Alvin Singleton
Momenta Quartet
By Stephanie Griffin
Momenta is especially honored to present the world premiere of Alvin Singleton’s fourth string quartet, Hallelujah Anyhow,
commissioned by Chamber Music America. We met Alvin through another
tireless Momenta advocate, Thomas Buckner, who invited us to perform
Alvin’s second and third quartets as part of his seventy-fifth birthday
concert on the Interpretations series at Roulette. Born in
Brooklyn in 1940, Alvin spent fourteen years living and working in
Europe and returned to the United States in 1985 to become
Composer-in-Residence with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He still
divides his time between Atlanta and New York City, has won countless
commissions and awards, and his music has been championed by major
ensembles all over the world, including the symphony orchestras of
Boston, Pittsburgh, Houston, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Cleveland,
Philadelphia, Detroit, Oregon, Baltimore, Syracuse, Louisville, and
Florida, the American Composers Orchestra, the Rotterdam Philharmonic,
l’Orchestre de Paris, das Guerzenich-Orchester Koelner Philharmoniker
and also the Kronos Quartet, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln
Center, the Nash Ensemble of London, the Asko Ensemble of Amsterdam,
Ensemble des 20. Jahrhunderts of Vienna, the London Sinfonietta, Trio
Basso of Cologne and the Bremer Tanztheater.
The
famously elusive Alvin Singleton does not like to talk about his music
and never explains his evocative and enigmatic titles. From my
perspective, early in our rehearsal process for this piece, the most
striking feature of Hallelujah Anyhow is the preponderance of
unison textures. The quartet opens with a bold statement of the motive
from which the whole piece is tightly woven: a half-step from E to F and
back, followed by whole-step motion from F to G and back, in four
octaves and with a distinctive syncopated rhythm. This motive is
followed by flurries of jagged chromatic sixteenth notes, in pitch and
rhythmic unison in all four instruments. The character is bright and
celebratory, and evokes the sound world of a jazz big band. As in
Alvin’s other quartets, he contrasts fiery, energetic material with calm
chorales and moments of stasis. He goes further in this direction in Hallelujah Anyhow than in any of his previous quartets, with an almost Tchaikovsky-like use of dynamics, ranging from four pianos (pppp) to five fortes (fffff). (Tchaikovsky still out-does Alvin in his Symphonie Pathétique,
but from what I have gathered Alvin is a much happier and
better-adjusted man!) As for the title, I can only venture a guess.
Perhaps Alvin is countering the fractured state of the world today with
his uncompromising unisons, and making a conscious decision to rejoice
in life as it is, despite the challenging circumstances that surround
us.
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