Arditti Quartet Deftly Turns Carter’s Thoughts Into Deed

Elliott Carter’s recent String Quartet No. 5 is a marvel.

For some years now, the American composer, who turns 90 in December, has been modeling his very brainy music on the brain itself. In the brief notes he supplied for the score, completed three years ago for the Arditti String Quartet, Carter notes that, in the real world, music is made in a fashion similar to the way brain makes thoughts.

Chamber musicians in rehearsal, for instance, work in a fragmented fashion. They play a snippet, stop, discuss, argue, play a bit more, stop again. This pattern, Carter writes, “is so similar to our inner experience of forming, ordering, focusing and bringing to fruition and then dismissing our feelings and ideas.”

You can’t pin down your mind, hard though you may try, and Carter’s quartet--given its first local performance by the Arditti on Monday at the Leo S. Bing Theater of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--penetrates the miraculous nature of this seemingly chaotic thought process.

More interesting still is that in a string quartet, Carter is concerned not with one brain but with four. It is Carter’s intention to demonstrate how, in an ideally functioning society, our different fragmented thoughts can interact, making it possible to live harmoniously in a fluid world. We needn’t agree, but we cooperate.

The quartet is, by Carter’s standards, lean. In an introduction and interludes, each player independently explores private thoughts--a pair of sharply attacked chords in the first violin and a leaping phrase in the cello are early examples. The six brief and connected movements, on the other hand, are each a single kind of music that is expressed slightly differently by each player simultaneously. If they are all scurrying, each scurries at his own pace and rhythms. If they are all playing shimmering, ghostly harmonics, each again breathes individually. The result is like a living organism, with different cells performing individual functions but making a whole.

That this quartet is the work of a composer who has reached an age at which most minds have lost their agility will surely go down as one of the wonders of our century’s music. Nor has Carter slowed down since. He has made large orchestral masterpieces. He has a new piano quintet for the Arditti and pianist Ursula Oppens for later this year. And, wonder of wonders, Carter is currently well along with the composition of his first opera.

Another marvel of this amazing Monday Evening Concert was the Arditti itself, which was formed in Britain a quarter century ago. It is a quartet that plays the most difficult music ever written (it has works in its extensive repertory no other ensemble dares touch) with consummate skill. Yet the quartet has quietly managed to incorporate a new violist. Dov Scheindlin joined violinists Irvine Arditti and Graeme Jennings and cellist Rohan de Saram in January. Yet the playing was as disciplined and powerful sounding as ever. I’ve never heard a string quartet produce such a tone in this institutional auditorium.

The rest of the program included the String Quartet No. 3 by Japanese composer Akira Nishimura and two recent quartets by composers working in California--”Ariadne’s Thread” by Roger Reynolds (who is at UC San Diego) and String Quartet No. 3 by British composer Jonathan Harvey (who is at Stanford).

Each of these works explores the sonic possibilities of the string quartet in different ways. Nishimura’s quartet, subtitled “Avian,” makes extraordinary squawking noises. The composer tells us he is after the bird sounds as signals from the dead. He succeeds for a while but eventually goes into overkill.

Harvey is more subtle. He writes a ghostly insubstantial music, with ethereal fragments that seem to be just at the point of materializing but never do. This really does sound like music from another world, and a very haunting one.

Reynolds’ quartet, which also uses electronic sound processing, is more substantial. He takes his inspiration from the physicality of lines of visual artists and from myth. He uses strong gestures full of rich content and then goes inside them. It sounds like late Beethoven: It doesn’t go into visionary Beethovenian outer space but instead goes deeply into the sound world of a phrase and doesn’t let go. It is strong, gripping music.