ABOVE AND BEYOND THE BASS: HARMONY AND TEXTURE IN GEORGE BENJAMIN'S ‘VIOLA, VIOLA’

Extract

George Benjamin's rich harmonic imagination was apparent from his earliest published works. A distinctive chordal sensibility is already evident in the 1978 Piano Sonata, with its glittering streams of five- or six-pitch clusters; in the hollow bell-chords punctuating the 1979 orchestral score, Ringed by the Flat Horizon; and in the supreme stasis of the A-minor pedal chord (a six-three triad) unveiled by the icy glissandi lines opening A Mind of Winter (1981). All three pieces share a fascination with degrees of chordal resonance – the interplay of upper partials above a fundamental – and a sensitivity to chords as sound objects. True, Benjamin's style, beginning at least with Antara (1987), has shown signs of a more linear-contrapuntal orientation, and less reliance on what one critic terms ‘purely coloristic phenomena’. Yet one could equally claim some continuity between the refined harmonic world of the early scores and the surprising richness of chordal sonority to be heard in a far more recent arrival, the 1997 duo Viola, Viola.