‘What Makes It Great?’

On Wednesday, Oct. 11, Kapilow applied his method to Antonín Dvorák’s “American” String Quartet at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall. Kapilow gave a one-hour talk, going through the piece with musical illustrations from himself at a Yamaha keyboard or from the St. Lawrence Quartet seated by him. Then, after intermission, the St. Lawrence played the entire work without interruption or commentary, enabling the audience to hear those points in their full context. It was an intense and tightly wrought performance.

As Kapilow explained, Dvorák had found inspiration in his own Czech folk culture. Spending three years in the United States in the 1890s to teach composition, he tried in his own work to teach by example for American composers to be inspired by the spirit of American sources: African-American spirituals, native birdsong and so forth. But Kapilow did not discuss the results of this teaching (it didn’t work very well, actually) or much of the specifics of Dvorák’s sources.

Instead, Kapilow’s focus was entirely on the internal content of the “American” Quartet’s composition, the little tricks of advanced technique that lift this music from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Kapilow spoke to a general, non-technical audience, but did so intelligently. He used few technical terms beyond “major,” “minor,” and “cadence.” He alluded to key relationships but did not go into details. His interest was in the development and mutation of phrases and rhythms.

The theme was the creation of a complex pattern or texture from something simple. Kapilow would take Dvorák’s texture apart and have the musicians play each part separately, then add them together so the whole could be heard as the sum of its components. He would illustrate the genius of some feature by having the musicians play a notional “boring” version to contrast with the actual one. For instance, the quartet begins with two bars of vamping with the instruments coming in separately. Here, the “boring” version was having them all begin together. He would show the mutation of a motive by taking it apart, playing it over and contrasting it with the mutated version. Thus, he revealed that the theme of the trio is that of the scherzo, slowed down and changed from major to minor.

This was actually very interesting. Kapilow speaks quickly and passionately, generating involvement by sheer enthusiasm. He is skilled at involving the audience, asking us questions, having us sing motives or clap rhythms to show how they’re built up and mutated. He tried to keep from getting too complex and would often stop himself and explain differently. He kept going with the serene confidence that comes from sure knowledge and, more importantly, deep understanding of his topic.

Dvorák once said that he would never have written his American works, including this quartet and the “Symphony from the New World,” the way he did were it not for his experiences here, especially his summers in a Czech settlement in Iowa. Kapilow quoted this, describing it as a key understanding. But it would have taken another lecture as long as this one to describe what’s American about this music or how it differs from Dvorák’s Czech music.

A clue as to what’s American about American music will have to emerge from combining this with the two other talks Kapilow is giving at Bing this season: on Leonard Bernstein’s theatrical songs Feb. 7 and Duke Ellington’s jazz April 11. They should be illuminating.