Beyond the Programmatic Music for Clarinet and Strings by Peter Eötvös and Carl Maria von Weber
Thomas May
“I try to describe the world with sounds, just like writers do it with words, painters with a brush, and directors with a camera,” remarks Peter Eötvös. “We often describe the same thing; only the medium is different.” Eötvös’s understanding of the composer’s task is put to the test in fascinating ways by this evening’s selections and their interconnections. All of the music that Jörg Widmann and the Cuarteto Quiroga have chosen to perform is “purely” instrumental. Yet behind the two Eötvös compositions—one of which receives its world premiere tonight—stands a literary source by one of the recognized masters of 20th-century world literature: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Actor Paul Rhys will read excerpts from the novel. Music without text, yet at the same time bearing textual traces buried deep beneath its surface: what sort of relation obtains between these pieces and the text that ispired them? Certainly not a “programmatic” one, in the traditional sense—anymore than these new chamber compositions by Eötvös stand for the purely “absolute” side of this conventional binary opposition, a relic of Romanticism. Eötvös notes that the medium with which he as a composer works differs from that of Joyce and artists in such disciplines as film and painting. (The work of another epochal Modernist, Kazimir Malevich, has also been a recent preoccupation, as shown by the composer’s 2018 orchestral work Reading Malevich.) For his part, the music-obsessed Joyce even referred to using the musical techniques
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