Complete String Quartets, Vol. 2

From the Ground Up

By Andrew Mellor

Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen managed to unite every faction of progressive Danish music in admiration. After studies in the 1950s with Finn Høffding, Svend Westergaard and Vagn Holmboe at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, he began to write music in a post-Bartókian and Serialist vein while working as a technical assistant at the Royal Danish Theatre. This period produced the composer’s first three string quartets, included on the first volume in this series (8.226217).

In the wake of those works, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s music began to focus more on the fundamentals of time and rhythm while developing a distinct sense of the absurd, invariably handled with childlike innocence. Then came twentieth-century Danish music’s Big Bang: the arrival of so-called New Simplicity, a sonic answer to Denmark’s functionalist design movement which decreed that the structure of any work should be clearly audible.

Techniques pioneered by the composer Henning Christiansen, the artist Robert Rauschenberg, the writer Hans Jørgen Nielsen, the playwright Samuel Beckett and the sculptor Jørgen Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (Pelle’s father) all helped shape in the composer a mature voice both wholly distinctive and disarmingly honest. The music that flowed from him from the late 1960s onwards was refreshing in the extreme, applying the communicative instincts of a street busker to the ‘concrete’ principle of music as sound.

Gudmundsen-Holmgreen went further than most in the New Simplicity movement, returning not just to traditional materials – using triadic harmonies as an equivalent to the woods and leathers of the furniture makers – but to the earth itself. His music delved joyously into the nature of noise and the sonic impulses that underpin life, humour, speech and conversation.

Few Gudmundsen-Holmgreen scores take themselves seriously but plenty become poignant, emotive or serious by default. His methods of composing can appear to have been pilfered from children or animals: musical building blocks are stacked on top of one another or repeated as obsessive slogans; banalities seize hold of the discourse and are held aloft in fascination; solo instruments are forced out onto tightropes while instrumental groups are bound together in unlikely coalitions that writhe and wriggle like ferrets in a sack.

In a pertinent echo of Carl Nielsen’s lifelong quest to drag song and symphony back down to earth, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s music endears itself more downwards than upwards. If his works provoke, and some do, it is rarely for the sake of provocation or to the detriment of a meaningful emotional residue. Listen more deeply, and we hear a body of work in sympathy with whole rafts of the planet’s species – music with a clear heartbeat, a living pulse and an animalistic gait whose numerous displacements and distractions speak of the imperfection, coyness, exuberance and confusion of life as a mammal.

Gudmundsen-Holmgreen wrote string quartets throughout his career, from 1959 to 2013 (three years before he died). This span of work charts not just his music’s fundamental style and sound, but also its relationship to form. ‘I have inherited from my father the preservation of sensuality, the retention of a childlike spirit and an innocence in dealing with people and in my work ... I have also inherited from him the quest for the perfect form,’ the composer once said; ‘I know that it can’t be found, but I shall continue to try.’

That form is concerned less with Classical floorplans than with an intuitive sense of balance – between opposing impulses, etiquettes, timbres or agendas. As time went by, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen allowed more physical forces to wash into his works and particularly his string quartets, reflecting the living presence of those who played them, many of whom he formed strong bonds with. The world-renowned Kronos Quartet, who instigated a number of the composer’s string quartets, looms large in that process.

String Quartet No. 7, Parted (1984)
Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s later string quartets tend to bear an umbilical connection to their immediate neighbours. Parted, the composer’s seventh quartet, came a year after Parting, his sixth. The latter piece presents a clear musical gesture and stretches it as if into a grand echo of itself – a tender farewell. Parted, the first score commissioned from the composer by the Kronos Quartet, reflects on fresh estrangement and all that comes with it.

The music’s initial disorientation can be viewed as a classic Gudmundsen-Holmgreen search for comfort and coalition. His coming-to-terms with this ‘parted’ status reflects the composer’s Kierkegaardian interest in the concept of two opposing ideas, parties or characters and the social awkwardness such opposition can engender. The ensemble can appear to be split into the three under-chin instruments and the single between-legs one. Patterns establish themselves only to oscillate with opposites or grind to a halt.

