Images from a Closed Ward (2010)

Program Note

Program Note by Aaron Grad

Music of urgency and fearlessness, Michael Hersch’s work often navigates what can be difficult, at times painful, realms of loss and psychological instability. His string quartet, Images from a Closed Ward, is no exception. It has in its origins an encounter in Rome in 2000. The American artist Michael Mazur (1935-2009) had created a series of etchings to accompany Robert Pinskyʼs new translation of Danteʼs Inferno, and Mazurʼs works were on display at the American Academy in Rome while the then 29-year-old Hersch was there as a Rome Prize Fellow. During their time in the Eternal City, Hersch and Mazur seemed to recognize each other as kindred spirits. Hersch later wrote, “Although we worked in very different mediums, I often felt that Mazur understood what I was doing better than most.”

In 2003, Mazur provided artwork and commentary for Herschʼs first CD release, a collection of his chamber music performed by the String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic. In describing the young composerʼs style, Mazur noted, “I am struck by what might constitute an analogy with painting and with my own work in particular. There is, of course, the overwhelming sense of ʻsadness,ʼ which is better than ʻdoom.ʼ In fact, the ʻabyssʼ in its finality is easy to portray: a rich black says it all ... Dante looked into the abyss but primarily found sadness there. Sadness is a much more complicated and, therefore, interesting human condition.”

Mazur began to make his name in the 1960ʼs with two groups of etchings and lithographs, Closed Ward and Locked Ward. His subject matter involved a different form of confinement than Danteʼs rings of hell, but his vivid depictions of inmates in a Rhode Island mental asylum peered into an abyss all its own. Reviewing the etchings in 1964 for The New York Times, John Canaday wrote that Mazurʼs tormented subjects “have the terrible anonymity of individuals who cannot be reached, whose ugly physical presence is only the symptom of a tragic spiritual isolation.” It was these images that resonated with Hersch, and that helped to shape what would be his first string quartet since one composed during his student days almost twenty years earlier.

Once he had the work outlined in the summer of 2009, Hersch decided that he would contact the artist with whom he had not spoken in some time. Hersch recalls, “I was extremely excited at the prospect of seeing him again, and sharing the terrain of this new quartet. I felt that he would be surprised and pleased that something he had done had a hand in the shaping of this new work. The day before I planned to write him, I read of his death in a Sunday newspaper.”

An etching from Mazurʼs Closed Ward series hangs directly over Herschʼs writing desk in Pennsylvania. The etching depicts figures seated on a wide bench, back to back. In the foreground, a man is crumpled over with his hands nearly brushing his bare feet; his limbs are clearly outlined, but his head and torso are shaded to a deep, impenetrable black. The person next to him is a bundled sack of gray, the face distorted. Behind them are hooded figures and a ghostly partial image. There is a sooty, Dickensian objectivity to the scene, and yet the image is surreal and fragile, like a partially remembered dream.

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Images from a Closed Ward uses thirteen separate movements to convey a disquieting reality from multiple vantage points. Music, unlike art, requires time to unfold, and Hersch stretches out the unveiling with glacially slow tempos. The work never creeps higher than 66 beats per minute (like a resting heart rate) and it drops to as low as 30 beats per minute, obscuring any sense of pulse. Another distinctive trait of the quartet is how, apart from the climactic counterpoint of the 11th movement, the four players often work together in formations of massed sonorities. Although distinctly modern, these homophonic or quasi-homophonic textures hearken back to Renaissance and earlier church traditions, a connection reinforced by open harmonies that avoid stylized triads and tonal expectations. Herschʼs ancient, pre-tonal tendencies are most apparent in the pale chorale texture of the first movement, which functions as a prelude to the work as a whole.

The players maintain rhythmic lockstep throughout the second and fourth movements, issuing loud and ferocious bursts of chattering chords. These two aggressive sections bookend the haunting third movement, marked with an expressive indication of “longing; quiet, restrained grief.” The plucked cello provides a dirge-like foundation for the understated and strangely heroic melodies. The fifth movement brings the first taste of brittle counterpoint. The sixth movement also divides the ensemble, with two pairs sparring in opposing strata of slow and fast motion. The seventh movement looks back to the smooth chords of the first movement, but the sound takes on greater urgency and motion, propelled by a ceaseless cello line. The eighth movement reduces the workʼs violent streak to dry attacks, the players assaulting their strings with the wooden bow-sticks. The ninth movement returns to the aching purity of long-tones, with a performance instruction of “haunted; stricken.” The following movement, marked “frozen,” drops the quartet into total stasis, a cold darkness reinforced by the use of mutes.

From this point of maximal tension, the eleventh movement erupts with ferocious, unrelenting rage. Gone are the targeted jabs of the second and fourth movements, in which the instruments moved together. For more than ten minutes, the four voices engage in a battle of ripping, gouging, and stabbing counterpoint, followed by an arresting silence. The twelfth movement combines the worlds of the first and second movements, while the ending, thirteenth, section, reprises the wistful music of the third movement; the melody provides solace, but not relief, as it once again leaves the final phrase unresolved.

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Mazurʼs final thoughts about Herschʼs early chamber music seem to apply well to Images from a Closed Ward: “These compositions are filled sometimes with frightening sounds. They are unrelenting, nearly without hope. But no artwork can be without hope since it is in the very nature of creative work to be optimistic, if only in as much as we continue to work through everything but our own death.”

Aaron Grad has been Program Annotator for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra since 2005. He also contributes program notes to the New World Symphony, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Celebrity Series of Boston, Columbia Artists, and others. His concert reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, and PlaybillArts regularly publishes his feature articles and interviews online.