Holiday Listening Part 3 - Linda Catlin Smith's 6th String Quartet

The Sheffield-based record label Another Timbre has now released six CDs of music by Linda Catlin Smith. The most recent, Flowers Of Emptiness, features eight chamber works, including her superb 6th quartet, an endlessly fascinating piece I first heard on holiday. Since then, I've come back to it many times...

Linda Catlin Smith - String Quartet No.6 - Apartment House (Mira Benjamin, Chihiro Ono (violin); Bridget Carey (viola); Anton Lukoszevieze (cello)) (Another Timbre)

(There is a performance by the Mivos Quartet here, although I would urge you to get hold of the Apartment House record. Purchase details and a decent extract here).

On first listen, I was reminded of favourite viol consorts, by the likes of Lawes and Purcell. This was partly down to the starkly beautiful vibratoless string sound, and partly down to the busy texture, that can suggest more than four players at times. In an interview on the Another Timbre website, Smith talks about creating a "tangled, woven polyphony" in this quartet, adding "I wanted to try to get lost in the polyphonic thickets." These thickets are thorny in places; while this piece is harmonically beautiful, it is not a warm bath of consonance. Tension comes from tightly packed lines, fighting for the same space.

This is a music of small surprises, and subtle, easily missed change. With ears primed for micro dramas, we may detect a slight shift in tone colour, or spot one note moving in a chord. Sometimes, the texture briefly thins, and there is a bout of rhythmic unison, or a recurring pulsing gesture.  As the piece goes on, there's a definite sense of expanding and developing, but it's hard to pin down. Longer lines emerge - sometimes projected by two instruments in unison - and the music becomes more continuous.

In the first part of the work, there are significant moments of silence. Smith has suggested that "maybe I'm like a still life painter, looking at the same objects again and again." This idea comes to life in the opening section, where the listener is invited to compare what comes before and after each silence, almost like a musical spot the difference. Smith's enthusiasm for Japanese gagaku also feels relevant here: "the sense of time in that music is very slow and you feel you have all the room you need to hear everything that's going on, and it requires a kind of slowing yourself down."(1) I've enjoyed adjusting to the gagaku-like underlying slowness of the quartet, although having the space to step into this music doesn't necessarily make it any easier to untangle. Smith embraces this unknowable quality: "I like things that are slightly obscure, that you can't quite make out, but I also like the idea of something that has multiplicity of meanings."(1)

The final section of the piece is perhaps the easiest to grasp. It's certainly magical. From around 15 minutes onwards, the music becomes more effortful, almost dragging itself along. Gradually, it seems to shake off the extra weight, begins to rise, and just keeps going, untethered from the earth. Sometimes, I would sit with this ending for a minute or two, reflecting. More often, my immediate response was to go straight back to the beginning, for another 20 minutes with this special piece of music.

I've dwelt on the 6th quartet, the longest piece on the disc, but it's worth saying that the rest of the music is also excellent (and superbly played). In fact, the record makes an ideal introduction to Smith's work, with pieces from across her career (1986-2024). If you're not familiar with Another Timbre, do investigate. Simon Reynell has put together an impressive range of over 200 releases, several of which have become great favourites of mine. If you're looking for a place to start, I can recommend John Lely's Meander Selection, Oliver Leith's Me Hollywood, John Tilbury playing Terry Riley, ffansïon by Angharad Davies and Tisha Mukarji, James Weeks' Gombert arrangements, and Pauline Oliveros' Sound Pieces. All superb. If you want more Linda Catlin Smith, try the marvellous Dirt Road, a series of violin and percussion duets.

(1) From an interview in Tempo, Vol. 71, No. 280, pp. 8-20