Jones: String Quartet nr. 1 & nr. 2

The last few days I've been listening off the beaten path with some quartets by Welsh composer Daniel Jones. I didn't know him at all but spotted his name in a Musicweb review where his quartets were mentioned in the same breadth as Simpson's and Maconchy's. However, the Jones set is even more difficult to find than the latter two. A few years back there was a Chandos issue of the full set of 8 quartets, but that has disappeared from the catalogue (rare for Chandos) and I found it hard to locate a set. It was expensive to boot. But after having listened to the first two quartets, I'm certainly happy to have invested as the music is of a very high standard.

Jones (1912-1993) was a rather weird guy: an outsider, anti-establishment figure. Giles Easterbrook in his excellent booklet notes finds him 'quixotic and often cantankerous'. He was a modest, private person, who was almost diffident about 'being a composer'. It was a job as many others. But he aspired to a high level of artistry nevertheless, leading him to destroy a significant part of his work when his career was already fairly well advanced. Apart from his musical abilities he was also gifted in languages, which secured him a post as cryptographer and decoder of Russian, Rumanian and Japanese at Betchley Park during WWII.

This analytic, puzzle-oriented intellectual temperament characterises his music. Again Easterbrook: " The music of Daniel Jones is not about landscape and language; it is about thought. It often smiles and often charms and delights, but his agenda are always organization of material, structure and the integrity of thought." Technically he was somewhat of an innovator as he developed an idiosyncratic system to work with metrical complexity - "different, irregular time signatures juxtaposed in exactly repeating sequences to provide subtle variations of stress in a phrase or melody laid over (or through) them." At the end of his life he was even invited to come to the Donaueschingen festival to talk about his work (which he wasn't able to).

However, his work does not sound particularly innovatory. It's a very odd and difficult to pin down mix, in fact. The compositional rigour underlying the music is certainly clear from a first hearing. But there is lyricism too. There's a sobriety there that speaks of a highly personal and disciplined mind. This and some distinctive harmonic echoes (evoking a sense of space and otherwordliness) brought to mind the music of Edmund Rubbra (roughly a contemporary, 1901-1986). The mix of rigour, terseness and a steely kind of passion also remind me of Elisabeth Maconchy (1907-1994). Simpson is different. Whilst also an intellectualist, he seems to lean more towards a Scandinavian-oriented, clean and cool brand of heroism (with Nielsen as a leading example, of course). Jones, for all his earnestness, seems to me to be more lapidary and frivolous, indeed less concerned about striking the pose of the promethean composer. A final connection, maybe, is the music of Humphrey Searle. A pupil of Webern (similar to Hartmann) he assimilated something of the serial rigour in his otherwise full-blooded symphonies. So, there seems to be something distinctively British about Jones' work, but not in the provincial sense (of a Frank Bridge, for example) as at the same time it also aspires to some kind of universality.

Im going to quote Easterbrook's sympathetic notes again on the first two quartets:

"String Quartet nr. 1 stands in isolation from the others in the cycle, its cosmopolitan voice speaking of pre-war Europe and pre-war travels. It is perhaps the closest he came to a 'normal' 20th century quartet, tight but not claustrophobic, thematically cross-referenced without being obsessive. These are all Jones's hallmarks, but the personality of the composer stubbornly remains in the background. Not so the personality of the medium, which is masterfully exploited, the part-writing confident, bordering on bravura, melodically teasing, harmonically pungent, though not acrid, rhythmically inventive, texturally alive, and constantly resolving into satisfying, surprising cadences. Complex metres are used extensively in the outer movements, by implication in the second, and not at all in the third. With String Quartet nr. 2, and from then onwards, we are in altogether different regions of the imagination. In the decade that separated the first two quartets there is a fundamental change. Its importance is intellectual, not stylistic, though the change in language is clearly noticeable. Rather it reflects an altered attitude to the act of composition. No longer is he the explorer cutting his way through the jungle, but the writer that comes 'after Shakespeare' or, in his case, 'after Haydn'. The Second String Quartet with its balancing outer movements makes very extensive use of complex metres with a seamlessness that integrates fully into the flow, the opening and closing palindromes of the scherzo flanking an extraordinarily free-sounding, but meticulously organized lyrical middle section."

Soon we're going to have a break, from work and from listening to quartets. We'll pick up the thread very soon.