Start Summermusic 2026 with Music for Brass

“Chamber Music” can be defined as “any small ensemble of one or more instruments” usually playing music designed to be performed in a smaller space than a large concert hall. Brass Quintets don’t often figure on many chamber music series – perhaps, in the Old Days, the idea of a group of brass players was better suited for ceremonial music maybe in the theater or opera house or, better yet, outdoors, the volume perhaps a bit much for the royal eardrums when confined to a small room in the palace – but certainly the sound and dynamic range of a brass ensemble would fit well in a church like Market Square Presbyterian. So you’re in for a treat with the first of the three concerts for Market Square Concerts’ Summermusic 2026 this weekend. 

The third concert, on July 19th at 4pm, will feature music for voice and piano with tenor Curt Bannister and pianist Mark Markham ranging from Strauss and Ravel to Bernstein and Ellington. The second concert will feature violinist (and MSC Co-Director) Peter Sirotin joined by pianist (and Harrisburg Symphony Music Director) Stuart Malina with several friends to perform two works written four years apart, Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet and American composer Arthur Foote’s rarely heard Piano Quintet from 1897. That’s on Wednesday, July 15th at 7:30. All concerts will take place in the air-conditioned Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg.

The first concert on Sunday, July 12th, at 4pm, will feature the principal trumpet player of the Harrisburg Symphony, Kevin Gebo, and some friends of his who are also members of the United States Army Band’s Brass Quintet, trumpeter Andrew Boylan, hornist Rick Lee, trombonist Gregory Hammond, and tubist Andrew Dougherty. And their program is the one I’m going to be telling you about in this post of the Market Square Concerts Blog.

Kevin Gebo, Gregory Hammond, Andrew Dougherty, Rick Lee, & Andrew Boylan

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Despite the fact brass instruments have been around since before ancient times, the idea of putting five different brass players in an ensemble to perform chamber music is a fairly recent innovation, since the “first brass quintet” was supposedly written by Viktor Ewald in 1890. Trumpets, according to the Bible, played a significant role at Jericho (perhaps not the best image for concert performances but then ask any player in a modern orchestra who sits in front of the brass section). Trumpets and horns played a key ceremonial role in Ancient Rome, especially in the military world of the empire, though it was always confusing to me growing up, that the Latin word for “trumpet” was tuba; then, when I first heard the Tuba mirum, the “trumpet of wonder” heralding the Last Judgment, from Mozart’s Requiem with its striking trombone solo, I was thoroughly confused.

Stringed instruments evolved over the centuries until the present day “violin family” was more or less finalized between the 1500s and early-1700s, especially with famous makers like Stradivari. Almost immediately, someone got the idea to put four of these together – two violins, a viola, and a cello – to form a String Quartet (Haydn is often called the Father of the String Quartet as well as of the Symphony). So, if brass instruments had been around so long, why did it take so long for someone to do the same thing for a Brass Quintet?

It would take too long to go into the history of brass instruments in general, especially the acoustical and technical details behind their development, to cover the centuries that led from those ancient Roman instruments to the modern instruments we know – and hear – today. Like most of the woodwind family which went through the additions of keys and various other modifications since the early-19th Century, similar changes impacted trumpets and horns with valves or keys to make “pitch production” more consistent. The trombone, however, evolved from a larger version of the trumpet (in Italian, tromba: trombone, with a pronounced ‘e,’ literally meant “big trumpet”) sometime during the 1400s and had a movable slide to change pitches rather than keys or valves, showing all the essentials of the present-day instrument. As one trombonist friend of mine put it, when being accused of playing “a primitive instrument,” his trombone had “achieved an early state of perfection.”

One thing about chamber music ensembles, the idea of a String Quartet was to blend instruments of similar sound to cover a wider range than you would get from, say, a single violin. But the Brass Quintet combines four different instruments – like the String Quartet with its two violins, the Brass Quintet has its two trumpets for the same reasons, however you care to justify it – each of which have considerably different sounds. The problem for composers becomes one of making these instruments blend and balance each other, again while covering the full range equivalent to the soprano and bass voices with inner voices filling in the harmony. It is more a question of handling the multiple voices of these instruments – literally polyphony, “many voices” – aaand here I go down the rabbit-hole of explaining counterpoint versus straight chord-by-chord harmonic writing like you’d find in a hymn. Yes, brass quintets do play hymns (and Christmas carols; man, do they play Christmas carols in due season) but it’s always a balance problem, especially for the “inner voices.” Technically, it’s more natural (no pun intended) for each instrument to play their own melodic line to help define the texture. So, if you’re listening with this in mind, notice how different pieces on the program will use a chordal “blended” sound as opposed to a more linear “independent” role for each instrument.

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Given the concept of a Brass Quintet evolved too late for Mozart or Beethoven to write for the ensemble like they did for the String Quartet, most of the repertoire for the brass quintet is fairly modern. And rather than long extended works – who would fade first from dealing with a 45-minute brass quintet, the audience or the players? – many are fairly short pieces and, in order to incorporate more variety in the musical styles we’ll be listening to, arrangements. So we can have some Mozart, some Handel – well, truthfully, the orchestra for his “Music for the Royal Fireworks” included 24 oboes, 12 bassoons (and a contrabassoon), along with 9 “natural” trumpets and 9 “natural” horns (natural, here, meaning without keys or valves) along with 3 sets of timpani and various side drums for a military flare (the King, for this occasion, wanting “no fiddles”) – even a Rachmaninoff piano piece, his G Minor Prelude, Op. 23 No. 5, the slow movement of Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar (though it has a lovely melody for the English Horn which is not a horn per se… (yes, it’s actually a French instrument unlike the French Horn which is really German) – and a choral work by Eric Whitacre.

The Mozart is his overture to The Marriage of Figaro, complete with its bustling flurry of notes at the opening which must strike terror in the lip of many a brass player. Both it and the opening of Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks are arranged by Chuck Seipp.

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Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque (“Light and Gold”) is a Christmas piece written in 2000; a few years later he arranged it for wind ensemble. “Light, warm and heavy as pure gold, and the angels sing softly to the new born baby.” Given Whitacre’s preference for dense harmonies and long sustained chords requiring “staggered breathing” from its singers, I’ll be curious to see how this translates to five individual players who need to breath.

Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th Century, wrote his G Minor Prelude from his set of ten preludes, Op. 10, in 1901 but only published the complete set a few years later. It may not be as famous as his ever-present Prelude in C-sharp Minor, written when he was 18, but of the remaining piano pieces he would compose during the rest of his life, the G Minor has always remained popular. This recording on the Telarc label, “A Window in Time,” was remastered from piano rolls Rachmaninoff recorded between 1919 and 1929.

Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo, about love on a dude ranch (really!), was composed in 1942 for Agnes de Mille who’d already blocked out her entire choreography before Copland had composed a note of music! She also specified a number of folk tunes she wanted him to use, like two that we hear in “Buckaroo Holiday” – “Sis Joe,” a railroad work song, and, for obvious reasons, “If He’d Be a Buckaroo.” How many of you have heard this music over the years and never realized Copland did not write these tunes? Here’s a performance of the original orchestral version, conducted by the composer (well, the composer of the ballet score, even if he arranged some folk songs along the way).

Speaking of folk-song arrangements, here’s a famous tune that most people would swear was by Copland. He used it in another ballet, this one called Appalachian Spring written for Martha Graham in the mid-1940s. He arranged a tune called “Simple Gifts” which was a song originally composed by Elder Joseph Brackett for a Shaker community in Maine in 1848, though it’s often referred to as a folk song and the composer listed in programs as “trad”. While there are many arrangements of the tune, here’s one not by Copland, performed by Alison Krause and Yo-Yo Ma. The quintet's program uses an arrangement by Jari Villaneuva.

While marches often form the basic fare for many a summer concert, here’s one from one of John Williams’ film scores, written for Stephen Spielberg's “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” from 2015. Here, the composer conducts no less a band than the Vienna Philharmonic in “The March of the Resistance.” To explain the music in the plot’s context would take longer than it would to listen to it: suffice it to say if you’ve familiar with the Star Wars films, you know the plot; if you haven’t seen it, no matter of explanation on my part will make it any more intelligible than Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen. For this concert, they're playing arrangement by the tuba player, Andrew Dougherty.

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Two works on the program are “original” compositions written for brass ensembles. The first of these is the Sonatine by Eugene Bozza, a French composer best known for what is often referred to as “lighter fare” though the same could be said of much of Francis Poulenc’s music as well, so it shouldn’t be taken too dismissively. Written in 1951, this Sonatine (a “little sonata”) is in four short movements – an opening Allegro vivo, appropriately French and saucy; a more serious and somewhat lugubrious Andante ma non troppo, before returning to a saucy scherzo, also Allegro vivo; the finale begins with a somber slow introduction before switching to yet another Allegro vivo full of swirling fanfares. It is, the composer says, “humbly dedicated to the musicians of the Republican Guard,” a prestigious unit of the National Gendarmerie responsible for ceremonial duties, security of key state institutions, and public order in Paris.

Kerry Turner is a prolific American composer best known for his works featuring brass instruments. Born in 1960 and winning first prize in a composition contest in San Antonio when he was 11, he attended Baylor University at 17 before transferring to the Manhattan School of Music. A horn player as well, he’s played in many orchestras including those in Luxembourg and in Köln, Germany. His work on the program, “The Casbah of Tetouan,” is described as a “symphonic poem for brass” but not originally for brass quintet. Written for a horn quintet in the late-1980s, it has become popular with brass quintets as well.

In this day and age and with an excerpt from John Williams’ music for Star Wars on the program, Tetouan may make us think of the world director Stephen Spielberg created for his intergalactic saga when in fact it’s a real place in northern Morocco whose history goes back 2000 years. Located across the Mediterranean just across from Gibraltar and not far from Tangier, the modern city has become a tourist destination, nestled between mountains and the Strait of Gibraltar, blending Andalusian, Berber, Jewish, and Spanish influences. Since 1997, it’s been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site as well as for its crafts and folk art. It had been a Phoenician outpost when the Pillars of Hercules (the modern Gibraltar) marked the limits of the known world, and in 1286 the Bedouins began building a casbah and a mosque (and if the word casbah brings up exotic but vague impressions from movies past, it usually means, at least in Northwest Africa, a hill-top fort (not necessarily a market place), part of what was called a medina, the walled city surrounding it. It also became a refuge for pirates and, following a war with Castile in the early-15th Century, it was destroyed. When Ferdinand and Isabella drove the Muslims out of Spain in 1492, many of the refugees from Southern Spain, Muslims and Jews alike, fled to Tetouan.

Kerry Turner’s “The Casbah of Tetouan,” originally written for a Horn Quintet, was conceived, as the composer describes it, “during a visit to Morocco in the summer of 1988.”

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     As we crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and first laid eyes on the North African coast, I knew we were in store for an adventure! The city of Tetouan was our destination. We soon stood before its main gates. The many exotic new sights overran our senses as we entered the city, complementing the wild sounds and smells of the bustling ancient city. After proceeding only a few feet past hobbled live chickens, we soon became completely immersed in the endless, tiny alleys of the Casbah.
     The Casbah was a labyrinth of tunnels and passageways, lined with vendors and shops the size of walk-in closets. Anything was for sale, including copperware, sacks of spices and grains, and silk. Street butchers displayed slaughtered lambs, goats and pigs, and a snake charmer with his cobra unnerved the unwary passerby. Things began to swim before my eyes somewhere around the urine-treated leather goods.
     After I informed the guide that I was ill, a young boy escorted me to a quiet place. The boy knew every secret passage and shortcut in the Casbah. He led me through even tinier streets and tunnels, across nomad camps, and even through a kitchen! We sailed through the back door of a mosque, and out the other side. Finally we entered a large, dark and cool house, which seemed to be some sort of palace. The boy led me to a back room and laid me down upon a bed of large pillows. I passed out.
     I awoke thoroughly disoriented. The first things I saw were six elaborately cloaked elderly men, wildly discussing in Arabic what possibly was wrong with me, I heard exotic music and aromatic food assailed my senses. After closer observation I discovered I was in a fancy restaurant, being entertained by a belly dancer. Somehow my wife and brother found me and we resumed our inspection of Tetouan. I still felt lightheaded and rather doped by the "therapeutic" tea; my impressions of the city were somewhat hallucinogenic.

