Winning the minimalist marathon

By Eliot Rose

Last week, the Yalie-led Flux Quartet made music history. In 1996, the acclaimed Kronos Quartet was scheduled to world-premiere Morton Feldman's Second String Quartet, an extremely long minimalist piece with a 124-page score. However, they bowed out because of stress and the threat of carpal tunnel syndrome, propelling the Second String Quartet into infamy in avant-garde circles. Although the Kronos Quartet had performed a four-hour abridged version of the piece several times throughout the '80s, the question of who would perform the piece in its entirety remained. It was finally answered last Saturday, when the Flux Quartet gave a six-and-a-half-hour performance of the 1983 quartet at the Great Hall of Cooper Union. The Herald spoke with Tom Chiu, MC '93, violinist and founder of the Flux Quartet, to discuss the historic performance.

JESSICA KUNG/YH

Chiu decided to take on the challenge last March. He wanted to perform the quartet because of a longstanding interest in Feldman's music. "We're committed to doing things that are genre-breaking and trying to seek new ground," he said. The difficulty of the piece gave it an added dimension. "The producer we were working with wanted to use two quartets to perform the piece, and that's where the Everest aspect came in. We said, `No, you don't need two quartets. We'll do it alone.'" Chiu and the rest of the Flux Quartet—violinist Cornelius Dufallo, violist Kenji Bunch, and cellist Darrett Adkins—began practicing the piece in late July. "We never played the whole thing in practice. A marathon runner would not run 26 miles until the race itself, and that's what we did. We built it up slowly."

The comparison to running a marathon extends beyond the Flux Quartet's practice techniques. According to Chiu, such a long performance required intense physical control and endurance. "The whole piece is muted; it's very soft and very slow. Imagine you're used to typing away at a desk, and suddenly you have to suspend your arm above the keyboard for six hours. It's very fatiguing." Since the quartet couldn't afford to be interrupted during the con-cert, they had to stop eating after breakfast and drinking after noon.

After all this preparation, the Flux players still only had a vague idea of how the quartet would sound. Chiu said that the best des-cription came from a radio DJ for whom the Flux Quartet played an hour-long segment prior to the concert: "It sounds like one drawn-out pop song." The score contains several repetitions of single measures; one section is repeated 13 times. "Although it's not quite atonal, a lot of sections don't resolve themselves," Chiu said. "They kind of leave you hanging." The quartet also didn't know for how long they would be playing. "The suggested duration of the piece is three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half hours. [Feldman] was dealing with a product whose end result he didn't quite know."

As it turned out, the concert began at 7:30 p.m. and continued until almost two in the morning. Chiu was not disappointed with the result. "Performing it was a totally exhilarating experience. Your sense of memory is always challenged since parts from early in the piece pop up surprisingly later on." The quartet was aware that the music would be equally challenging for the audience, so they left the doors open, enabling people to walk in and out during the show. Chiu hopes that the Flux Quartet's newfound fame—the concert garnered a story on the front of the Arts section of the New York Times—will enable the quartet to bring thought-provoking music to a wider audience. "We perceive that young people are into this and don't necessarily want to listen to Top 40 or bad alternative rock. Many classical groups confine themselves to an ivory tower. The reactions of common people are more important to us than those of trained academics."

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