Barbara Pentland, Quintet for Piano & Strings (1983) - Part 2 of 2

Описание: Barbara Pentland's preferred brand of modernism drew on the textures and organizational principles of the Webern school but was suffused with a lyricism that was expressly individual. In the 1960s and 1970s, Pentland continued her explorations investigating such then current trends as microtones, 'found' texts, directed improvisation, and tape. Pentland continued to refine and 'season.' She incorporated quarter-tone inflections and a procedure for continuity she called 'aleatory zones' (controlled-chance sections somewhat on the model of Lutoslawski). These devices are featured notably in the String Quartet No. 3, 4, and 5, in Mutations, and in Tellus. In Canadian terms she was analogous to Elisabeth Lutyens in the United Kingdom or Ruth Crawford Seeger in the United States; she shared their concerns not just about the struggle for the new, but the particular problems of a finding a place as a woman in the overwhelmingly male milieu of the international avant garde.

In 1982 Pentland said she treats 12-tone serialism 'as a governing principle' rather than a 'straitjacket.' Consistently with this, the opening passages of a later work such as the String Quartet No. 4 or Tellus reveal a clear 12-tone set but subsequent passages draw on this and its various transformations only in a free and selective fashion. The wide spectrum of instrumental effects in both these works, including ornamental quarter-tones, is striking. Their transparent, almost pointillistic, detail is a carry-over from her studies of Webern. In both, there are interesting extra-musical aspects as well. Unusually, Pentland's prefatory note in the score of the Quartet suggests particular associations: the work 'starts in a mood of quiet mystery - like dawn or life,' and attention is drawn to 'suggestion[s] of bird sound' and 'sounds of nature.'

Aware that her work may have seemed austere, Pentland neither revised nor regretted it. She once remarked (Northern Review, 1950) that "all audiences are more intelligent than they are brought up to be by the musicians who are responsible."

Pentland was fully at home with the abstract (or 'absolute') prototypes of Western music. In their biography of Pentland, Eastman and McGee list close to 100 instrumental pieces written by her 1930-80; of these approximately 60 per cent have classical genre-titles (Symphony, Ricercar) - a trait evidenced as late as the Canticum, Burlesca, and Finale for piano (1987). Non-classical titles are often equally abstract (Interplay, Phases), and evocative titles usually suggest a general mood or tone-painting quality (Vista, Arctica, Tides), short of any out-and-out impressionistic or programmatic approach. Overt extra-musical connections in her work exist mainly in incidental, dramatic, and vocal pieces. Her musical comments deal with some of the large moral issues of the age: war in general and the Vietnam War in particular (News); feminism (Disasters of the Sun); the rape of the environment (Tellus, Ice Age).