Many string quartets have had books written about them. These are, to one extent or another, factual accounts, some press agentry aside. Among the many unique things about the Pro Arte Quartet is that it is perhaps alone in being the inspiration for fictional writing, especially by one of a group's members.

Bernard Milofsky

In the course of his career as a brilliant violist and as member of the Pro Arte String Quartet, Bernard Milofsky conceived the idea of writing fiction. He took a few courses at the University of Wisconsin in creative writing, and at some point began writing a novel. It was about the travails of a string quartet and its members, and it was given the title of Fiddlers Four. Milofsky continued to work on it after he left Wisconsin. He was engaged in the project in 1962 and in 1964, when he was given encouragement in letters from Rudolf Kolisch. As the work continued thereafter, Milofsky was eventually joined in some of the writing by his son David. A publication-ready manuscript was prepared, under the title first of The Fiddlers Four and then of The Casa Bella Quartet. Through a series of two agents in New York, it was submitted to more than one publisher, but was never accepted. In its final form, it remains unpublished.

In the collection of Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin– Madison there is a volume of 708 pages in typescript, indicated as a draft entitled Fiddlers Four: A Novel, heavily revised, as of 1960. This was edited and personally typed by James Crow in 1995, two years after Milofsky's death.

The history of this typescript is full of questions. It clearly represented an early form of the novel, as it was taking shape. As such, it cannot be accepted as a full representation of the novel as finally written. James Crow was a distinguished professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and an amateur violist of considerable skill. He undertook some studies with Milofsky in his Madison years and the two became good friends. After Milofsky stopped playing, he bequeathed his viola to Crow, who used it lovingly for his own playing. The friendship, and contacts, continued after Milofsky moved to Pennsylvania.

Early medieval Christians were constantly faced with the problem of how to communicate the mysteries of their religion in a manner consonant with its inherent complexity and paradoxicality. Early exegetes, while noting that human knowledge about divine matters could only ever be incomplete, stressed that any insight into the gospel text would come only through patient and thoughtful rumination. Early medieval art reflects this difficulty as well, as sculpture, manuscripts and other objects often present images beguiling in their visual and conceptual complexity. In many works, it is clear that medieval makers sought to multiply and extend the frames of reference as far as possible, encouraging their beholders to think creatively and subtly about scripture. In service of this goal, every visual form might be imbued with some kind of meaning or reference, whether representational or seemingly abstract. Scholars of medieval art have recently begun to think more seriously about the capacity of ‘minor’ forms of visual enhancement, such as ornament and calligraphy, and seemingly incidental qualities, like colour and medium, to participate in the production of meaning within a work. The concept of early medieval graphicacy, as it has been articulated by Ildar Garipzanov, has the potential to help us do so with greater lucidity.

Garipzanov’s formulation of early medieval graphicacy is centred on abstract shapes which might find expression as letter-forms, frames, and ornamental motifs. In this essay, I will argue that we must attend carefully to the role that colour, scale, and patterning play in producing meaning in nonfigural graphic forms, and also to the ways in which graphic signs interact with – are woven seamlessly into – a larger sign system that encompasses calligraphic writing, representational imagery, and ornamental patterning. It is only by seeing how such various signs work together that we can begin to understand medieval graphicacy.

There are many early medieval works that show such complex interactions of signs, but I will confine myself in this essay to a close reading of a single page from the Book of Kells (Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 58). Although scholars and the public alike have to expressed astonishment over the calligraphic and ornamental forms in the Book of Kells for centuries, the rich symbolic capacities of those forms have not been considered until relatively recently.

Commercial Recordings

Chronological

Quatuor Pro Arte: 1931–40

Each year and date is followed by day of the week: Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat. Original issues are all 78 rpm; matrix numbers are listed first, followed by 78-rpm issues, then LP and CD reissues. HQS = Haydn Quartet Society. All recordings were made in London and are monophonic. In addition to commercial recordings, included are several recordings that were not completed and aborted.

Personnel: Alphonse Onnou, violin; Laurent Halleux, violin; Germain Prévost, viola; Robert Maas, cello.

