Ge Gan-Ru
String Quartets Nos. 1, 4 and 5
Modern Works
Ge Gan-Ru was born in Shanghai in 1954. His
childhood violin studies were interrupted by the
Cultural Revolution, during which time he was sent
to a labor camp to plant rice. At night, however, he
would walk in total darkness on a muddy road to a
secret location where he could continue to practice
western music. After a year of this, he was assigned
to an ensemble of violin, saxophone, bamboo and
western flutes, pi’pa and accordion to entertain the
workers with revolutionary songs and dances. To his
good fortune, two wonderful things happened: the
accordion player became his wife, and he had many
opportunities to do musical arrangements for this
unusual group. (Without this experience, Ge later said,
he might not be a composer today.) When the Cultural
Revolution ended and the Shanghai Conservatory
was reopened in 1974, he was admitted as a violin
student; but in 1977, inspired by his recent creative
experiences, he switched to composition, studying
with Chen Gang. Soon he became acquainted with
scores by 20th century western composers such as
Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Cage, Crumb and the
Japanese composer Takemitsu; and in 1980, when
(British composer) Alexander Goehr became the first
western composer to visit China after the Cultural
Revolution, Ge was among the few students to receive
lessons. Upon his graduation in 1981 Ge was named
assistant professor of composition at the Conservatory.
But new Chinese music was still based on
traditional western styles. By all accounts, the
opening salvo in the Chinese musical avant-garde
was Ge’s 1982 work Yi Feng (Lost Style) for what
has been described as a “radically detuned” solo
cello. Yi Feng was premiered in Shanghai in 1983 to
much controversy and criticism. (A contemporaneous
recording has been released on the New Albion label.)
In 1983, Ge started working on his String
Quartet No. 1—Fu (Prose-Poem). Before completing
it, however, he left China as the first of a generation
of Chinese composers brought to New York City by
Chou Wen-chung at Columbia University. At first he
had to support himself as a restaurant deliveryman,
but he managed to complete Fu, which was picked up
within a year by the Kronos Quartet. By the time he
received his doctorate from Columbia in 1991, he was
supporting himself as a composer, and he continues
to live in the New York area as of this writing. Ge
regards both Fu and Yi Feng as landmarks in the
development of his musical language: “They are the
first of their kind in China, exploring individualism
and the essence of Chinese music characteristics
while avoiding sentimental melodies then prevalent
in China.” The composer continues: “Fu in Chinese
refers to descriptive prose interspersed with verse. In
this piece, I tried to express some of the most basic
aesthetic feelings typical of Chinese classical poetry
and calligraphy, such as subtlety, free form, and
masterly strokes.”
Notice how poetry and calligraphy (decorative
or highly stylized writing) are combined in Ge’s
description of Fu—both the cultural object and the
string quartet. This invites the reader/listener to focus
on its content and meaning as well as its means of
production; or, viewed another way, to focus on
western notions of musical content (melody, harmony
and rhythm) along with timbre (the nature, quality,
even physicality of the musical sounds) and inflections
of individual notes, which are more dominant in
Chinese music.
Fu’s opening note is bent up and down by a half-step (or minor second), the smallest interval
in traditional western music. (It is also the most
prominent interval in 20th-century modernist and
avant-garde western classical music, a connection
that Ge exploits in his own music.) But this small
gesture also generates much of the musical content
of the quartet, as various episodes (perhaps analogous
to verses in poetry) build up and break off, returning
to this primal sound. In the opening episode, the half
steps open up to other notes until the four voices form
western-style harmonies. In another episode later in
the work, the half-step motive appears in the highest
range of the four instruments, becoming an almost
neurotic melody in the violin.
Unorthodox means of tone production dominate Fu, although to a lesser extent than with Yi Feng. (For
instance, the instruments are conventionally tuned.)
There are snap pizzicati (plucking the string with
such force that it rebounds against the fingerboard);
harmonics (producing high-pitched “glassy” sounds
from the vibrating string); glissandi (sliding up and
down along the string); tremolos (both normal and
with great pressure on the bow producing a “scrubby”
sound); and various combinations of these techniques
resulting in some unearthly but always very musical
sounds. There is also throughout the work an
alternation between unmeasured rhythmless passages
and more regular patterned music. The metrical
aspects of poetry may be part of the inspiration behind
the two march-like episodes that gradually form,
accelerate and break off suddenly, near the end of
each half of the work. After the second such episode,
a subdued coda ends the work with, yet again, the
recurring half-step. Some of the same sounds from
Fu open Angel Suite—String Quartet No. 4 (1998).
