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FRA(NZ)G-MENTATION
In celebration of their 20th anniversary, the Brentano String Quartet commissioned a group of composers to complement incomplete works by Dufay, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Shostakovich. Each (living) composer was given a fragment to contemplate, and I was delighted to be given the task of working with Schubert's unfinished Andante from D. 703, composed in he year 1820. This movement was to be the second (he completed the first) of Schubert's 12th string quartet. I chose to use the lovely theme Schubert wrote for this Andante as the basis of my piece, and I also incorporated the more urgent, dramatic configuration Schubert wrote as the beginning of a second section that he never completed.

I must confess that I started three versions of this composition based on the Schubert before arriving at the approach that I finally used and completed. Schubert’s graceful tune did not immediately suggest rhythmic variants to me, and my first attempts were to place the tune in a variety of surprising harmonic contexts, as if the tune, an intact 19th century creature, were visiting distant harmonic worlds. These ideas did not work for me, as they were too deliberate, too self-conscious, and not truly inspired.

What finally worked was for me to liberate the tune from its 19th-century German rhythmic uniform and to allow it to dance naked in patterns of 11 notes grouped as four, three, and two plus two. For some reason, I have always enjoyed rhythmic groupings of 11. In fact, my piece And All is Always Now, which I composed for the Brentano’s first violinist Mark Steinberg and my wife, pianist Marija Stroke, back in 1992 features some music in 11/16. When I set poems by Bronzino and Petrarch to music for the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in 2010, I learned that Petrarch’s poetry scans in 11 pulses per line, as opposed to the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare’s poetry. This was a wonderful discovery for me, and I again used a meter of 11/16 for an entire movement, setting one line of Petrarch’s. Another recent work of mine, Drumming a Dream, with choreography by Preeti Vasudevan, is based on Indian rhythms, including a culminating dance in patterns of 11 (Takadimi, Takita, Takadimi), which is closely related to the music in Fra(nz)g-mentation.

Back to Schubert: once I set Schubert’s tune spinning in 11, I became inspired and the music flowed. Then, at a crucial point in the unfolding of ideas, I inserted another motif from the Schubert fragment, a chromatic phrase that Schubert left hanging on the page like a flag blowing in the wind. This motif also could spin and twist in a newly energized rhythmic wind, and this brought a new mood to the music.

Most inspiring of all for the composition of this piece, however, was the extraordinary playing of the Brentano String Quartet. I have known the quartet since its very first concert (in fact, I helped present that concert), and I have known Mark Steinberg since he was a kid in my theory classes at The Juilliard Pre-College Division, where he already clearly showed the brilliance for which he and his Brentano colleagues are justly renowned today.

Bruce Adolphe

A NOTE FROM MARK STEINBERG, 1st violinist, Brentano String Quartet
It's not often we have the chance to see or hear incomplete thoughts of great composers. Completed works come down to us having been considered, reconsidered, polished and readied for presentation. But how fascinating it can be to get a glimpse into the workshop, into the process, into promising beginnings that never grew into their full selves, marble blocks that are half statue, half stone. And how intriguing it would be to have composers of our day reach back and hold hands with some of the great composers of the past, entering, after their own fashion, thoughts started and left dangling, suggestive and mysterious.

For this "Fragments" project we are exploring the idea of this linkage, reentering abandoned imagined spaces to discover what they might suggest when examined from a fresh perspective. Incomplete works of varying lengths by composers such as Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Shostakovich will be paired with new compositions by some of our most thoughtful and imaginative composers to form hybrid creatures. Traditionally mythical beasts of this persuasion, living in two worlds at once, have been believed to have magical powers. We are hoping for some magic here as we find out how today's composers collaborate with their predecessors. We expect, at the very least, to have a compelling, colorful and challenging evening-length program.

ABOUT THE TITLE
Fra(nz)g-mentation is perhaps a complex title, but it accurately reflects the goal and nature of the piece. The music is based on a fragment by Franz Schubert, hence the name Franz imbedded in the Frag. Mentation, in addition to being the end of the word fragmentation, is a word in its own right, of course, meaning mental activity or, more simply, to think. This, then, describes both my task and its source — to think about and react to the fragment by Franz Schubert given to me by the Brentano String Quartet. —BA

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