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To many American music lovers, the name of John Philip Sousa is universal, but few might be familiar with other great march composers from the same era, like Henry Filmore who, after Sousa’s death in 1932, became hailed as “The March King.” But there is also Karl King who composed some 188 marches and “screamers” along with numerous galops, rags, and waltzes. When he was 11, he used the money he’d earned from his newspaper route to buy a cornet which he taught himself to play. At 14, he dropped out of school, joined various bands, started conducting some circus bands when he was 19, and joined the Fred Neddermeyer Band in Columbus, OH, conducted by Fred Neddermeyer who became his mentor. During this time, he received his only musical instruction from friends in the band: four piano lessons and one harmony lesson. In 1916, he married the calliope player of the Barnum & Bailey Circus Band of which he then became bandmaster the following year. He said years later the proudest moment of his life had been when he conducted the Barnum & Bailey band at Madison Square Garden.

With World War I now over, he met John Philip Sousa and hoped to join his staff, but Sousa had no openings for him. He soon settled in Fort Dodge, IA, where he became the bandmaster in 1920 and was instrumental in passing the Iowa Band Law in 1921, which allowed cities to levy a local tax for maintenance of a band. He continued to conduct Fort Dodge’s municipal band for the next 51 years.

The “Neddermeyer Triumphal March” was composed in 1910 when King was playing baritone horn in Neddermeyer’s band. And so we end the concert – and this blog post – with that very march, played here by the United States Armed Forces Bicentennial Band.

– Dick Strawser

Cuarteto Latinoamericano and a "Tribute to the Americas"

Cuarteto Latinoamericano (photo, Sergio Yazbek)

 

It’s the final concert of the season, Thursday night, April 30^th, at 7:30 at Temple Ohev Sholom at 2345 N. Front in uptown Harrisburg (just below Seneca St).

The Cuarteto Latinoamericano will be performing a program of works by American composers – and by that, I mean not only from the United States but composers from South America, too. In addition to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” from its home in his String Quartet Op. 11 and George Gershwin’s “Lullaby,” there the last string quartet of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, “Four for Tango” by Argentine Astor Piazzolla, and, from the busy pen of Czech composer and temporary resident of New York City, Antonín Dvořák, a work written during one pleasant summer spent in Spillville, Iowa, a work forever known as “The American Quartet."

Collectively, they are the Bitrán Brothers and a friend they picked up along the way to play viola: violinists Saúl and Arón, cellist Àlvaro, and violist Javier Montiel who formed the quartet in Mexico City in 1982 when they had to prove to audiences they were not a mariachi band and didn’t (as their official biography puts it) wear ponchos and play guitars (that case is for a cello, not a guitarrón). Since then, they have become internationally renowned, toured world-wide, won two Latin Grammys for Best Classical Recording, and branched out from the traditional Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, the usual core available to string quartets at the time, to premiere over a hundred new works written especially for them, and focused their repertoire on composers from Mexico south to Argentina.

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The program begins in Brazil in 1957 with the last of the seventeen quartets by the most recognizable Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos. It was first performed by the Budapest String Quartet at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. on October 16th, 1959, which turned out to be exactly one month before the composer’s death. Initially, Villa-Lobos had given a copy of the score to a violinist-friend while he was in Paris when he was already ill. He had asked her to arrange a reading of it so he could hear it but circumstances always got in the way, so he returned home to Rio de Janeiro without having heard it and then died without knowing it had already been premiered. His state funeral was the last major civic event held in Rio before the capital was transferred to the new, interior city of Brasília.

Like many nations that evolved from colonial roots to independence – something we should be talking about this year, ourselves – many changes affected what defined this new national character. Just as we still discuss “what makes ‘American Art’ American,” the question at the time Villa Lobos was born was “what will make us Brazilian, not Portuguese?” He was born two years before the overthrow of the Empire of Brazil in 1889, ruled by a grandson of a Portuguese king. The primary focus of music in Brazil then had been imported along with the Portuguese immigrants, many of whom arrived in 1808, long after it had been initially colonized in the early-16th Century, after the Napoleonic Wars drove the Portuguese king and his court out of Lisbon.

The conservatory in Rio offered the traditional Classical courses in harmony and counterpoint that would’ve been found in any European capital, but after a few failed harmony lessons, Villa-Lobos decided to give up on any formal training. He learned to play the cello, clarinet and classical guitar, and listened in on his father – an amateur musician – when he invited friends over for musical evenings. After his father’s early death, the 12-year-old boy played in pit orchestras around Rio for movies and theater.

Still a teenager, the young would-be composer not only “branched out,” he chose to explore this vast country of his to discover the different kinds of music he might find beyond the urban capital, gathering up not only influences from Portuguese immigrants and African slaves (slavery had only been abolished the year after his birth) but also the numerous indigenous tribes deep in the “dark interior,” presumably at one point nearly being captured by cannibals and escaping from them (true or a romanticized tale?). His initial compositions became improvisations based on all this material, written for guitar.

He played with street bands in Rio, played cello in the Rio opera orchestra, married a pianist. In 1917, he met Serge Diaghilev who brought his Ballet russe to Rio, along with Darius Milhaud, a secretary at the French legation there, who introduced him to the works of Debussy and Satie, possibly Stravinsky – and in turn Villa-Lobos introduced Milhaud to a wide array of Brazilian folk and “street” music (which would figure prominently in so many of Milhaud’s works). He also met pianist Artur Rubinstein for whom he composed a number of piano works including, in 1922, a suite called A prolo do bebê (The Baby’s Family) which proved to be a bit too modern for Rio’s tastes. The movement about the doll – O polichinelo – became a favorite encore of Rubinstein’s – in fact I heard him play this after an all-Chopin recital in the early-1970s when the pianist was around 88 years old.

To fast forward a bit, Villa-Lobos, ever his own “melting pot,” wrote a series of pieces inspired by the combination of Bach and various kinds of Brazilian music of which the most famous is the Bachianas Brasileras No. 5 for soprano and cellos written in 1938. After years of political turmoil in Brazil, Villa-Lobos was able to tour Europe, wrote many works – concertos, symphonies, and choral works reflecting his Brazilian roots – that were mostly well received. He wrote most of his string quartets between the 1930s and 1957, leaving sketches for an 18th Quartet incomplete when he died. In 1958, MGM commissioned him to write music for a Hollywood film, Green Mansions, starring Audrey Hepburn, conducting the filmscore himself, but in the end, after some studio turmoil (always with the politics) replaced the original director, the decision was made to use only a portion of the original score, though one assumes Villa-Lobos got to keep the original $25,000 commission. Disillusioned, he incorporated much of the music into a work called “Forest of the Amazon” in 1959 which became his last major work. He had managed to alienate many musicians at home when he complained in an interview in June, 1959, that Brazil was “dominated by mediocrity.” He died at the age of 72.