However, they go in a very different direction, for this
is a very different piece. The composer writes: “of
all my works, this piece is the closest to the Western
classical music tradition, and it offers a contrast to
my other music…The title comes from my interest
in Christianity, although I am not a Christian myself.
For many years, the religion was forbidden in China…In this work, I try to express my curiosity in, and
observation of, various aspects of Christianity. The
titles of the movements refer to the subjects that I
wanted to represent musically. For instance, in the
first movement, the harmonic glissando represents
a cherub; the second movement focuses on dance
rhythm, which comes from the persistent bass notes
on the cello. The beginning motif on violin gradually
develops into a full dance. In the prayer movement,
I use contrasting consonant and dissonant chords to
draw out feelings of purity and sincerity in praying. In
the middle section, I also use the beginning few notes
from Schubert’s Ave Maria. For the last movement I
chose to write a march, as I always imagine an angel
is young and vibrant.”
Interestingly, the minor second plays a prominent
role in the second, third and fourth movements, but
here it grows out of (and into) western chromaticism;
Ge’s idea of heaven includes gorgeous late-romantic
harmonies. (In a possible subconscious homage, the
second half of the first movement and the second
movement’s repeated cello notes contain audible
reminiscences of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht.) The
closing march contains echoes of Shostakovich, and
the never-resolving augmented triad-based harmonies
move upwards as the melodic material moves
downwards, presumably because angels can move in
all directions at once!
Fall of Baghdad—String Quartet No. 5, from
2007, is an explicit homage to George Crumb’s
Vietnam-era (1970) Black Angels for Electric String
Quartet. Crumb’s work was not written as an explicit
anti-war protest, but has come to be associated with
“surrounding things (psychological and emotional)”
that were in the air at the time. Ge, on the other hand,
decided to “compose a string quartet that could,
on the one hand, pay tribute to Crumb and, on the
other hand, record my musical thoughts provoked by
the [Iraq] war.” Like the Crumb, it is in three large
sections divided into thirteen shorter ones; and like
the Crumb, it opens with hair-raising squeals which in
Ge’s piece are produced by applying pressure on the
strings behind the bridge to create a scraping sound of
indefinite pitch.
The Crumb work enacts a metaphysical drama
of good and evil. Ge’s quartet is much more down-to-earth—as his subtitle puts it, a living hell. Here
extended techniques are neither cultural artifacts (as
in the first quartet) or evocations of incorporeal beings
(as in the fourth quartet) but rather embodied sounds
of destruction and misery. (For musical and emotional
contrast, light percussive effects are used in the middle
section, ‘Music from Heaven,’ which is a different
heaven than in Angel Suite.) Microtonal inflections
here evoke Arabic music, connected (by the Silk
Road) to similar gestures in Chinese music. Other
unorthodox techniques used in this work include,
in the composer’s description, “using glissandi and
distorted sound to create the ‘hellish’ effects; playing
col legno (striking the strings with the [wooden part of
the] bow) both in front of and behind the bridge for the
Caliph’s drum and using extreme high notes on low
strings for ‘moaning’ sounds.”
The final movement, ‘Desolation,’ builds to a
climax over its first three sections, from traditional
western dissonance to sobbing and heaving sighs
suggested by the cello’s phrasing and breathy timbre
in its low register, to the moaning described above,
and finally to “keening” (a lamentation or dirge for
the dead uttered in a loud wailing voice) with the
most difficult sounds in the entire quartet. It seems to
fade out, but instead it returns more and more slowly,
finally surrendering to hopeless despair.
Although these three quartets span Ge’s creative
career to date, they do not encompass the full range of
his musical voice. In addition to Yi Feng, several of
his larger-scale works have been recorded: two more
conventional orchestral pieces, Chinese Rhapsody (1992) and Six Pentatonic Tunes (2005) and a Piano
Concerto, Wu (1986) on BIS SACD-1509; and Four Studies of Peking Opera (2003, rev. 2006) for
prepared piano and string quartet and Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, a melodrama for voice self-accompanied by a
toy ensemble, on the New Albion label NA-134 along
with Yi Feng.
© 2008 Eric J. Bruskint