composer
WINGATE: STRING QUARTET NO. 3
Allegorical Palindrome
(THIS PROJECT IS A WORK IN PROGRESS)
Movements:
I. Vanitas (after Simon Renard de Saint-André) - Grave con moto
II. Folly (after Erasmus of Rotterdam) - Allegro
III. Hearing (after Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens) - Andantino
IV. Veritas (after Walter Seymour Allward) - Tempo di marcia
V. Birth of the Goddess; or the Union of the Physical and the Spiritual (after Sandro Botticelli) - Adagio
Notes:
Wingate’s String Quartet No. 3, ‘Allegorical Palindrome’, is a dodecaphonic chamber work whose creation was once again sparked by some of the composer’s favorite artworks and texts (see also: Kleetüden), but in this case all allegories, and all aptly obsessed with the ineffable.
It might be said that the most striking feature of this work is actually its hidden structure. The piece is a musical palindrome of 576 notes, using the same 288 notes, first forwards, then backwards. But this musical architecture is nowhere obvious in the piece, which duly recomposes its reversed-order second half—instead of just literally playing the first half backwards—as well as generally hiding all of its many mirroring procedures under a thick tapestry of expressive pathos. The five movements also refuse to delineate any overarching symmetry in the piece, as their distribution within the total note count occurs unevenly. Yet Wingate further escalates the palindromic nature of the piece by building all the music with a tone row which is itself a palindrome (and which is incidentally the same highly symmetrical tone row used by Anton Webern in his 1928 über-atonal Symphony, Op. 21, namely: [9, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 11, 10, 2, 1, 0, 3]). Using a mirrored note series like this, in which the second half is derived from the first, tends to impart upon the music a kind of unified sonic impression, as each of the rows has its own identical twin among the 48 row permutations. In essence, Wingate’s String Quartet No. 3 is a palindrome of palindromes of palindromes.
But then the ideas of the referent allegories from the piece’s titles inevitably distract the listener from all these underlying formalities. For the first movement, the composer had in mind one of the magnificent 17th century Vanitas paintings of Simon Renard de Saint-André, which of course contains the obligatory skull with its wilting laurels, but also a beautiful rebec or pochette with its bow, a beribboned flûte à bec tossed aside, and a musical score carelessly left open. The movement’s lugubrious 5/2 time signature attempts to spread out this memento mori into irregularly-placed single-pitch octave chords that interrupt our rhythmic expectations, and then creates further subversion with the slow dissolution of these sonic blocks into chromatic fragments, courtesy of the piece’s highly dissonant tone row materials.
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Simon Renard de Saint-André (1613?-1677): Vanitas Still Life; Oil on canvas, 38 x 47 cm, Private collection.
The remaining movements of contrasting character take inspiration from four other allegorical works in Western art and literature [see below], including The Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1509), the Allegory of Hearing by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens (1617-18), the statue of Veritas [Truth] by Walter Seymour Allward (1920), and finally, Sandro Botticelli’s supremely iconic allegory The Birth of Venus (ca. 1480s), which begets the quartet’s transcendental finale. Stylistically and formally, the three inner movements of the quartet together form a kind of single, tripartite central movement. This is bookended by the slower outer movements, whose more serious complexions flank the central scherzo- or rondo-like trio episode with opening and closing profundities, perhaps additionally imparting to the work a heightened sense of symmetry while enhancing its perceived palindromic excesses.
Clockwise from top left:
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536): Title page of a rare first English edition of The Praise of Folie. Translated by Thomas Chaloner. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1549.
Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640): Hearing; from the series The Five Senses in Five Paintings, 1617-18
Walter Seymour Allward (1874-1955): Veritas (‘Truth’), 1920; installed outside the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa in 1970.
Sandro Botticelli (ca.1445-1510): Nascita di Venere (‘The Birth of Venus’), probably executed in the mid-1480s.
In the same manner as other musical palindromes, such as John Corgliano’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Symphony No. 2, or Wingate’s own Metaphysical Monologue No. 6 for Bass Trumpet (which uses the same 144 notes forwards and then backwards), this musico-theoretical trickery is not particularly audible in the music itself, but acts as a kind of bonus underlying feature to be appreciated after the fact, rather like the discovery of the individual dots in a pointillistic painting, or the realization that an intricately engraved drawing actually consists of a single continuous spiraling line.* Wingate’s Allegorical Palindrome quartet carefully spins its mirrored web of 576 notes, all the while demanding a kind of steadfast but quiet virtuosity from its performers (as well as an appetite for incorrigibly ‘serious’ music from its listeners), perhaps in the end adding a unique and curious opuscule to the 21st century string quartet repertoire.
*See Claude Mellan’s masterful 1649 single-line engraving The Sudarium of Saint Veronica.