The Catalyst Quartet: Karla Donehew Perez and Abi Fayette, violins; Paul Latakia, viola; Karlos Rodriguez, cello
Linde Center for Music and Learning, Friday, Nov. 14, 2025
Program:
John Adams, Fellow Traveler
Max Richter, On the Nature of Daylight
Philip Glass, String Quartet no. 3, Mishima
Bernard Herrmann, Echoes for string quartet
Erich Wolfgang Korngold, String Quartet NO. 2 in E-flat, Op. 26
Thinking about film music can be an exercise of imagination. There are many angles to consider: You can watch a scene with the sound off (and subtitles on) and imagine what the music might sound like; you can listen to part of a score and imagine what the scene it accompanies might be; you can also listen to a piece of non-movie music and design your own movie to go with it; or you can ask yourself, while watching, “Why did the director insert music here and remove it there?” You can notice when the source of the music is visible on the screen or is an integral part of the story (that is called “diegetic music” by film critics) or when it is provided as background (“non-diegetic”). A fundamental question all this raises is: Does the music follow the film’s emotional arc or actually create it? Aaron Copland, who composed scores for six Hollywood films in the 1940s (and won one Academy Award), found that the background music could completely determine an audience’s response to an actor’s facial expression or to an entire scene (see his autobiographical video here:
The relationship between 20th-century classical composition and film music is complex. Most film composers received a thorough classical training, and in the era of big Hollywood studio orchestras (the 1930s to the ’50s with subsequent revivals), their scoring techniques reflected the state of the art as exemplified by such German/Austrian composers as Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. It is no accident that many of them were expatriates, fleeing from the Russian Revolution, European wars, or the Nazis and looking to establish careers in America. Clearly there was lots of work creating movie soundtracks, especially with the advent of the sound film (around 1930).
The unique program assembled by the Catalyst Quartet, titled “Cinematic Refuge,” focused on the idea that films provide an escape from everyday life while offering intense engagement with emotional experiences. Of the five compositions represented, only one derived from an actual film: Philip Glass’s score to the 1984 film “Mishima,” reworked into the form of a string quartet in six movements based on six episodes from the film. All the other works were by composers who have been active as film composers to varying degrees, and each work possessed an explicit or implicit subtext that pointed to the music’s emotive and/or narrative function. While Glass’ was the major work on the first part of the program, shorter works by John Adams and Max Richter shared its minimalist pedigree and filled out the picture of minimalism’s potential range of expression, while revealing the individual predilections of their composers.
Adams (the least active film composer of the group) contributed “Fellow Traveler” (2007) as a birthday gift to his theatrical collaborator, director Peter Sellers. The title’s double meaning points to the collegiality of composer and director who shared numerous theatrical projects (operas and oratorios), but also hinted at an ironic political subtext, the term having been used during the Red Scare of the 1950s as a term for supposed communist sympathizers. Intended as a private work, it was not clear (although it may have been to the recipient) how any of this was musically conveyed: The brief work possessed the kind of hyperactive, rhythmically attractive energy typical of much of this composer’s work. Its opening plunged immediately into a driving pulsation that almost seemed lifted from Steve Reich’s minimalist classic, “Different Trains” (1988), perhaps in a reference to “traveling.” As an opener, it provided plenty of fodder to arouse the imagination of the audience.
It was followed by a beautiful meditative work by Max Richter, a prolific composer of film and video soundtracks who is best known for his “recomposing” of Vivaldi’s “Seasons.” It was described as a response to the U.S.’s entry into the Iraq war, but nothing in the music suggested any related content. If anything, it was an elegy of regret and a hope for peace. Its simplicity included adhering to the material of a single scale throughout and a simple but atmospheric textural strategy. It was perhaps the complete absence of tension which opened it up to extra-musical interpretation, but again it was left for each listener to fill that opening for themselves.
I may be in a minority, but sitting and listening to Philip Glass’ “absolute” music has never appealed to me. His style relies on using familiar harmonies in non-functional cycles of repetition and block-like shifts that promote a certain quasi-trance state of listening (it may actually generate alpha waves in some people’s brains) that fails to suggest any specific image other than a scenario of fatalism. Perhaps that is the reason why it is so sought after and often powerfully successful as film music. Wikipedia lists 56 film scores to his credit. Many are documentaries, horror films, or suspense stories; few are comedies. My favorite is Errol Morris’ documentary about Robert McNamara and Vietnam, “The Fog of War.” There, the known outcome weighs heavily and fatalistically on every scene to varying degrees, and the appropriateness of the music imparts a tragic sensibility to each sequence. A similar impact occurs in “Mishima” (1984), from which his Quartet no. 3 is drawn. In the film, Glass uses expanded instrumental resources including important percussion parts to energize and connect the music to the intensity of the protagonist’s unique life journey, in which tragedy, artistry, and fanaticism play equal roles. The contrasts of mood implicit in the six scenes from which the movements are drawn were not apparent in the quartet version, and, losing count, I was surprised when it ended. It is a tribute to the performers that they were able to stay oriented—this music takes tremendous concentration, if only keeping count to the number of times a figure is repeated. But textural, harmonic, and rhythmic gears shifted smoothly throughout.
