Inward Movements: Searching for Selfhood in the Classical String Quartet
Three Wednesdays at 4 PM PT: May 20, May 27 & June 3
An online course exploring the emotional core of string quartets, the slow movements, with Dr. Paul Berry of Yale School of Music.
Between the dynamic opening movements of Classical string quartets and the courtly dances and lighter finales with which they closed lay the emotional core of the genre: the slow movement. Here, unencumbered by goal-directed action or aristocratic convention, composers fashioned delicately poised musical landscapes that encouraged introspection from performers and listeners alike.
The three lectures in this series explore these landscapes and the nuanced senses of personhood they created. We begin amid the endlessly inventive variety of Haydn’s slow movements and their myriad allusions to the world beyond the notes: the church, the theatre, the outdoors and its creatures, the interpersonal dynamics among string players. In the second lecture, we plumb the emotional depths of Mozart’s mature slow movements, with a focus on the Andante cantabile from the “Dissonance” Quartet, K. 465, and its dual capacity to confront and to console. Finally, we end with slow movements from Beethoven’s late quartets, especially the Cavatina from Op. 130 and the Heiliger Dankgesang from Op. 132, in which the composer’s sense of self, imagined in the act of performance, recalls to us our own selfhood and offers transformation.
WED, 5/20 at 4 PM PT | Haydn
WED, 5/27 at 4 PM PT | Mozart
WED, 6/3 at 4 PM PT | Beethoven
All enrolled students will have access to all the recordings until two weeks after the final session. Each class will last a little over an hour.
Historian Dr. Paul Berry received his BA in humanities and music from Yale College (2000) and his PhD in musicology from the Yale Department of Music (2007). His scholarly work focuses on compositional process and interpersonal communication in the chamber music and songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and other composers and performers of the nineteenth century.
Online Course