Work Information
Nathaniel Stookey : String Quartet No. 3, “The Mezzanine”
| Work Notes |
Available for performances after February 2016 |
Publisher |
Associated Music Publishers Inc |
| Category |
Works for 2-6 Players |
Sub-Category |
String Quartet |
| Year Composed |
2012 |
Duration |
24 Minutes |
| Orchestration |
2vn, va, vc; optional electronics |
Availability |
Unavailable Explain this... |
Programme Note
First performance:
February 21 2013
Kronos Quartet
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
San Francisco, CA
Composer note:
We composers often go to great lengths to discourage our audience from looking for connections between our music and the titles we give it. In the case of my third quartet, the music really is about escalators, drinking straws, shoelaces, vending machines, and cigarette butts. If it doesn’t sound that way to you, I can only say that I did my best with what I had. (Describing a coffee dispenser in music is a bit like creating a self-portrait out of sea-foam!) I would like to thank Nicholson Baker for forever changing my world-view, and David Harrington for forever changing the string quartet.
— Nathaniel Stookey
Reviews
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A similar fusion of charm and sentiment infused the world premiere of Nathaniel Stookey's String Quartet No. 3, inspired - improbably but persuasively - by Nicholson Baker's 1988 novel, "The Mezzanine." Baker's deadpan, loving paean to the mechanical apparatus of modern life - staplers, escalators, doorknobs and more - finds a musical analogue in Stookey's austere but vivid harmonic language.
Framing the piece's five movements are a series of serenely rising whole-tone scales that ascend like the freestanding escalators that figure prominently in the novel. In between come a wealth of puckish inventions, including an offbeat rhythmic groove that morphs into a tenderly sardonic waltz, and a slow hymn whose harmonies grow and expand in surprising directions.
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, 22/02/2013
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The second piece on the program was my favorite, Stookey’s String Quartet No. 3 (“The Mezzanine”). The first movement was the most distinctive, with a brilliantly interlocking series of upward, whole-tone scales passed around the instruments, most effectively rendered by cellist Jeffrey Zeigler. Lots of fun ensues in the remaining movements, even if I couldn’t relate the music to the indicated objects. Highlights included a kind of cowboy tango, Bartókian accents, additive gestures, a hillbilly hoedown, and a superb conclusion that brings back the lovely whole-tone escalators.
Jeff Dunn, San Francisco Classical Voice, 22/02/2013
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