Philip Glass: String Quartet No. 4 (Buczak)
The spirit of visual artist Brian Buczak (1954—1987) is memorialized in the fourth string quartet of Philip Glass (1937—), one of the composer’s most intimate works. In 2024, what would have been Buczak’s 70th year of life, the acclaimed Mivos Quartet performed Glass’s tribute on October 27 in a free concert organized by composer Nick Hallett as part of the Memorial’s live art series. The performance included opening remarks by Bracken Hendricks and Sur Rodney (Sur).
During the 1970s and 80s, Brian Buczak worked in multiple forms, from painting to publishing. Many of his canvases hold contrasting ideas side-by-side, pulling from portraiture, abstraction, and stenciled impressions of objects—often aestheticizing the nostalgia of faded cinema. Buczak might have found points of connection with the concurrent and era-defining Pictures Generation movement if his work wasn’t such a personal and unclassifiable collage. Two posthumous exhibitions earlier this year in New York, at Ortuzar Projects and Gordon Robichaux, affirm Buczak’s belonging to the canon of Postmodernism.
String Quartet No. 4 (1989) resonates with the cultural history of Downtown New York. The music was commissioned by Buczak’s life partner, noted Fluxus artist, Geoffrey Hendricks (1931-2018), with whom Glass shared a deep, longstanding friendship. The finished work was premiered on July 4, 1989, the second anniversary of Buczak’s death from AIDS-related illness at age 32. Its first recording by the Kronos Quartet was released a belated six years later. It is now performed widely, yet remains a rarer gem within the composer’s extensive catalog.
Buczak encountered Glass not only within Lower Manhattan's galleries and performance spaces, but also on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia where both Glass and Hendricks—along with significant art world figures such as Joan Jonas and Richard Serra—owned simple wood cabins to find refuge from city life during the summers, taking inspiration from its rugged coastline, fields of tall grass, and, specifically for Hendricks, epic cloudscapes. Here, their respective families formed lasting bonds.
About the string quartet, Glass said he wished to create “a musical impression of Brian Buczak as a person as well as a tribute to his life’s work.” The cinematic quality of Buczak’s paintings collides with the tragedy of his early passing and Hendricks’s grief, clarifying the Romantic influences on Glass’s oeuvre. Its melancholy echoes Franz Schubert’s fascination with death, by rendering loss as a thing of beauty. Different from the wild arpeggios over grandiloquent basslines that had become synonymous with the composer’s most well-known scores by that time, the fourth quartet displays restraint, lyricism, increased chromaticism (including dissonance), dramatic scene changes, and reduced use of arpeggio, offering instead subtle, undulating changes of meter. The music looks ahead to Glass’s mature instrumental compositions and recognizable Hollywood themes. Buczak’s spirit emanates from this layering of present and past, which arguably pushed the composer into new realms of rhythm, harmony, and emotional depth. - Nick Hallett
Role: Commissioner/Producer with Nick Hallett, Curator
Date: October 27, 2024
Location: New York City AIDS Memorial, New York, NY