Here is a video with score of a performance by the Cuarteto Latinoamericano of Villa-Lobos’ String Quartet No. 17 which opens their Market Square Concert’s program.

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Skipping ahead to the work that concludes the first half of the program, there is a famous anecdote that almost sounds apocryphal (given the number of variations on its details) but the end result is the same. The advice speaks volumes of truth for many composers, not just a 33-year-old Argentinian named Astor Piazzolla. In 1954, he had left Buenos Aires – at the urging of Argentina's leading “classical music” composer of the day, Alberto Ginastera – to study with one of the most influential teachers in Paris, Nadia Boulanger. However it happened, many young composers, especially from the United States, were drawn to Paris to study with her, ranging from Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and Elliott Carter to Burt Bacharach and Joe Raposo (more famous for the songs he wrote for Sesame Street).

In the early-1940s, Piazzolla – his childhood is complicated, as a boy moving to New York City before returning to his native Argentina – grew up in the world of tango bars and became a bandoneon player in various dance bands in the capital city. He met the pianist Artur Rubinstein, then living in Buenos Aires, who urged him to study with Ginastera, with whom he studied the scores of Stravinsky, Ravel and Bartók, listening to orchestra rehearsals by day and playing the dance clubs by night. By 1950, he gave up his own band to concentrate on composing “serious” music and in 1953 his “Buenos Aires Symphony” won a competition and was given its premiere. Despite a fight breaking out in the audience between those who supported the “newness” of combining classical and popular influences and those who found this insidious and degrading (really, using not one but two bandoneons?), Piazzolla won a scholarship which allowed him to travel to Paris to study with Boulanger.

Piazzolla played through a number of his “classically-inspired” pieces for his new teacher with little response. It wasn't till he started playing one of his tangos – Triunfal – that she reacted: “This,” she said, “is the real Piazzolla!” Dismissing the pile of “serious” works, she said “this” was what he should focus his efforts on. And you could say, he never looked back. (By the way, imagine if Mozart had waited till he was 33 before “finding his voice”?)

Primarily, he studied counterpoint with her – it was, according to Carter, what she was most brilliant at – and it would, in fact, become a major feature in the development of his “New Tango” style. It was the synthesis of the “serious” which he'd started to learn with Ginastera, with the “popular” element he'd grown up with and which was such an important aspect of his environment.

So here we have another great “What If...?” game: if Piazzolla had stayed with his “serious” side, would as many people today know the name and hum his music if he instead wrote symphonies and operas and string quartets like his mentor Alberto Ginastera? Would his “serious” music have had the same sincerity his tangos have?

Following his stay in Paris, Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires in 1955 and formed another band, expanding the traditional tango ensemble of two bandoneóns, two violins, bass and piano, by adding a cello and electric guitar. For his Octeto he composed his “Tango Ballet” in 1956 which was later transcribed for full orchestra as well as for string quartet.

While many of his works translate well to other combinations like the string quartet, his “Four for Tango,” written in 1989 for the Kronos Quartet, is originally for a string quartet. A single movement work – some sources describe it as a six-minute or an eight-minute piece (here, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano play it in five) – it may not seem like a tango you can dance to (but then, Chopin never expected people to dance the waltz to, say, “The Minute” Waltz either). He has, by this time, combined his classical training from Ginastera and Boulanger with his life in the smoky bars of Buenos Aires with his Nuevo Tango to create a synthesis that is both modern and inspired by popular dance, the national sound we automatically identify as the Argentine Tango.

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It might seem odd to find Dvořák on a program of American Music, considering he was born in Bohemia and was a protege of Brahms, but seven years after his first international success with what we know as his 7th Symphony in London, the Czech-born composer Antonin Dvořák found himself Professor Dvořák at the National Conservatory in New York City where, in 1894, he completed what became his last symphony, nicknamed “From the New World” and a number of chamber pieces like the “American” String Quartet. 

He also began this Cello Concerto. He was not only homesick but also worried the money was going to run out – not his, but the school's. His initial salary at the school was twenty-five times what he was making at the conservatory in Prague. After taking “cuts in pay” each semester, once the school could no longer pay him any salary, he returned to his home on April 25th, 1895, taking with him his recently almost-finished concerto.

After his initial arrival and within days of finishing his “Columbus Cantata” (as he called it) one cold January day, he began a new symphony, the one he called From the New World, which he completed on May 24th, 1893. A week later, the rest of his family arrived from Bohemia for the summer, posed for that group photo on the steps of the Dvořáks' home at 327 E.17th Street, and then in a few days they would leave for Spillville, Iowa.

It was his secretary and translator, Josef Kovařík, an American-born Czech who'd suggested the holiday destination: it was his home town and Kovařík's father was still a prominent businessman there. Given its large Czech population, it seemed a good way to assuage Dvořák's homesickness and his interest in seeing more of America than just noisy and crowded New York City.

Shortly after they arrived, he began sketching a new string quartet, completed in eight days. Three days later, he began a string quintet, adding another viola to the standard quartet, and then finished that on August 1st, a little over a month later. Obviously, the town of Spillville agreed with him.

"I have been on vacation since 3 June here in the Czech village of Spillville and I won't be returning to New York until the latter half of September. The children arrived safely from Europe and we're all happy together. We like it very much here and, thank God, I am working hard and I'm healthy and in good spirits."

For decades he had toiled unsuccessfully to find a balance between his overflowing melodic invention and a clear structure. Finally, in his twelfth quartet, the American Quartet, everything came together.

A characteristic, unifying element throughout the quartet is the use of the pentatonic scale, usually associated with stereotypical Chinese music but also found in the folk music of, say, Scotland and also, not coincidentally, many Slavonic folk songs which Dvořák was already familiar with. This scale, less typical of those harmonic progressions associated with “Art Music” and standard tonality, gives the whole quartet its open, simple character, a character that is frequently identified with American folk music.

The quartet incorporated the song of the scarlet tanager Dvořák heard on his walks in the town's Riverside Park. (As if musicologists can expend lots of warm air about American versus Czech influences in the style of Dvořák’s “American” music, ornithologists have argued that the bird was “probably” a red-eyed vireo). Regardless, he was delighted to have heard birds singing for the first time in eight months – and in the fourth movement one could detect echoes of the organ from the local church which he would play every morning before walking along the Turkey River. In the quintet, listeners claim to hear the sound of the Native American drums accompanying the ritual song of the Iroquois Indians – from the Kickapoo tribe – who visited Spillville that summer to sell their herbal remedies. “Dvořák was enchanted by the performances they gave to promote their wares and, for the duration of their stay in the village, he apparently attended every one.”

