Pierre Boulez, Giacinto Scelsi, Earle Brown

condition (record/cover): VG+ (some surface noise) / VG+ (light wear)
Gatefold sleeve.

A Mainstream Records LP of exceptional historical importance - and one of the more unusual pairings in the American independent new music catalogue of the early 1970s. The juxtaposition of Pierre Boulez, Giacinto Scelsi, and Earle Brown in a programme devoted to new string quartet writing illuminates three of the most fundamentally different approaches to post-war compositional thought that the mid-century produced, and doing so through the same chamber medium makes the comparison unavoidable.

Boulez's string quartet writing - whether the early Livre pour quatuor or the later revised forms - is an exercise in total structural rigor: every parameter organized, the historical continuity of the genre present only to be systematically dismantled and reconstructed. Scelsi's approach is the opposite of systematic: a continuous investigation of a single sound's inner life, harmony dissolved into timbre, the string instruments required to behave as if they were a single resonating body rather than four independent voices. Brown's graphic and open-form approaches constitute yet a third negation of traditional quartet thinking - structure as a field of possibilities rather than a predetermined path. That these three bodies of work could inhabit a single LP without incoherence is itself a document of the period's productive tensions. Mainstream Records, MS 5009.