I start this piece of writing with a digression (my students will tell you that I am very good at those).
The graduation ceremonies at The Royal Academy of Music are normally held in the Marylebone church. We often have rather too many people for the venue, resulting in a cheerful chaos that is part and parcel of the exuberance of the event. Of course, in 2020 the usual July ceremony was cancelled, and it was not until July 2021 that we were permitted even to think of holding any in-person celebration of two years’ worth of student achievements. The result was five socially-distanced ceremonies held in the Freemason’s Hall in Holborn, all of them made rather surreal by the restrictions enforced upon us. Nevertheless, with the resilience of youth, our students turned up in their best dresses and suits, donned robes with variously coloured hoods, and tossed mortar boards into the air. Several speeches were made – including one from the president of the Students Union, that was changed for the final two ceremonies to take into account the result of the Euro Cup final – and, more to the point for this blog post, honours were conferred on past illustrious students. One of these was Eleanor Alberga.
I must confess to being rather starstruck. I approached her to thank her for the hours of pleasure and insight her music has afforded me, and she was gracious in the face of my slight incoherence. She was also extremely down-to-earth and practical about the act of composition. I had noticed this already in her 2019 interview at King’s Place, where she was forthright about the lack of role models for her. I loved the point at which the interviewer asked her about setbacks and disappointments, and Alberga is clear and instantaneous in her reply. It is obvious that she knows what she is supposed to say, that these setbacks have made her stronger and more determined, but she won’t. Setbacks are just part of life, she says, part of the highs and lows you have to deal with it; they don’t necessarily make you stronger, they’re not a blessing in disguise. She doesn’t quite say it, but the implicit message is, “We just have to get on with it.” And yet this message is delivered with a gentle optimism that makes it seem a worthwhile goal rather than simply being, and it is this underlying positivity that I hear in her music – rather in the same vein as Louise Talma’s “tonic of optimism”.
The first Alberga piece with which I became acquainted was the suite of Dancing With The Shadow. Since then, I have actively sought out her music, including playing a few of the piano works for myself, and listening to Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs with my son, in Alberga’s suitably freaky setting of Roald Dahl’s version. Then I encountered this recording of her three (so far) string quartets.
I have a confession to make. As a pianist, I have struggled to enjoy string quartets. Rather stereotypically, I have always felt that I am peering through a velvet curtain that I have not been able to raise sufficiently to hear, with any clarity, what is being played on the other side.
Realising that this inadequacy is entirely mine – not least as the consequence of a bizarre mix of childhood/teen listening that is the subject of an entirely different post – I have sat through many hours of Haydn, Beethoven, Britten, Shostakovich. I noticed the dead-white-male leanings of my listening and tried Beach, Gubaidulina, Mayer, Chen Yi. Finally, my excursions began to pay off. It was Florence Price’s 5 Songs in Counterpoint that first ripped slashes of light in the curtain of my listening; but it is this album of Alberga’s three quartets that has entirely torn the velvet from its cushioning influence, and displayed the genre to me in a blaze of excitement and recognition. Finally, I understood the joy of listening to these four instruments explore, harangue, heed, ignore, dialogue. I didn’t even notice these were string quartets, and yet I did.
The first quartet (2003), commissioned and premiered by the Maggini Quartet, is an outcome of Alberga’s attendance at a lecture on physics:
“[W]hat grabbed me was the realization that all matter — including our physical bodies — is made of the same stuff: star dust. So the first movement might be called ‘a fugue without a subject,’ as particles of this stardust swirl around each other, go their separate ways, collide, or merge. The second movement might be described as ‘stargazing from outer space,’ while the finale re-establishes gravity and earthbound energy.”
It is easy to hear these sparks, especially in the first movement. The instruments ricochet off each other, without the listener ever losing the sense of a tightly structured musical edifice beneath. Even the expressive marking at the beginning, Détaché et Martellato e Zehr Lebhaft und Swing it Man, betrays the balance being offered between playfulness and control. Again, I am reminded of the way in which Alberga pays tribute to the creative contribution of performers: “I quite enjoy the fact that different performers take my music and can find something else in it than I had seen, even, or take it in a slightly different direction. I enjoy that – as long as it’s not completely off the scale.” The work also feels underwritten by the influence of the dance world Alberga has so much been part of for most of her musical life (one of her “sparks”, as she terms it).
The second quartet is a single movement work, but within this lies the traditional forms of a multi-movement quartet, each section segueing into the next without pause.In her accompanying notes to the recording, Alberga draws attention to the importance of the first few seconds of the piece, which provides the motive from which the remainder of the work is fashioned: “this short motive is treated to all manner of variation – inversions, expansions, and so on – and is present in some form throughout the 15 minutes of the piece.” Alberga certainly has an understanding of how narrative structures make us listen afresh to repetition; material is never the same for performer and listener alike, and this work is a testament to the art of this kind of listening.
The third quartet is in four movements with far more sedate markings - Moderato, Scherzo, Adagio and Allegro. Despite this apparent traditionalism, however, Alberga adds her own unique take on structure, describing the whole work as as evolving from a central note, D, that then returns to add structure to the piece. Motives from different movements appear in others, but it is not until the finale that their full importance is understood. Tonality and serialism combine throughout: after commenting on her use of twelve-tone techniques, Alberga continues, “This third movement ends with C major under arpeggiated chords. The Maggini quartet described it as like the play of sunlight on water.” It's a wonderful nod to nature as another of her “sparks”.
It has been a revelation to listen to this recording; not only because I have breached the wall between me and the string quartet as a genre, but also because I found my own “spark” here. As Alberga says:
“Also very important to me is the inner world, my inner world of imagination, and of spirit, whatever that means. But the something has to touch on that, really. […] Something clicks, and I feel “yes, this is the idea I want to go with.”