Aside from an unexpected disruption to attend the Chicago “World's Fair” in mid-August to celebrate “Czech Day” where he conducted a hastily organized concert of his works, he had only two more weeks of his holiday before Dvořák reluctantly left to return to New York on September 16th. 

Unfortunately, he never had a chance to return to Spillville: ten years later, a year before his death, he told a friend he'd thought Spillville “was an ideal spot; that’s when I felt happy, and I should have stayed there.”

In a first private performance of the quartet in Spillville, June 1893, Dvořák played first violin with members of the Kovařík family: father Jan Josef playing second violin, his daughter Cecilie the viola, and son Josef Jan (Dvořák’s secretary) the cello. It was premiered in Boston the following January by the legendary Kneisel Quartet, then shortly afterward in New York City where one critic was disappointed it lacked the “soaring” of “the mighty Beethoven,” but another one heard "the spirit of eternal sunshine" that is "the soul of Mozart's music.”  

Here is the Emerson Quartet in this score-video with Dvořák's "American" String Quartet, the Quartet No. 12 in F Major:

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Let's see… Of the two remaining works on the program, George Gershwin wrote his Lullaby for String Quartet as a harmony assignment for his teacher Rubin Goldmark in 1919 when he was 21. Rubin Goldmark, born in New York City in 1872, taught theory at New York’s National Conservatory in the early-1890s but also studied privately with its new director, Antonín Dvořák, during his first year there. And Dvořák, as I mentioned, was a protege of Johannes Brahms – so that's how many connections? Consider that Rubin Goldmark was a nephew of composer Karl Goldmark who was another friend of Brahms'. Goldmark himself studied with Johann Nepomuck Fuchs whose brother Robert was a more well-known composer and teacher who included among his students Mahler, Sibelius (yes), and a fellow named Eusebius Mandyczewski. J.N. Fuchs studied with the famous teacher Simon Sechter who was old enough to have become famous because he gave one counterpoint lesson to Franz Schubert before he died in 1828!

There is, however, something curious here: while Goldmark was credited in numerous sources and biographies as being Gershwin’s teacher at the time – enduring enough Gershwin would later return to him for advice when composing his Concerto in F – he was not Gershwin’s only teacher. There is evidence to suggest that it’s more likely he wrote the Lullaby as an assignment from Edward Kilenyi (Sr.), a Hungarian-born violinist and composer who studied briefly in Rome with Pietro Mascagni and graduated from the Cologne Conservatory before arriving in New York City where he (supposedly) studied at Columbia University, earning his doctorate by 1915. There is evidence to suggest Gershwin came to him for advice about harmony at the same time he was studying with Goldmark (another Goldmark student at one time was Aaron Copland who found him “too pedantic,” so perhaps Gershwin approached Kilenyi for a “second opinion”?). Regardless, this “Lullaby” came about from the imagination of George Gerwshin, Tin Pan Alley song-plugger and future Great American Composer.

Samuel Barber, meanwhile, born and raised in West Chester, PA, was a pianist and singer and composer when he became a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia (he was 14 at the time) where his composition teacher was the Italian violinist and composer, Rosario Scalero who, in 1900, went to Vienna and studied with Eusebius Mandyczewski – who was (ahem) a protege of Johannes Brahms.

Basically, Gershwin’s “Lullaby” is a young man on the brink of becoming a serious composer, though he found more joy working in Tin Pan Alley and turning out numerous jazz songs that made him a “hit song-writer.” By the time he was studying with Goldmark, he had already made a name for himself with the song “When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em, When You've Got 'Em, You Don't Want 'Em,” his first published song in 1916, which earned him all of 50 cents. But by 1919, he’d also written “Swannee,” made famous by Al Jolson who’d heard the young composer play it at a party and decided to use it in one of his shows. I don’t think Gershwin approached Goldmark to become a “serious Classical” composer, but it gave him a foundation that the young man was then able to rise to the challenge when band conductor Paul Whiteman suggested he write something for his concert in 1924, a kind of “Jazz Meets Classical” program. At the last minute, having forgotten his commitment, he quickly wrote the work that would change his life – the Rhapsody in Blue. And the rest is history.

Here, members of the New York Philharmonic play Gershwin’s “Lullaby.”

Samuel Barber grew up in a musical household: his aunt was the famous contralto and star of the Metropolitan Opera, Louise Homer. His mother was a pianist, the daughter of a family tracing its roots (and social position) back to the Revolution, and she gave her son his first piano lessons when he was six and wrote his first composition the following year, a short piano piece in C Minor called Sadness. Overlooked in most short biographies of Barber’s childhood is the fact that his uncle Sidney Homer, Louise’s husband, was a respected composer of art songs who then mentored the young boy into the adult composer he would become, over a span on 25 years.

By the time he composed his first string quartet – actually, his only string quartet – he’d already composed the “Overture to The School for Scandal” when he was 21 (it would be premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1933), so by the time he started his String Quartet, later to be published as Op. 11, he’d already built quite a reputation, and a very enviable one for a man in his mid-20s. As I recall the story from Barber’s memoir, he was introduced to Toscanini while in Europe through his teacher Scalero, and Toscanini took an interest in him. Looking over the quartet, he suggested the slow movement, an Adagio, would make a very fine piece for string orchestra, and so Barber arranged it as suggested but Toscanini returned the score without comment, later telling Gian-Carlo Menotti who’d met Barber while they were at Curtis and who’d go on to become Barber’s life-long partner, that he’d already memorized it and scheduled it for a broadcast. It would add to Barber’s early fame and remains to this day his most recognizable work. In 1963, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, it became the National Mourning Piece and has since been used (if not overused) in numerous contexts that it’s almost become a cliché. It’s not often heard in its original version, even less so as part of the complete quartet, but it is still a powerful piece on its own that, as one critic wrote, “rarely leaves a dry eye.”