In the second movement, the cello obsesses over a single, droll note while its companions blare out clarion chords above, an opposition inverted at the close of the work when the cello underpins luminescent chords while the first violin bows ecstatically on a single altitudinous pitch. In between, lyricism sprouts among the composer’s characteristic grinding sounds and alarmist chords; conversations run out of words; instruments cling vulnerably to single pitches and there are hints of the motoric minimalism associated with the America of the Kronos Quartet.

String Quartet No. 8, Ground (1986)
Two years after Parted, the Kronos Quartet took delivery of its next commission, Ground. The score formed both a beginning and an ending: closing the series of quartets numbered 5-7 (ending with Parted ), while also marking the starting point in a series of modular, related quartets stretching beyond the three included on this recording.

The Baroque practice of looping a bass line (or ‘ground bass’) proved useful for Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, its enforced limitations acting as a stimulant. The composer would toy with the device throughout his later decades and for this eighth string quartet, extended its rubric by using rows of harmonic sequences in symmetrical upward and downward movements. The composer’s own explanatory note explains that his ground consists of ‘a continuously repeated 35 bar rhythmic foundation (constructed of polyrhythms), an equilibrium in a limited number of tones, a continuously repeated harmonic sequence (modulating between four different symmetrically arranged levels) and the overall form of a bow, consisting of many small bows.’

In that, the work was ‘kind of an experiment’ in the composer’s own words – an attempt to prod, probe and provoke the institutional ‘ground bass’ with new apparatus while also testing the capabilities of the playing ensemble, whose constantly abridging, condensing and intensifying sequences (particularly during the first seven minutes of the score) are technically challenging and dynamically straining for a group of four acoustic instruments from the same string family.

For all that, this quartet still emerges as one of Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s most enchanting: a playful rhapsody on simplicity, constraint and resolution whose poetic empathy (and parting gesture) offers palpable closure on what went before.

String Quartet No. 9, Last Ground (2006)
Twenty years passed between Ground and its successor, Last Ground – another collaboration with Kronos, and a score that Gudmundsen-Holmgreen fully expected would be his last in quartet form. Yes, a ground bass is at work in this piece – this time, though, the focus is more on the series of chords implied by the bass line, which alternates with inverted versions of itself. New to this piece are electronics: the sampled sounds of a roaring sea, wind and associated wildlife, perhaps an echo of time spent by the composer on the slender Danish island of Samsø in the Kattegat Sea.

‘In the face of the roaring, raging sea the quartet is a puny little thing,’ said the composer to the music journalist Jens Cornelius in 2007; ‘It’s very faint-hearted. Gradually it gets slower and weaker. What starts as a pale, puny little thing gets even paler!’ In the same conversation, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen drew an analogy with his own mortality. Eventually, the sounds of the sea return to wash the quartet out completely, but not before one last musical clue: the introduction of an A flat to the constant note D, to form an ominous tritone.

String Quartet No. 10, New Ground (2011)
Last Ground turned out not to be Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s last string quartet – nor even, in fact, his last ‘ground’. Aware of comments made at the time of that piece, the composer, with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek, described setting out to ‘disappoint listeners as much as possible’ by writing ‘an outgoing, light quartet’ titled New Ground but based on a famous old ground: that used by Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706) in his famous Canon and Gigue.

Pachelbel’s ground isn’t spelt-out verbatim; Gudmundsen-Holmgreen gives it an extra bar and a bluesy chromatic detour on its home straight. Apart from that, the technique is effectively Baroque: above the consistently looping ground, the discourse becomes ever more complicated and exuberant – and, in this case, fractious, flailing, scared and animalistic. The idea proved even more fertile than this one quartet could justify and would lead to the composition of two partner pieces that can be superimposed onto it: the atonal No Ground and the vocal work Green. That, however, was all still to come …

Andrew Mellor is author of The Northern Silence – Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale University Press, 2022)