Luckily for the Calder Quartet, I must have unconsciously over-anticipated just how brutal sitting through an entire chunk of Schoenberg’s atonal compositions would be, because once I was in Hertz Hall, listening to Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 (which opened the program), I surprised myself with a deep breath. It simply wasn’t as discordant and difficult as I had prepared myself to endure. I have had a limited introduction to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique and it wasn’t exactly the most enjoyable experience. This piece, however—despite marking the beginning of Schoenberg’s plunge into atonality—had clear themes, and the jerking of bows across instruments felt more artistically placed than discordant. The melody could have been purely screeching (judging from some of the reactions my family members have had to Schoenberg’s later works), but it wasn’t. My unexpectedly relaxed state allowed for certain details to sit more nicely in my mind and enhance the music overall. For one thing, instead of focusing on the discordance (unless it was overpowering), I could focus on Schoenberg’s instrumentation, scoring, and stylistic choices.

Something that I really attached to was how complicated the combination of melodies became. Schoenberg had every instrument doing its own thing at several times in the piece, and yet they all fit with each other. Simply put, I think that’s really brilliant. Schoenberg had to have kept so many elements in his head, and the performers had to follow strange timing and still not be distracted by the actions of every other player. The collective brainwork that went into this performance was something I was better able to enjoy rather than pick apart.

Another really interesting aspect of Schoenberg’s quartet was the addition of the soprano part (sung in this case by Yulia Van Doren). This was not something I had prepared myself for, but I actually found that the Emanuel Ax and Anne Sofie von Otter recital—our first concert of the semester—had already laid some groundwork. I felt that the singing movements of the string quartet were really reminiscent of the Otter and Ax rendition of “So Many Things” by Nico Muhly. Both had this strange and eerie melody being led through the instrumental parts by a powerful female voice (Otter’s mezzo soprano, Van Doren’s soprano). But I think, of the two singers, Van Doren was so much more impressive. She had emotion and a strength of voice that I appreciated immensely. Otter’s performance felt theatrical while Van Doren’s felt sincere. We watched Otter from the back of Zellerbach’s vast main floor, while we watched Doren from the middle of Hertz Hall, a mere thirty feet away.

A lot of factors worked together to make Van Doren feel more effective to me—her extreme talent being one of them. She brought out a really great paradox of the piece in that her lyrics contradicted her melody in a lot of ways. The lyrics, taken from poems by Stefan George, express feelings of foreignness and then acceptance. They are strangely archaic compared to the realism of the time but this does not make them any less poignant. The music felt pensive and then violent, with long flowing tunes turning to discordant chaos. Van Doren embraced the contradictions within her performance and so resolved them as parts of a complicated whole, which is what I think Schoenberg was aiming for. I see Schoenberg’s work as a celebration of complexity, and this performance embraced that concept for me.

The second piece of the program, meanwhile—Jörg Widmann’s String Quartet No. 3, “Jagdquartett”—revived me in the best of ways. It started simply, but became the most fun of all of the pieces of the afternoon. It had amazing intricacies and alternations between folky tonal music and discordant, more modern, themes. The alternations gave an air of spontaneity, which was enhanced by the fast pace of the piece. Spontaneity became a theme of the piece with seemingly random shouts and unconventional instrumentation. Violins were played like cellos. The cello was attacked by elaborate tricks and exhausting competition. Masculine shouts were first scattered about and then violently repeated. Overall, I thought the performance of this piece was fabulous. It was so witty and fun and engaging. This piece is what made me want to write my blog post about the Calder Quartet. They executed exactly the kind of fun I was looking for, especially after the release I was feeling throughout the Schoenberg.

Finally, Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14, “Death and the Maiden,” which ended the program, was pleasant, but I felt that it aligned itself with the classically structured and formal aspects of many of the prior performances we had seen. The excitement that I usually seek with music felt held back by the Romantic structure of the piece. There was significantly less of the incredible counterpoint and concentration I had witnessed earlier, as in the Schoenberg; instruments rarely distinguished themselves at a comparable height of complexity. That said, it was still beautiful. While I had to resort to the listening skills I’ve been refining at some of our previous concerts, making note of patterns and of themes changing keys, the second movement reached a higher level for me. I think that it was so much more impressive to me because of how it strove toward the colorization of the Schoenberg and Widmann pieces. The sound was richer, and the reason this stood out to me is because, after the first two quartets, I really noticed all of the empty spaces in Schubert’s composition that could have been an opportunity for complex enrichment. While the other two composers fleshed out their sounds with embellishments and new harmonies, Schubert offered something sparse in comparison—a skeleton of a quartet, or so it seemed to me. The second movement not only seemed to fill out more of the mind space available to process sound, varying each instrument’s role, but it also had this elegant melody that, in my opinion, drooled emotion, making up for those moments where it lacked a fuller, or more elaborate texture.

When I reminisce on the classical concerts I’ve attended, I remember them as all sounding approximately the same. I can notice the differences between composer A and composer B, but those differences seem at times minute, and at times beyond my grasp. What was it about composition X that shook me in a way that composition Y did not? How did a particular segment of a performance evoke a particular feeling in a particular person of a particular background? How do different musical instruments play together to create a particular effect? These are some of the questions that have been born out of my discussions with my class, except the answers still elude me. And I think my lack of vocabulary makes it hard for me to remember all but the vaguest instances and segments; even if I did remember them, I would recall them to you by way of whistling or humming. When it comes to understanding the style of a composition or the evolution of style within a single piece, or ascribing any relevance to an element within some scheme, I find myself lost. And so, between composition A and composition B, all I can definitively say is that they are different, and no more.

All of this shockingly changed when I heard the Calder Quartet’s performance of Jörg Widmann’s String Quartet No. 3, "Jagdquartett" (2003). I found this piece to completely overturn my perception of classical music as, at the very least, structured, organized, highly coherent, mostly consistent, and continuous. One observation I’d made before attending this concert, and that I felt no one could deny (especially after viewing the Vienna Philharmonic): classical musicians are often essentially motionless, save for their arms and neck. But the Calder Quartet playing Widmann! There was motion, a lot of it. Wild, crazy motion. By the end of their performance, the musicians had hairs flying off their bows, and I had even been afraid their bows would break at various points, what with all the swinging and whipping. As for the music itself? I found it to be the most interesting out of all the Schoenberg, Schubert, Brahms, and Haydn we’d heard. Jagged and erratic are terms that first come to mind, and also highly unpredictable. I would also say that the piece ascribes very loosely to classical structure. I did not expect all of that screeching and wailing, nor did I expect it to be as fragmented as it was. I was rather caught back by what I found to be very innovative usage of the instruments themselves. Not only were the musicians dragging their bows along the strings in a way I hadn’t observed before, they managed to fit in sounds that I would ordinarily find absolutely wretched.To be precise, I had never seen or heard the sound of bows moving across the bridge of a string instrument instead of across the strings—it’s a horrible sound, but within the context of Widmann’s piece, they managed to use it well!