trampler, and cellist Aldo Parisot. The selections are the first quartet by Jerome Rosen (who studied with Denny) and the only quartet by İlhan Usmanbaş.

Any reader unfamiliar with any of these four composers should not feel inadequate. Only two of them, Lees and Usmanbaş, have Wikipedia pages, the latter being far more modest than the former. The other two can be found behind the Grove Music Online paywall. I have to confess that my initial experiences with all four of these pieces left me recalling a production of the Johann Strauss II operetta Die Fledermaus in which the decadent Prince Orlofsky delivered his spoken lines in English. I can hear the inflections of that voice declaring, “String quartets! If you’ve heard one, you’ve heard them all!”

Mind you, all four of these quartets have elements of reflection on the past. The word “neoclassical” pops up in the booklet for both CDs. More often than not, however, I tend to avoid that adjective as a catch-all to avoid finding a more specific description. There is, of course, one retrospective link in the teacher-student relationship between Denny and Rosen. Usmanbaş, on the other hand, has explicitly identified Paul Hindemith and Béla Bartók as acknowledged “masters” (his noun). In terms of influence, the only potential departure from the beaten path would have come from Lees’ studies with self-proclaimed “bad boy” George Antheil.

What troubles me, however, is that, among these four composers, I have only found biographical evidence of one of them having experience with an instrument in the string family. The musical side of Usmanbaş’ biography begins with his teaching himself to play the cello at the age of twelve. HIs original intention was to pursue mathematics and science in school; but, according to his Wikipedia page (acknowledging an article in BBC Music Magazine), one of his mathematics teachers told him, “We have enough engineers in Turkey. You should be a composer instead.” (As they say, if it’s not true, it’s still a great story!)

My desire to inquire into matters of familiarity with the instrument(s) can be traced back to the experience of listening to Leon Kirchner at the piano playing his own music on the first recording in this collection. Similarly, I am fairly confident that Harrison would have sung many (if not most) of the passages from his Mass setting; and Killmayer’s training probably required him to be able to do the same for his own choral composition. On the other hand I feel that there is a risk in any composition student getting overloaded with exercises in four-part harmony and counterpoint, leading to the (often mistaken) assumption that the results of such exercises can be mapped over to the instrumentation of a string quartet.

To be fair, however, a listening experience depends as much on how a string quartet chooses to interpret their respective marks on paper as it does on the marks that the composer provided. As might be guessed, a good deal of my own student listening involved the Juilliard quartet, including all six of the Bartók quartets, Alban Berg’s “Lyric Suite,” pieces for string quartet by Anton Webern, and Elliott Carter’s second string quartet. That said, however, none of those recordings migrated from vinyl into my personal CD collection; and I do not miss any of them! I thus feel it fair to ask whether their recordings of Lees and Denny did justice to those composers.

Things are not much better where the second quartet CD is concerned. Raimondi played a major role in my student listening, particularly through his involvement with the new-music recordings on the Time label, which were curated by Earle Brown. The other three members of the New Music String Quartet would eventually find their way into the Yale Quartet, resident quartet at the Yale School of Music in Yale University. In that context I can imagine that they may have brought sufficient interpretative skills to the Usmanbaş quartet and the composer’s affinity for Hindemith and Bartók; but I was less convinced by their approach to Rosen.

This past weekend I made a passing reference to the only encounter that John Cage seems to have had with Paul Fromm. Apparently, Fromm replied to anything Cage said with one word: “nichts” (nothing). I am doing my best to avoid dismissing these four quartets with that same expletive!