The second, post-intermission part of the program offered a great contrast: works by two iconic film composers who represent the best of two generations of film scoring. Though born only 14 years apart, these composers’ styles offer striking contrasts completely parallel to the kinds of films on which they worked. Bernard Herrmann’s career began with “Citizen Kane” (1940), and his second, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1940), won the Oscar for best score. Herrmann was a modernist, an early advocate for the music of Charles Ives, and a composer whose idiom lent itself to suggesting unusual psychological states, which made him the perfect collaborator for Alfred Hitchcock and similarly inclined directors of the 1950s and ’60s such as Martin Scorcese, Brian De Palma, and François Truffaut. His string quartet “Echoes” (1965) has the same eerie atmosphere as his scores to “Vertigo” and “Psycho,” in which the persona of the music (i.e., the subject of its moods and feelings) seems disembodied and removed from day-to-day physical reality—in other words, something like a ghost. The “echoes” seem to be the traces of sounds generated in a world no longer present. Its form is a prelude and epilogue with nine short sections in between, including waltz, elegy, nocturne, habanera (Spanish dance), two scherzos (one marked “macabre”), pastorale, and allegro. They are played continuously, linked by a refrain of the rocking figure call-and-echo of the prelude which expands into the harmonically rich and poignant epilogue. The work contains an absorbing variety of moods and sonorities, unified by a common aura of wistfulness, with emphasis on the upper registers. As we know from the “Psycho” score, which was limited to the sounds of a string orchestra, Hermann was a master of string writing, including a wide spectrum of special effects. The waltz replaces om-pahs with light off beats in the violins above the viola melody. The adagio is like a mordant and unsentimental cousin of Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” The “macabre” scherzo lives up to its name with diabolical trills, bowing on the bridge of the instruments, and skittering figures and fragments. The most earthy section is the penultimate allegro, whose manic figures recall the chase music from “North by Northwest.” Apparently, Herrmann felt bitter about the fact that he devoted so much of his talent writing for films, which he believed to be a lesser art form, and so little to the composition of “absolute” works such as this. There is, however, a healthy list of works, few of which are in repertory, and gratitude is owing to the Catalyst Quartet for sharing “Echoes” and perhaps leading other performers to other works of this important composer.
Finally, the program worked backwards, chronologically, to Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who represents the classic days of Hollywood cinema with lush scores performed by those amazingly accomplished studio orchestras, whose members were often recruited from the best emigré musicians of the time. Korngold can be counted as a generation before Herrmann since he began his career as a publicly performed composer at the age of 11. Mahler declared the nine-year-old “a genius” when he heard his cantata “Gold,” in 1906. That would probably place him ahead of Mozart and Mendelssohn in the musical prodigy category. Thus, he had already absorbed the newest musical idioms of central Europe (primarily those of Wagner, Mahler, and Strauss) five years before Herrmann was born. His scores have the fingerprints of those composers all over them, but they are absorbed into a personal idiom that retained a sense of innocence, sweet lyricism, and playfulness well into Korngold’s maturity, along with a wide range of dramatic moods suitable to such films as “Captain Blood” or “The Seahawk.” (If I have to recommend a single film, it would be “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938) with its wonderful set of variations on the title theme “The Song of the Merry Men.”) His String Quartet no. 2 was composed before he departed Vienna for Hollywood, called there by theater director Max Rheinhardt to doctor Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” music for the 1935 movie version with Mickey Rooney. This represented the first of the 21 film scores that cemented his reputation with the public, perhaps a little too securely, for like Herrmann, Korngold viewed film scoring as a lucrative expedient during his forced exile in the United States while the Nazi’s held sway in Central Europe. Soon after the war, Korngold returned to Vienna, where he discovered that he could not easily recoup his career as a “serious” composer of concert music. Korngold’s skill composing music of vivid narrative implication derived from the aesthetic of Wagner, whose music carried the main burden of narrative in his operas, through Richard Strauss, who was able to accomplish amazing feats of illustrating human activities in his instrumental tone poems, even down to the mundane level of bathing the baby! Korngold honed these illustrative powers in the seven operas he composed, most predating his film scores and providing powerful preparation for creating soundtracks that elevated even the most mundane film narratives to the realm of high art, utilizing the full virtuosic resources of the post-Wagnerian symphony orchestra.
Korngold’s quartet begins with a lush harmonic texture and dynamic melodies that eluded easy identification with a single signature in the Catalyst’s spontaneous and flexible performance: The rhythms swoop and dive in a kind of ecstasy of motion. The mood resembles that of the opening scene of flirtation in Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier.” The players performed miracles of ensemble in holding together this volatile texture and maintaining the atmosphere of almost giddy joy. Korngold’s typical melodic sweetness holds sway throughout. The second movement, “Intermezzo,” sounded exactly like an operetta scene without words, but it was easy to imagine the heroine singing with an armful of flowers, backed up by a chorus of flower girls, perhaps even dancing. Korngold was steeped in the Viennese operetta idiom, as in his “Die stumme Serenade” written after his post-war return to Vienna. The trio section of this movement of the quartet anticipates the festive banquet scene of “Robin Hood” with hints of the immanent incursion of the Merry Men. The slow movement, Lento, is the most “abstract” section, with a texture of harmonics suggesting an otherworldly quality and causing the players some intonation difficulties. The finale was, for me, the capstone of the work. Marked “Waltz: Tempo di Valse,” it was a dance on steroids, reminding me of two other surreal 1920s evocations of the waltz, Ravel’s “La Valse” and Schoenberg’s “Tanzszene” from his Serenade Op. 24. Both push the waltz energy to the point of hysteria, but where Ravel’s subtext was the imminent destruction of European civilization in World War I and Schoenberg’s was transmuting the dynamism of the waltz into a post-tonal language, Korngold’s seemed to be pushing the pleasures of the physical and social energies of the music into a transcendent realm. It was manic, unhinged, expressionistic, and at the same time exhilerating—a way to cut loose without paying the price. The whole work provided a perfect opportunity for listeners to imagine their own movie.
