Programme notes – Shimmering Interference

Béla Bartók: Divertimento for strings

Béla Bartók composed his Divertimento for strings in August 1939, a time when clouds of war gathered over Europe. The 58-year-old was arguably at the pinnacle of his career. He was composing in multiple genres, touring internationally as a pianist, and led a research team in Budapest to collect and categorise Hungarian folk melodies.

The Divertimento was requested by Paul Sacher, conductor of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, who gave Bartók the use of his own Swiss chalet while he worked on the composition. Bartók was a lifelong lover of nature, and the summer retreat in the Alpine countryside must have been congenial, as he completed the score in only 15 days.

By titling the work Divertimento, Bartók deliberately evokes the past. The word is Italian for ‘diversion’, and in the 1700s it was used by composers such as Mozart and Haydn for music that aimed to be entertaining. His score also draws on a characteristic of the equally antiquated Concerto Grosso form, by putting groups of soloists into dialogue with the full orchestra.

But this ‘old’ music is shot through with modern colour. The first movement is composed with playfully irregular rhythmic groups, rather like the wonky features of a Picasso portrait. There is a considerable switch in mood for the slow second movement – quietly foreboding with occasional agitated outbursts, it may well reflect Bartók’s anxiety about imminent war. The frenetic final movement is laced with the flavours of Hungarian folk music – which Bartók had studied for decades – including a violin solo in the ‘gypsy’ style.

Two weeks after he completed the Divertimento, Germany invaded Poland. Bartók had strong anti-fascist sympathies, and by the time the work was premiered in June 1940, he was preparing to leave Europe. In October, he and his wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, travelled to Lisbon and boarded a ship for New York. Sadly, this composer who had given so much to Hungarian national life would sadly never see his homeland again – he remained in America until his death in 1945.

John Adams: Shaker Loops

John Adams is one of the world’s most performed living composers, and Shaker Loops is among his most popular works. While teaching at San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the 1970s, he became interested in the American minimalism movement. Pioneered by composers such as Steve Reich, minimalist music is known for its use of hypnotically repetitive looping patterns.

Adams was especially interested in natural wave forms, and how minimalist techniques might be applied to them. Initially, he explored this idea by composing a string quartet called Wavemaker. It was an ill-fated start. Not only did the piece prove unsatisfactory, but on the morning of its premiere Adams stepped on a bee’s nest while walking his dog, and was hospitalised by a reaction to the stings.

Over the next few months Adams recomposed the work, adding three more string parts to make it a septet, and renaming it Shaker Loops. The result was, in his own words, ‘an emphatically better piece’, and he later made the string orchestra arrangement that we’ll hear tonight.

‘Shaker’ has a double meaning. To ‘shake’ is a string player’s technique of moving the bow rapidly back and forth, instead of one smooth stroke, which gives each note an energetic tremor. But it also refers to the Shakers, or the United Society of Believers. Adams had grown up near a defunct colony of this religious sect, and stories of their ecstatic, ‘shaking’ forms of worship were on his mind while composing the score.

Despite the change in title, the notion of waves rising and falling is still useful for understanding this music. It’s written in four continuous parts. At first, looping patterns are introduced by different instruments, gradually layered on top of each other. While changes are subtle and incremental, the near-constant bow-shaking creates a sense of fluid motion. Part 2 is a tranquil episode, featuring gentle pitch-sliding effects, before the music gathers pace again in Part 3, steadily accelerating to a furious climax. If this is the crest of a great wave, then Part 4 resembles a series of ripples receding in its wake. The energy slowly dissipates, until at last the shaking stops.

Programme notes by Simon Brackenborough