Here is the Dover Quartet playing the original version of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” from his String Quartet, Op. 11:

- Dick Strawser

The Doric Quartet and "The Art of the Fugue"

Who: The Doric String Quartet

What: a program called “The Art of the Fugue” with four fugues from Bach’s The Art of Fugue, Haydn’s String Quartet in F Minor, Op. 20 No. 5, and the third of the “Razumovky” Quartets by Beethoven

When: Tuesday, March 17^th, 2026, at 7:30

Where: Temple Ohev Sholom at 2345 N. Front St. (just below Seneca)

The Doric Quartet returns to Harrisburg as they open their American Tour before moving on to seven other locations across the country (including three different programs in three different locations – Boston, Houston, and Durham NC – over a span of three days). When they performed here in 2012, I had the pleasure of “MC-ing” their presentation at the Midtown Scholar, with excerpts from their program. Formed in 1998, the quartet’s undergone some personal changes over the years, so I thought I’d open this post with a 2024 performance at London’s famed Wigmore Hall of a different Haydn quartet than the one on their program this visit, the finale of his Op. 64 No. 3:

They call the program they’ll be performing here this time “The Art of the Fugue” not just because it opens with four selections from a work by Johann Sebastian Bach called “The Art of the Fugue” (or, as the original German is often translated, “The Art of Fugue,” perhaps an article for a different occasion) but because each of the three works explore one of those frequently encountered but rarely understood bits of musical jargon, “the fugue.”

How do Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven, three very different composers, handle the Fugue?

Bach, generally considered the height of the Baroque, composed these fugues in the last decade of his life, the 1740s; Haydn, who along with Mozart is considered the height of the Classical Era, wrote his Op. 20 quartets in 1772; and Beethoven, generally regarded as one of the most influential if not the greatest composer ever, wrote his three quartets dedicated to Count Razumovsky on the cusp of the Romantic Age in 1806.

Three different composers, three different eras, all spanning only about 60 years. (Think, if you’re old enough, what is considered stylish today and what might you remember as having been “cool” in the mid-1960s?)

Well, anyway – what, exactly, is a Fugue??

Simply put – if anything in music could be put simply – a fugue is usually defined as “a composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.”

But music is always a statement of fact followed by enough exceptions to the rule to leave most juries hung up on “reasonable doubt.” The first exception would be “it is not necessarily a composition. It can be a part of a composition.” Case in point, the last movement of Haydn’s quartet on the program is, yes, a fugue; the whole string quartet is not. But while Beethoven writes a lot of “fugal passages” in the finale of his Third Razumovsky Quartet, the idea of a fugue here is treated “semi-rigorously” (a term which always makes me think rigor mortis has not yet set in) where it’s incorporated into the on-going structure of the movement. It may imitate many of the features of a “fugue-by-definition” – the sequencing of a fragment through successive entries in the different instruments at different pitch-levels, to begin – he does what Beethoven does best, developing these ideas in ways that Bach might not have, incorporating them into his structural framework like any other element available to a composer writing a sonata-form movement. Yes, you’re listening to fugue-like passages but they are part of the complete fabric of the piece. And it’s the last of four movements.

Another exception (and a particular peeve of one of my favorite professors of yore) is that “a fugue is not a form: it’s a procedure.” (So too is a root canal.) In fact, an old-time definition of a fugue was “a piece of music where the voices come in one after the other as the audience goes out one after the other.” It was generally regarded as an “intellectual” process by which a composer could show off his technical aptitude: there are many times, when I’m listening to, say, Tchaikovsky’s vast “Manfred” Symphony and that fugue revs up in the finale, it occurs to me even “great” composers sometimes feel the need to impress their critics by proving they can handle the hard stuff, like writing fugues.

While a lecture on “The Fugue” might sound a bit like John Cleese’s famous talk on the workings of The Brain,

trying to explain the many types of fugues can sound just as comprehensible. Keep in mind, the fugue as Bach knew it was already an old, dried-up, out-of-fashion thing, having had its origins in simple “imitative” writing – for instance, a round like the 13th Century’s “Sumer is icumen in” where a folk-song-like melody can be sung with four voices, each overlapping the other by starting at different points, all sung over a repeating bass, in itself a pair of voices overlapping their own pattern, creating a dense texture of six independent voices.

For centuries music’s “standard operating procedure” was a single line, what we know as “Gregorian Chant.” The idea of adding a second independent line was considered revolutionary in the late-12th Century – but thus counterpoint was born. (I always argue that, if students obeyed their horrified teachers who responded “but you can’t do that,” we’d still be singing nothing but Gregorian Chant today…)

“What if” you could take one line and create a second line by manipulating it to come up with a “two-for-one” deal? Of course, for it to work harmonically (“harmoniously”), you had to avoid things that would create nothing worse than passing dissonances… so, let’s see… maybe something like this song from the 1390s by a French harpist about “the melodious harp” advising the listener to “flee from displeasure who causes problems to that which is pleasant to hear.”

A Flemish composer of the late-15th Century, Johannes Ockeghem, had also devised ways to create “puzzle canons” which, by offering often hidden and sometimes obtuse instructions, could be solved to create complex textures all based on a single line. He incorporated many of these different kinds of “puzzles” into his numerous masses and motets.

By the Renaissance, this had branched out to writing pieces with various lines in “imitative” style – not necessarily exact repetitions but recognizably similar. Someone came up with the idea of starting to sing (or play) them starting at different pitch-levels. The term applied to this technique was “fugue” even though it’s not quite The Fugue we know today. It was just a more advanced form of “imitative counterpoint” – one more degree of technical hocus-pocus.

Composers of the generations before Bach wrote elaborate works they also called fugues, the most famous being Sweelinck and Buxtehude. Bach wrote numerous “puzzle canons” and incorporated the idea into such works as The Musical Offering and… The Art of Fugue. As I mentioned, these were already considered old-fashioned by Bach’s day and, as often happened with Bach, he spent a good part of his life codifying the past in often encylopedic works like The Art of Fugue. The primary focus of this collection “was an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject.” In this sense, he took a single melody – although not a very melodious one by our 19th Century standards – and took it through its paces: how could he realize this line’s potential by writing as many different types of fugues as he could? In all, there are 14 fugues and 4 canons; the last fugue is incomplete and, true or not, there is a note added to the MS by Bach’s son, Carl Philip Emanuel, that “Upon this fugue, where the name BACH [for which the English notation would be B♭–A–C–B♮] was placed in the countersubject, the author died.” While there is proof much of the manuscript was composed (or compiled) between 1740 and 1746, there’s enough difference between the last fugue and the rest of the MS that, perhaps, it was written later, quite possibly at the time of Bach’s final illness. Whether or not he actually died at that very moment is a nice story: “he wrote it before he died” (“well, obviously…”). In this case, it could be argued “he wrote it before his blindness prevented him from writing it down.”

