“It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.”

– Johannes Brahms

Josquin des Prez, widely regarded one of the great Renaissance composers, eschewed the highly florid, melismatic lines of the preceding generation of composers, and strove to make the music accentuate the text so that it could be better heard and understood. “Mille regretz” (A thousand regrets) and ”El Grillo” (The cricket) are two of his secular songs. Joseph Haydn, with his Op. 20 quartets, began defining the nature of the string quartet as a genre, and making his mark in the development of the “sonata form.” Although Haydn created music of great variety and inventiveness in his Op. 20, No. 5 string quartet, he surprisingly uses only one theme in the first movement, and works within the rigor of a fugue in the last movement. Using techniques of the Minimalism movement, such as repeating patterns that shift ever so slightly, John Adams’s Alleged Dances are rhythmic pieces that are highly dynamic. Morton Feldman’s Structures (1951) is performed as quietly as possible and features a sparse, pointillistic texture and passages of quasi-ostinato writing. Even though his music is highly charged with Romantic era drama, Brahms composed in a “minimalist” manner in which everything was derived one way or another from the main motif.

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Works to be performed on the “Alleged Minimalism” program include:

Josquin des Prez, “Mille regretz” and “El Grillo”
Haydn, String Quartet Op. 20, No. 5
Adams, John’s Book of Alleged Dances
Feldman, Structures
Brahms, String Quartet Op. 51, No. 1

Program offered September through December, 2012.