Beach at Pacific Coast (Photo credit: Frank Kehren)
Description of a piece by Gloria Coates at the just concluded Other Minds Festival:
The best way to describe the work’s affect is to imagine yourself sunbathing on a hot Pacific beach. In the first movement, you have found a hangnail in your big toe. For 10 minutes you move it around in various directions like a anti-joystick, trying to keep it at the most painful position. Finally, you black out and miss much of the 10-minute second movement and its unheard tune. In the third movement, however, you wake up and discover you are immersed in the lapping waves of the tide that rose while you were unconscious. The intersections of the waves of glissandos somehow create a relatively less undulating übermelody that eventually soothes the pain of the previous movements and makes you feel you’ve been on a journey, however unpleasant at times, and perhaps have accomplished something.
Piston’s Fifth Quartet was commissioned for the 1962 Berlin Festival by the Kroll Quartet, who gave the first performance on October 8, 1962. It was awarded the New York Music Critics Circle Award in 1964 (Pollack 1982, 138).
Posted by: mspy review | March 06, 2012 at 06:44 AM