Bach’s collection of fugues, here, unlike the famous Well-Tempered Clavier, does not seem to be intended for any specific instrument. It is written in “open score,” meaning it could be played one unspecified instrument to a part or on an organ where multiple manuals and the pedal could cover the notes as needed. While it could be a keyboard work – any organist worth his salt would’ve been able to play from it; presumably as well a harpsichordist – it’s also notable that no instruments of Bach’s day had the range to play many passages throughout the work. It is probably an attempt how best to notate it for the clarity of the fugue’s procedures. Curiously, the final unfinished fugue (which a friend of mine insisted on calling “The ‘Death’ Fugue”…) is written with all four lines on two staves just like a piano piece.

Here’s the first fugue (or, as they were subsequently labeled, “contrapunctus”). Note the sheet music used here with all four different “voices” color-coded. Notice also how these lines overlap each other.

As the remaining fugues progress, they become more complex: Bach adds different kinds of “accompanimental” lines, or uses The Theme in diminution or augmentation (shortening or lengthening the note-values). Rather than sequencing the entrance of the lines at the interval of a fifth, he might increase that to a tenth (an octave-and-a-third) or a twelfth (and octave-and-a-fifth); in others, the lines may move in contrary motion or be inverted or mirrored. One of the canons moves roversio, that is, the line is reversed, moving “in retrograde” from end to beginning.

Here is the 9th Fugue, a double fugue (two subjects each treated fugally): yes, the first subject is different but The Main Theme (sorry, subject) enters in m.35 – see 0:54 into the video – playing simultaneously as counterpoint to the first subject; then both continue to interweave with each other. Notice how the harmonic tension increases with the interaction of the two subjects.

The Main Theme is in D Minor. Each of the fugues and canons is in D Minor. The entire collection is not intended to be performed straight through – there is very little tonal variety (despite a great deal of rather intense chromaticism) and unless you’re prepared for it, it could become a very mind-numbing experience. On the other hand, the variety that Bach gets out of his material and the incredible ways he creates his technical variety is amazing. Of course, a composer who had struggled through counterpoint class trying to write fugues as an assignment will find more to be amazed by than a music-lover who might prefer the good ol’ Pachelbel Canon.

Speaking of an academic approach to fugue writing, for many students and composers writing a fugue can be like creating a crossword puzzle: you have a set of challenges you try to solve. The unfortunate thing is, most people don’t want to listen to your homework assignments, for better or (most likely) worse, in a concert. You learn by doing and each time you take away some slightly different solution to a problem that, with any luck, will help you in the future, whether you’re writing a fugue per se or an involved contrapuntal passage you can make more interesting. If you listen to the last movement of Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, you will most likely have no idea you’re listening to one of the most complex pieces of music ever composed! That’s what “talent” is all about: making the difficult sound easy.

In the 19th Century, one of the most famous teachers of the day was a composer named Simon Sechter who included among his students Franz Schubert (okay, he only took one lesson and died shortly afterward, but hey…) and Anton Bruckner, a longer-lived composer who wrote many fugues and contrapuntal passages in the course of his masses and symphonies. As for Sechter, he tried to write one fugue a day and, in the end, left behind about 5,000 fugues! The quality of this output might be explained by the fact you’ve probably never heard a single one of them even if you know who Sechter is. (I wonder if, like people who attend the gym regularly and have, say, a dedicated “leg day,” was Sechter’s Wednesday a “Fugue with Inversion” Day?) But what if he were inspired to write a fugue beyond just his daily exercise? Here, if you’re curious, you can spend a few minutes with Herr Prof. Sechter’s fugue “In Memory of the Prematurely Deceased Franz Schubert.”

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The Haydn quartet on the program is more than just the fugue in the finale. There are so many things to point out about its historical significance or the technological advances Haydn made in the three sets of quartets he’d written in the few years leading up to these works – he was 40 by the time he finished the Op. 20 quartets in 1772, the so-called “Sun” Quartets – a quick summary is in order. First of all, in the Classical Period, minor keys were considered darker, more dramatic, and were usually passed over in favor of brighter major keys. The music was after all intended to entertain and the audiences to be entertained were usually not fellow musicians but aristocrats gathered in the local nobleman’s music room for some after-dinner delectation. So the key of F Minor – considered a particularly dark key – was there because Haydn wanted to explore more intense emotions than a lighter mood might allow. This was near the start of what was called the “Sturm und Drang” period of the late-1760s to the early-1780s: “Storm & Stress.” In many ways, it explored what would become major features of 19th Century Romanticism, and it came about as an antidote to the rationalism of the Enlightenment that gave the “Classical” Style its general characteristics. The opening movement of Haydn’s quartet is turbulent (certainly for what the audience might’ve been used to in 1770) and not everyone was on board with it (Frederick the Great, the Prussian King, considered the style “noise”). A play in this style might focus more on greed and revenge than uplifting principals, or pitting two aristocratic brothers against each other over their love for the same woman; hopeless love and suicide are main themes in Goethe’s famous Sorrows of Young Werther published in 1774.

By comparison, the second movement, a more austere minuet (still in F Minor), has a folk-like middle section or trio. The slow movement, a stark contrast to the first movement and the finale to come, has the feel of a gentle sicilienne in F Major that for all its simplicity brings to mind Schubert fifty years later (though no one could ever imagine anyone other than Haydn actually composing it).

The finale returns to the storminess of the opening yet it is a fugue through-and-through, which, if already old-fashioned long before Bach died in 1750 (only 22 years earlier, btw), must have startled Haydn’s listeners who would’ve expected a lively romp with a happy ending instead of something this intellectual and archaic (and yet, curiously, in this avant-garde “Sturm und Drang” style!).

Not only is it a fugue, it is a double fugue with two subjects (the “theme” of a fugue is always called a subject, just to be academic about it), heard simultaneously at the outset. The character of each subject is distinct: the more prominent one strongly resembles Bach’s “Theme” used throughout The Art of Fugue, angular with wide intervallic leaps, clearly defined rhythms; the one that sounds like an accompaniment is actually a contrast in quicker rhythmic figures and smaller fragments, yet perfectly identifiable as “not the main theme.” As the fugue expands, we’re never far away from one of those subject’s motives, identifiable but often passing kaleidoscopically from one instrument to the other. Later, the viola introduces the second subject al rovescio (in reverse), followed a bit later, after an interrupting pause, by a subtle cascade of both subjects spilling over each other, not waiting for the first statement to finish before the second one butts in (this is called stretto, an overlapping of ideas that creates a kind of “stress”) followed by the main subject now coming in only a half-measure after the other voice, moving “in canon” before it seems like its losing steam, only to end with a forceful statement of both subjects simultaneously, treble and bass, with its final punctuation.

