composer
WINGATE: STRING QUARTET NO. 3
Allegorical Palindrome
Movements:
I. Vanitas (after Simon Renard de Saint-André) - Grave con moto
II. Folly (after Erasmus of Rotterdam) - Allegro inquietante
III. Hearing (after Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens) - Lento acuto
IV. Veritas (after Walter Seymour Allward) - Tempo di marcia
V. The Union of the Physical and the Spiritual (after Sandro Botticelli) - Andante confluente
(See referent artworks below)
Date:
2026
Duration:
11'30"
Notes:
Wingate’s String Quartet No. 3 ‘Allegorical Palindrome’ came about as the result of a dare from the composer’s subconscious. Having woken from a dream in which he was challenged to write a quartet with the same notes forwards and backwards, he found himself feverishly sketching several minutes of music throughout the night, employing a particular set of twelve notes used by Anton Webern in 1927 which he had been perusing the day before. Months later, this inspiration was consummated as a dodecaphonic chamber work which not only mirrors itself musically, but is also designed to depict five of the composer’s favorite allegorical artworks and texts (see also Wingate’s Kleetüden), here resulting in a symmetrical pentaptych for string quartet, duly and inescapably obsessed with the ineffable.
Yet it might be said that the most striking feature of this work is its utterly hidden structure. The quartet is a meticulous musical palindrome of pitch occurrence, consisting of 576 note events over five movements (or, the same series of 288 notes forwards and then backwards), but this elaborate musical architecture is nowhere obvious in the piece—which painstakingly recomposes its reversed-order second half instead of just literally playing its first half backwards, all the while hiding its structural details under a thick tapestry of expressive pathos. Wingate further escalates the palindromic DNA of the quartet by building all the music with a highly symmetrical tone row which is itself a palindrome (and which is also, as mentioned above, the same row used by Anton Webern almost a century earlier in his über-atonal Symphony, Op. 21*). 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. So 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, virtuosically 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.
*Namely: [9, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 11, 10, 2, 1, 0, 3]
**See Claude Mellan’s masterful 1649 single-line engraving The Sudarium of Saint Veronica below:
