Bagatelles

Program Note:

Earlier I mentioned how some early 20th century composers used Wagner as a negative foil. In their attempts to carve out a future for music, they turned away from Wagnerism and all it represented. Bombast must be converted into clarity; grandeur into mathematical simplicity; length into brevity. Austrian composer Anton Webern (1883-1945) symbolized that new direction perhaps better than any other composer.
Webern’s Six Bagatelles for String Quartet (1913) last only five minutes, typifying the taut, aphoristic style at its peak. Every single note truly has a purpose and has been sweated over. Without familiar musical features like chord progressions, melody, or repetition, these Bagatelles boldly reach out and grab our attention; our ears, even a hundred years later, are not always ready to receive Webern’s message. His texture has been described as musical pointillism and abstract-expressionism where individual events or gestures apparently carry no audible continuity with what has come before and what will come next. But there is method at work, one that entire dissertations cannot completely ascertain. We, as listeners, have a more straight-forward task: to experience the intensity, power, beauty, and angst with which Webern filled his music. We might recall that Beethoven’s late works sounded like total chaos to many of his contemporaries. Yet we have since recreated enough historical context to make them sound palatable, even stunning, to a general audience. Will the same be true for Webern once another hundred years have passed?

(c) Jason Stell