You may not be aware of the intricacy of it and I know people have heard it and wondered “what fugue?” Yet it’s an amazing tour-de-force worthy of the contrapuntal genius of Bach or, at least later, chronologically, the Mozart-yet-to-come. Two things to mention, here: Mozart was so impressed by this set of six quartets and then by the Op. 33 set in 1781, the year he moved to Vienna, he set about writing a new set of his own quartets, exploring many of the innovations Haydn had opened up for him, especially in terms of incorporating more contrapuntal writing into his textures. Beethoven, when he arrived in Vienna to study with Haydn, hand-copied one of the Op. 20 Quartets (I would imagine either the F Minor or the G Major, both with fugal finales), a typical way for a young student to learn the details of his teacher’s craft.

Here is the Quatour Mosaïque in this video of the complete Op. 20 No. 5 Quartet with the score:

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This concert is part of a series of seasons with the Doric Quartet focusing on Beethoven culminating next year in the 200th Anniversary of Beethoven’s Death on March 26th, 1827. Not that the 199th Anniversary warrants such a celebration, but there is much in Beethoven’s legacy to examine, not just his own impact on subsequent composers – few figures loom as large over future generations as Beethoven – but on those whose music helped to form him.

Of the other two composers on this program, Haydn was not only Beethoven’s teacher but also someone who could be regarded as the Most Famous Living Composer of the Day (and in Beethoven’s own estimation that was only because Mozart had died before he’d had a chance to study with him). The other is Bach, and though this was long before he’d come to be regarded as one of “The Three Bs,” the influence of his collection of keyboard pieces called The Well-Tempered Clavier was also very powerful among the handful of composers familiar with it.

Over the years, I’ve written about Beethoven’s 3rd “Razumovsky” Quartet, so if you’re interested in the historical or biographical information about the piece, the composer, and the dedicatee, check out this earlier post from 2016.

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The expansive opening movement, following a very enigmatic introduction – harking back, most likely, to Mozart's “Dissonant” Quartet, also in C Major – is more compact than the other quartets' but on the whole more approachable, too, as if he's letting listeners baffled by the first two off the hook with this one (or so it might seem).

As one of the early reviews said, "Three new, very long and difficult Beethoven string quartets, dedicated to the Russian ambassador Count Razumovsky, are also attracting the attention of all connoisseurs. The conception is profound and the construction excellent, but they are not easily comprehended." Perhaps the comparative tunefulness of the Third's opening brought a sigh of relief? 

The second movement, however, could have something Slavic about it – again, more likely Beethoven's impression of something Slavic – in the mood of the theme though its most memorable feature is the cello's steady pizzicato, almost like a tolling bell – and Russians did love their bells. That hasn't kept other writers from hearing something Spanish or even more exotic in it.

The third movement, rather than being a typical scherzo, is more of a throwback to the graceful days of Mozart and Haydn, the previous generation, a minuet marked “grazioso.” [Keep in mind Mozart, an idol of the teen-aged Beethoven, had died in 1791, fifteen years before this quartet; and Haydn, old and ill, would die three years after it.] But this sets up the finale more perfectly than a typical Beethoven scherzo possibly could.

And yet, this [finale] was even more of a throw-back, this time to the highly contrapuntal days of Bach and Handel of the 1740s or so when Fugue was king. (In Beethoven's day, Bach was little known, at least to the general public; Beethoven admitted more than once Handel was one of his favorite composers). The finale starts off with a vigorous (!) fugue and this dense and busy texture – a perpetual motion, at that – dominates the movement to the point it no longer sounds like an academic and old-fashioned dry-as-dust fugue, the kind of thing all students once learned to compose but then probably shouldn't. While it's very different from the Great Fugue that originally ended the Op. 130 Quartet, it's still a marvelous show-case of compositional craft combined with musical ingenuity.

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Here is the Emerson Quartet (another frequent visitor to Market Square Concerts in seasons past) with the Quartet in C Major, Op. 59 No. 3 by Ludwig van Beethoven, complete with score:

(P.S. The video and the poster’s commentary date the quartet as 1808 but that is when it was published. The C Major Quartet was composed in 1806, and all three were premiered in February, 1807.)

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I could spend another 5,000 words writing about how Beethoven did or did not quite follow the rules of “How to Write a Fugue.” But then Beethoven was never one to follow anybody’s rules, something that often frustrated his teacher, Franz Josef Haydn, and most of his friends and fans. Counterpoint, which can become a fairly rigorous academic subject, is not something Haydn was particularly interested in teaching, and it was Baron von Sweiten, a prominent bureaucrat, librarian, and music-lover in Vienna’s court, friend and supporter of Mozart and a fan of young Beethoven’s, suggested Beethoven, then pushing 25, to study with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger who proved to be a much better (or at least better-attuned) teacher for someone of Beethoven’s intellectual feistiness.

Counterpoint, of course, is not just “writing fugues” – it is the development of those skills both melodic and harmonic which help create a greater sense of texture and variety beyond a simple melody with a simple harmonic accompaniment. Yes, there are lots of rules – as a former theory teacher, I can say there are too many rules perhaps, but learning the rules is important because then you understand what you need to do to break them, which is so much more productive than merely writing whatever the hell you want to. Beethoven knew this, even if purists (frequently known as pedants) bickered about his ability to follow the rules. You learn the rules, understand why they exist, and then, keeping in mind what you should do, you find a way to bend – then break – them to get what you want.

And that’s what Beethoven did here, a composer by then in his mid-30s, who horrified the pedants by not following their rules. As one violinist responded to the Razumovsky Quartets, “Surely you do not consider this music!” To which Beethoven famously replied, “Not for you, but for a later age,” not because he was arrogant – well, yes, he was, but that’s not what he meant, here: there would come a time when the present generation would not only have forgotten the Old Rules but would have accepted the fact there are other ways of writing music.

On that note, I cannot resist ending with a fugue composed by Glenn Gould, the great pianist and interpreter of Bach, whose little vocal quartet accompanied by strings was written for a 1963 CBC broadcast called “The Anatomy of Fugue.” I give you Glenn Gould’s So You Want to Write a Fugue which includes, in the midst of some very busy counterpoint, wise advice: “Just forget the rules and write one.”

– Dick Strawser