Covering the most fertile decades of the avant-garde movement in the United States, American String Quartets, 1950-1970 is a comprehensive survey of the most influential works in this concentrated genre. Broadly divided, these quartets represent either the full-flowering of post-
Webern serialism or the more esoteric, philosophical conceptions of the group associated with
John Cage. Several rely on tone rows and serial methods, notably the intensely organized quartets of
Stefan Wolpe,
Jacob Druckman, and
Lejaren Hiller's controlled experiment with quarter tones. The works of
Cage,
Earle Brown,
Christian Wolff, and
Morton Feldman are more freely derived, and their ideas range from the extreme pointillism of
Wolff's Summer to the proto-ambience of
Feldman's Structures. Somewhat outside the serial/intuitive dichotomy are
Leon Kirchner's String Quartet No. 3 and
George Crumb's Black Angels. Both are augmented with electronic sounds or additional instruments, and the coloristic possibilities of the quartet are expanded in these innovative pieces. The
Concord String Quartet made its debut with this recording, and it is wholly persuasive. Although its reading of Black Angels was arguably surpassed by the
Kronos Quartet, the rest of the performances may be considered definitive. The digital transfer of the analog tapes is clean, but the original VoxBox LPs may be preferred for their warmer sound.