The last several days I have been obsessed with one particular piece of music. I often go through stages where I will listen to the work of one artist/composer/band almost exclusively for a period of days...I call these "jags". Periodically I find myself on a "Dylan jag", where I plumb the deep resources of my Bob Dylan CDs. Red House Painters jags are not uncommon, depending upon my mood. Autechre jags crop up fairly regularly and they will often morph into "general electronic music jags".
But rarely (if ever) have I found myself immersed in a jag such as the one I'm on now, which is all about one single piece of music...namely Dmitri Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet.
I very much enjoy string quartets as a general rule. I have complete collections of Beethoven's and Dvorak's, and believe it or not, I actually have three different recordings of Shostakovich's complete string quartets (the one performed by the Fitzwilliam String Quartet is the one currently getting so much attention, though I also very much enjoy the live recording I have by the always great Emerson Quartet and I can't dismiss the first versions I obtained of the works, as rendered by the Eber String Quartet). I love the Beethoven quartets and they're probably my favorite. The Dvorak quartets have not revealed their genius to me just yet...I'm probably not at the point in the evolution of my musical appreciation to fully grasp their charms.
Can't really explain why I am so enamored of the Shostakovich quartets, but I am. And I find it very difficult to write about this music, or to even explain why the 8th String Quartet has me in it's sway to the point where I have listened to it before going to sleep every night for the last week. As with any great classical piece, it only gets better the more familiar one becomes with it.
It's a mournful piece, and I've read it described as "an instrumental war requiem". That is as good a description as I could come up with. I have a penchant for melancholy music (see the afore-mentioned Red House Painters reference)...perhaps that explains why the 8th so appeals to me.
This may be the first time I've obsessed over a single piece of music, but it will not be the last, because I hope to develop the same admiration for other masterworks that such repeated exposure inherently spawns.
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