Aloofness, sincerety and montage: Esposito Quartet plays Laurence Crane and Caroline Shaw

It can be tricky to precisely describe the music of Laurence Crane for those who haven’t heard it. Deadpan, gentle, sardonic, aloof, unassuming, but also very alluring. It makes use of the most prosaic of materials – triads, added sixth chords, sevenths, small diatonic melodies. In the 1980s his pieces were all one or two pages. They have titles like Andrew Renton becomes an International Art Critic and Spa Towns of Central England and Twentieth Century Music.

In recent years Crane’s music has expanded significantly – almost every new piece becomes an extended foray, a new excursion into something larger. Crane’s String Quartet no. 2 is his first for ten years, circa 20 minutes in length (his last was only six). It was performed for the first time by Dublin’s Esposito Quartet at the Spirit Store, a pub and venue overlooking the mud flats and fishing boats and tidal inlets of Dundalk harbour, the hills of the Ring of Gullion in the distance to the north.

The music hits an emotional note immediately. Perfect cadences, prayers, rocking V to I, a lullaby, an immediate adieu: more tender than I had been expecting. Has Crane abandoned all his habitual aloofness? The sincerity of the first movement hits all the more because of his usual sardonicism.

Yet the first movement ends on an unresolved V chord, and the second movement immediately returns us, by means of a sort of loud initial announcement, to something more gently sarcastic. Portamento and vibrato, the melody heading mi-re-do, three blind mice, occasional sudden shifts of mode.

There is the shadow of Beethoven throughout – already signalled in the opening movement, and in the second at a certain point things start to sound like the Heiliger Dankgesang. We think we are heading to a tender coda, yet Crane again pulls the rug out. Pivots and sudden modulations, a mi-re-do-sol melody in violin harmonics. It is like Beethoven rewritten by Satie. 

The piece concludes ambiguously, with unresolved sevenths in a short third movement. What had started like a prayer in the end becomes a montage. Yet the emotion of the music is real: the sincerity is real, the aloofness is real. Crane is, for me, the great permission-giver in British contemporary music. The composer Linda Catlin Smith, sat across from me, said: “some music convinces you that everything is possible”.

Also on the programme was a quartet by US composer and singer Caroline Shaw. Titled The Evergreen, it is itself intended to be a gift – in this case, to a tree the composer encountered on the island of Swiikw, British Columbia. Shaw’s music is direct in a rather literal way. The quartet’s pizzicati become onomatopoeia for the dripping of water. Mossiness is depicted through tremolando, string-crossing arpeggios and bouncing jété. In the final movement (Roots), there is ostinato in the cello halfway between Nyman or Glass and a pop song.

Shaw also performed some of her songs together with the quartet. Some were better than others, though a highlight for me was a middle-French virelai reminiscent of Machaut, replete with fauxbourdon and false relation.

Afterwards, the audience headed to St Nicholas’ Church for a performance of Terry Riley’s In C by a group of Irish traditional musicians, assembled specially for the festival. It was a revelation. Deeply emotional, it revealed a side of Riley lying completely dormant. The festival this year is titled “Folks’ Music”, signalling how, in the end, music belongs to all of us. In this instance, the musicians made this music entirely their own.

Lawrence Dunn’s press trip to Dundalk was funded by Louth Contemporary Music Society