music

I ploughed through the Tolstoy in the company of a vapid, self-congratulatory, small-minded protagonist, and in the presence of a sanctimonious and exclusionary authorial voice. Clearly my take on this story was not going to add anything to the highly-wrought and emotional response made by Janacek.

Instead, I decided to place the characters: Pozdnyshev, his (unnamed) wife, and Troukhatchevsky, the man Pozdnyshev takes to be her lover after having engineered their first encounters in order to sustain his own self-pitying world-view (you'll take it that I have little sympathy for the character) within the context of the early 21st century where, despite continued rollbacks and retrenchments we have still made steps in moving past the moral, personal, societal, and sexual repressions and inequities that so marked the late 19th century.

This brief one-movement quartet seeks to reflect our more progressive era, and it opens and closes with brisk, efficient, cooperative music. A tremolando 'fade' leads to a section of intercut juxtapositions (reflecting the structural procedures of the Janacek) of tiny images of Pozdnyshev (melodramatically fraught falling half-steps); his wife (intense jabbing half-steps played as repeating diads, sul ponticello), and Troukhatchevsky (a rising 4-string violin arpeggio followed by a slightly ornamented held note).

There is much in our current world that leaves a bad taste; in this piece I wanted to remind myself of how far beyond white, Judeo-Christian, heterosexual, male hubris and privilege we have gone, and how far there is still to go.