Word: quartets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Meat & Poison. Gerhard has just completed a string quartet to add to the thick sheaf of compositions that has followed the First Symphony-another symphony, a concerto for harpsichord, strings and percussion, and a new work called Concert for Eight, which is scored for an accordion and seven instruments "masked" to produce odd sounds. He is totally unconcerned about the cool public reception his works usually find. When a listener cried "Rubbish!" at the close of a Gerhard concert in England two years ago, Gerhard blithely said: "One man's meat is another man's poison...
Mannered Genius. But the error had been pressed upon him. Convinced that Lewis is Vivaldi's nephew, his cult has urged him into thinner and thinner air since he appeared with his three fellow ascetics in the first Modern Jazz Quartet performances ten years ago. In pursuit of something that sounded agreeably like jazz from the 16th century, Lewis soon became one of the half-dozen important jazz composers, writing such a mannered form of music that his compositions set a whole new tone...
...such titles as In a Crowd; Valeria; Wintertale, a trip of the tongue that describes only sketchy excerpts from a film score. Whatever he touched turned out so well that he soon found himself a prisoner of his own achievements. "I hate to sound immodest," he said, "but the quartet has reached a standard so high that I don't see what anyone else can do with small-ensemble jazz...
Lewis' new interest is only in the greater variety of sounds and colors he can achieve with an orchestra; he has no intention of making jazz truly symphonic. "The quartet is like black and white," he says; "the orchestra is all the colors. I want this orchestra to be a proof to the world that there are other things in this country-things you can't touch, feel or spend." The only fault in such high ambitions lies in the notion that to make something bigger or broader is always to make it better...
...hedonist of 19,'' "redheaded sculptress,'' "girl physiotherapist," "former Harvard lecturer turned tycoon in ladies' underwear.'' Frequently, Brooks offers an acid explanation of the owner's reasons for selling: "One of the big pots in chamber music, leader of a famous quartet, taking up suburban residence with former girl viola pupil, sacrifices exciting newly built mews residence...