1931: November 30 (Mon), Queen's Small Hall, Studio D JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809): Quartet in G Minor, op. 74, no. 3, “Rider” (Hob. III:74). 2B 2458–61; HMV set DB 1632–33; in HMV set HQS vol. 2, DB 1927–31; LP: in EMI set 2906043; CD: in Testament vol. I, SBT 3055; in Allegro vol. 2, 4012; in Enterprise/Strings QT 99–388, or Tactus TC 99388; in Gramofono AB 78 916.

1931: December 1 (Tue), Queen's Small Hall, Studio D JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809): Quartet in C Major, op. 33, no. 3, “Bird” (Hob. III: 39). 2B 2464–67; HMV set DB 1630–31; in HMV set HQS vol. 1, DB 1628–31; LP: in EMI set 2906043; CD: in Testament vol. 2, SBT 4056; in Allegro vol. 2, CDO 4012; in Enterprise/Strings QT 99–380.

1931: December 1–2 (Tue–Wed), Queen's Small Hall, Studio D JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809): Quartet in G Major, op. 77, no. 1 (Hob. III:81). 2B 2468–75; EMI set DB 1634–36; in HMV set HQS vol. 2I, DB 2159–65, or Victor set M 525; LP: in HMV set 2906043; CD: in Testament vol. 2, SBT 4056; in Enterprise/Strings QT 99–370.

1931: December 2 (Wed), Queen's Small Hall, Studio D JOSEPH HAYDN (1732–1809): Quartet in C Major, op. 20, no. 2 (Hob. III:32). 2B 2476–79; HMV set DB 1628–29; in HMV set HQS vol. 1, DB 1628–31; LP: in EMI set 2906043; CD: in Testament vol. 1, SBT 3055; in Allegro vol. 1, CDO 4011; in Enterprise/Strings QT 99–386.

Commissions by PAQ

Quatuor Pro Arte of Brussels

The group apparently never issued commissions of its own, but frequently presented works commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge or her Foundation.

Pro Arte Quartet of the University of Wisconsin

With date of composition; * indicates also premiered by the PAQ, with date given; # indicates recording by PAQ.

Adler, Samuel. *String Quartet no. 5 (1969). November 11, 1970

Bolcom, William. *#Piano Quintet no. 2 (2011). March 24, 2012

Diesendruck, Tamar. *Quartet no. 3, “Dagger” (with Koussevitzky Foundation, 2005). April 22, 2006

Fennelly, Brian. *#Quartet no. 2, “Arias and Interludes” (with Koussevitzky Foundation, 2001). December 3, 2002

Harbison, John. *#String Quartet no. 5 (2011). April 1, 2012

Imbrie, Andrew. *#String Quartet no. 4(1969). November 17, 1969

———. *#String Quartet no. 5 (1987). November 8, 1987

Jalbert, Pierre. *#Howl, for clarinet and strings (2014). September 26, 2014

Lerdahl, Fred. *#String Quartet no. 2 (with NEA, 1980–82, 2010). October 22, 1982

Luckhardt, Hilmar. *String Quartet no. 4 (1970). December 3, 1971

Mays, Walter. *#Quartet no. 2, “Dreaming Butterfly” (2011). October 22, 2011

Mernier, Benoît. *#String Quartet no. 3 (with Koussevitzky Foundation, 2013. February 28, 2014

Sessions, Roger. *Quartet no. 2 (1951). May 28, 1951

Shapey, Ralph. *#String Quartet no. 9 (with School of Music, 1995) May 4, 1996

Dedications to PAQ

Quatuor Pro Arte

* indicates also premiered by QPA

Bartók, Béla. Quartet no. 4 (1928)

Cartan, Jean. *Quartet no. 2 (1930)

Casella, Alfredo. *Concerto for String Quartet (1924)

Cowell, Henry. *Quartet no. 3, “Mosaic” (1925)

Fitelberg, Jerzy. *Quartet no. 2 (1928)

Gruenberg, Louis. Four Indiscretions, op. 20 (1922)

Honegger, Arthur. Quartet no. 2 (1934–35)

Houdret, Charles. Quartet (1928)

Huybrechts, Albert. *Quartet no. 2 (1927)

Jacobi, Frederick. Quartet no. 2 (1933)

Martinø, Bohuslav. *Quartet Concerto (1931)

Milhaud, Darius. La cantate de l’enfant et de la mère (1938) [also ded. to Collaer]

