Nicky Swett in conversation with composer Ben Scheer ahead of the Music@Menlo world premiere performance of his new piano quartet.
Nicky Swett: Your new piano quartet will be debuted on a Menlo concert curated by Chad Hoopes, who is your partner of ten years and your fiancé. Are there aspects of his violin playing that influenced the decisions that you made when structuring this piece or others you’ve written for him?
Ben Scheer: Chad has this very beautiful, lyrical sound. I wanted to explore that with my piece. I made it slower and more expressive. When you have really phenomenal players, you want to use them to their full extent. You want to showcase that. It’s better than writing something that’s more motivic or kind of busy, because he’s really fabulous at performing soaring melodies.
NS: What are pieces you look to for inspiration when writing for piano, violin, viola, and cello?
BS: I love the Mozart Piano Quartet, the Schumann Piano Quartet, and also both of the Fauré Piano Quartets. In each of these, the composer has used the strings in full unison or octaves, with the piano providing rolling arpeggiations. There are also alternations of strings playing together and piano playing solo. Piano is so different from the strings that it needs to be featured and stand on its own, separate from the strings. Once you’re able to do that, you’re able to unlock other, smaller interactions between all the instruments.
Another piano quartet I love to death is the Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time. Instead of viola, it has clarinet, but to me it still counts. One of my favorite moments is in the penultimate movement. You have the violin, cello, and clarinet playing in unison. The violin and cello execute matching trills, the clarinet outlines the melody, and the piano plays these very dreamy, rolling arpeggios. It’s so gripping and so effective and it’s using the instrumentation so well. I feel it’s following along in that tradition of the piano quartet, even without the viola.
NS: What are some new things you’re doing in your piano quartet?
BS: I’ve been exploring what it means to be more tonal with my music. I don’t want to say that I have avoided tonality as a composer, but in the past my music has had a lot of dissonance. Recently, I’ve been trying to conquer the fear of writing stuff that has tonality. There’s a lot of baggage that comes with that. In the new music community, there’s a divide between composers who use a more dissonant harmonic language and composers who are more tonal. There’s pressure to be one or the other and I’ve never wanted to choose. The musical landscape that I grew up in sort of implied “you can write tonally, but maybe it’s not ideal.” I felt pressure to leave behind part of what I wanted to express and ended up exploring more dissonant sonorities. The thing is, I’m grateful for that trajectory, but now I’m happy to be looking at this other side of my composition and trying to write more tonally.
NS: Are there any other aspects of your piano quartet that you’d like to share with the audience?
BS: The piece itself is inspired landscape of the Bay Area. Something that was very dramatic to me was being there when it’s consumed by fog. There’s something surreal about that: it feels almost like time is suspended when you are in a cloud on one of the hills. What I love about San Francisco is that there’s such a variety of different things. You have Victorian architecture mixed with Art Deco—these glorious, old, traditional buildings mixed with modernity—all set in these dramatic, rolling hills. In my piece, I have this old-timey, lyrical sound represent that. But then the fog is covering it. I have this represented with ominous pedal tones, which cover the melody but also work with it a little bit. I love setting up tonal sonorities and then disrupting them with either one pitch or a couple of pitches, so that they’re still recognizable and you can get your bearings but you’re questioning where you’re at in that moment.
That’s going to be prevalent in my piece: you will have quite a few moments of tonality, but there are going to be things that are obscuring it. Then there are very melodic and expressive sections that I want to be quintessential piano quartet sound. I want to achieve that richness of the instrumentation, because it’s a genre that I love!