Article content continued

The quartet was an important landmark on the road to Schafer’s much-heralded notion of Soundscape—a type of music that attempts to fuse traditional notions of music with what might be called “noise;” or to put it another way: the sounds around us are made to be “musical.” Both in the way the string instruments are used, and even more in the treatment of rhythm, the piece deals in non-repetition, in irregular waves of rhythm lasting between six and 11 seconds—the non-period relationship of one wave to another—and in a sound world (soundscape?) that challenges the very basic ideas of how one listens to music.

For the average listener, this is all quite a stretch, even today. But with younger players, what is strange for (shall we say) experienced listeners, is not so strange for them. The members of the Rolston Quartet tucked into this music with relish, purpose, and conviction, delivering a compelling performance, in which imagination and freshly conceived ideas of sound were much to the fore. A bracing experience for some, but nonetheless rewarding for those able to engage the very idea of music in a new way. And it was no bad thing for a Canadian quartet to champion Canadian music, Schafer himself having written other equally interesting works for string quartet. One can only hope the Rolston Quartet will continue to explore this repertoire.

The remainder of the program consisted of “normal” works by Mozart and Schumann, even if neither work is very often played. The program opened with the A major string quartet from the famous set dedicated to Haydn. As music, it is clearly in Mozart’s familiar manner, but on a deeper level, it is quite unusual in its mixture of historical gestures and a certain kind of wandering more characteristic of music from a later period.