———. *Quartet no. 7 (1925)

Reichel, Bernard. *Little Quartet (Sonatine) for Strings (1924)

Rieti, Vittorio. *Madrigal in Four Parts (1927)

———. Quartet no. 1 (1926)

Tansman, Alexandre. Quartet no. 3 (1925)

In the autumn of 1984 the University of Wisconsin Graduate School awarded the Pro Arte a grant enabling it to solicit submissions of chamber compositions, in line with the group's intense commitment to new music. The scores submitted would be studied by the quartet, and any deemed worthy of attention could be programmed for performance. A small advertisement was placed in one musical journal, with the expectation that the response would be modest. Instead, an eventual total of 150 submissions were made by 147 composers (some submitting two or more compositions). A number of submissions were belated, but are reckoned among the total elicited by the announcement.

The list of submissions is given below. It is interesting simply for the range of composers who responded, which varies from totally obscure musicians to composers of very considerable stature by that time—e.g., Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Henry Cowell, George Crumb, Ross Lee Finney, Otto Leuning, Quincy Porter, Seymour Shifrin (posthumously), Karl Weigl (also posthumously), and Charles Wuorinen, not to mention Igor Stravinsky's son Soulima. Some composers, too, were represented by other works in the quartet's programs. Perusal of the names on the list reveals a number of curiosities. Noticeable is the large number of Czech and Slovak composers who made submissions— an indication of the contacts that Paulu and his quartet had developed with that musical world, and a harbinger of the group's later tour there in October of 1987.

As it worked out, only two works (one each by Fred Lerdahl and Elliot Weisgarber) can be traced in subsequent Pro Arte programs. A capstone to the project came in June 2–14, 1986, when the quartet launched what ws titled “The First Contemporary String Quartet Symposium and Festival in Madison.” (In point of fact, there never was a “Second” or any other such event.) Guest participants in this gathering proved to have no relation those who had submitted scores made a year-and-a-half before. The composers involved were: Stephen Dembski (of the UW faculty), Ramon Zupko of Kalamazoo, Michigan; Thomas Oboe Lee of West Somerville, Massachusetts; Richard Moryl of Roxbury, Connecticut; John Lennon of Knoxville Tennessee; Mario Pelosi of Portland, Oregon; Daniel Perlongo of Indians, Pennsylvania, and Charles Porter of Brooklyn, New York. Also participating were two “laureate” composers, Karel Husa and Andrew Imbrie.

Anglo-Saxon and Insular artist-scribes were the undisputed masters of the initial letter. They created and made into an art form the historiated initial, those letters that guide the reader into the content of a text by using two different forms of signification simultaneously. They did the same with the inhabited initial, letters in which humans and/or creatures guide the eye of the reader into a text visually while maintaining a much less direct relationship to that text’s content or meaning. Far more common than these two types of letter, and far less studied, are the decorated initials made up of creatures, humans, objects, interlace and pen flourishes, or any combination thereof, that fill the pages of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts from the late ninth through the eleventh centuries.

These decorated initials can be both figural and non-figural, representational and non-representational, often simultaneously. They were classified by Francis Wormald in 1945 as Type I and Type II initials – Type I initials being composed in part of complete creatures, and Type II featuring gripping heads, linear interlace and acanthus ornament. Scholars still refer to these classifications, despite the fact that they tell us nothing about the possible meanings or functions of the decorated letters, and despite the fact that even as a system of classification they are in many ways inadequate. Many of the initials in the late ninth or early tenth-century Durham Collectar, for example, resist classification (see below, Figs 3 and 4). For Wormald, these initials, which are among the earliest examples of their type to survive, straddled a borderline between the fundamentally Insular structure of gripping heads and interlace (Type I) and the ‘Romanesque characteristics’ – meaning the more naturalistic solid bodies and developed acanthus leaf pattern – of the later manuscripts (Type II). Some of the Durham Collectar’s initials combine aspects of Types I and II in a way that Wormald himself described as characteristic of the eleventh century. Wormald was, however, impressed by the effect of Anglo-Saxon decorated initials, which he described as ‘one of ceaseless and elaborate movement’. His words refer specifically to Type II initials, but they are equally apt for Anglo-Saxon initials more generally, as they all function in one way or another to bring the word to life.