Coates: String Quartets nos. 1, 5, and 6
Kreutzer Quartet.
Naxos 8.559091. Recorded, St. John’s Church, Loughton. CD.—There are composers who make you work. Not pleasurably, the way late Beethoven makes you work—that effort rewarded almost immediately by the sense of being in the presence of something vast and necessary—but genuinely, uncomfortably, with no guarantee of arrival anywhere you recognize.
Gloria Coates is one of those composers.
I came to this disc essentially ignorant of her music, which is an embarrassing admission given that she’s been writing symphonies performed on both sides of the Atlantic for decades now, with CPO having done the heavy lifting of putting several of them on record. The string quartets collected here—the First from 1966, the Fifth from 1988, the Sixth from 1999—span a third of a century, and if they reveal a composer of unsettling consistency, they also leave me in the genuinely unusual position of writing a review while still not entirely sure what I think.
Let me try to describe what you’ll actually hear.
The First Quartet lasts barely five minutes, an opening salvo rather than a statement. The cello enters alone—agitated, searching—with what the score demands as Bartók pizzicato, those percussive snaps that seem almost violent in the close acoustic of St. John’s Church in Loughton. Tremolandi, harmonics, an atmosphere of tightly controlled fury. The work is atonal throughout, and glissandi appear almost immediately, sliding between pitches with a kind of deliberate unease. Canons surface within the texture, though “surface” may be the wrong word—they’re embedded, structural in the way Josquin used canon, not as ornament but as the thing that actually moves the music forward in time. You have to listen hard to catch them.
Five minutes. Then silence.
Then the Fifth Quartet begins, and everything changes—or rather, everything slows to the point where change itself becomes the subject. Thirty-plus minutes across three movements: “Through Time,” “Through Space,” and “In the Fifth Dimension.” The opening reminded me immediately of Ligeti’s Ramifications from 1969—that same quality of stratospheric string harmonics drifting above a slow, cantus firmus-like bass, microtonal clouds shifting against each other with glacial deliberateness. But where Ligeti arrives somewhere, evolves, Coates holds the sound. Just—holds it. Whether that constitutes a limitation or a philosophical position, I genuinely cannot tell you yet.
The second movement offers less relief than you might hope. Glissandi swarm more tightly here, generating what can only be called tone clusters in motion—not static dissonance but dissonance that breathes and writhes. Kyle Gann’s booklet notes mention fragments of “Fling Out the Banner” embedded somewhere in the texture, which is a very Ivesian gesture, and Charles Ives does seem to lurk somewhere behind Coates’s sensibility: that willingness to let materials collide without mediation, to trust the listener’s ear to make something of the wreckage.
The third movement consists—entirely, without interruption—of glissandi in different tempi. The microtonal implications are constant and unavoidable. I know of no other string quartet that does this. That’s not a judgment, just a fact.
The Sixth Quartet is the most immediately approachable of the three, which is a relative term. “Still,” the first movement, begins with a single aggressive snap—startling after the sustained textures of the Fifth—and then unfolds as a slow metamorphosis through close microtonal dissonances. Six minutes later, something resolves onto what sounds unmistakably like E minor. Whether Coates intends that as arrival or irony, I can’t say with confidence. “Meditation,” the second movement, returns to the characteristic glissando web, but here the first violin occasionally picks out single notes above the texture—like a bell heard from a distance, or perhaps through water. It’s genuinely radiant, in a way that catches you off guard. The finale, “Evanescence,” revisits the first movement’s material in developed form, and I’ll be honest: it felt like a disappointment, a retreat to familiar ground when something more unexpected might have been ventured.
The Kreutzer Quartet plays all of this with evident commitment and considerable technical accomplishment. Sustaining this kind of music—intonation deliberately destabilized, rhythmic pulse dissolved, normal markers of ensemble coordination largely absent—requires a different kind of discipline than playing Haydn, and they bring it.
Gann’s notes are superb, genuinely informative without being promotional, and they’re careful to note that Coates “should not be regarded as the glissando composer“—that there’s more structural and expressive variety in her output than these particular works might suggest. I take that on faith. He also mentions that as a teenage student she wrote a quartet consisting entirely of glissandi, which baffled her teacher. That detail tells you something essential about her.
At Naxos prices, the risk is minimal. The experience—unsettling, occasionally beautiful, finally unresolved in my mind—is not.
