Stefan Wolpe, String Quartet 1969 i

Dont get backed into a reality that has fashioned your senses with too many realistic claims. When art promises you this sort of reality, this sort of prognostic security, drop it. Stefan Wolpe Certainly Wolpes String Quartet offers anything but prognostic security. Commissioned by the Julliard Quartet in 1947 but not completed until more than two decades later, the Quartet is cast in Wolpes preferred two-movement design. Characteristically, any sense of traditional motivic development is supplanted by the principle of adjacent opposites. Chordal gestures clash with linear ones, static with active, violent with languid, elongated with truncated. Although these gestures are far more familiar than Babbitts, their shocking juxtaposition makes them alien. Rather than aim for a classical continuum, in which dissimilar material is gradually introduced by meals of meticulous transitions, Wolpe sought a discontinuum the projection of adjacent opposites in which traditionally conceived opposites woul