James Primosch

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The concerts and exhibits of the Cleveland Museum of Art were an important formative influence for me during my student days.  So when the invitation came to create a new work celebrating this institution on its seventy-fifth anniversary, I was not only happy to accept, but knew immediately that I wanted to write a piece that would somehow relate specifically to the museum.  I decided to make the work a reflection on a painting in the museum’s collection: Zurbarán’s “The Holy House of Nazareth.”  My quartet is not program music in a narrative sense, but rather a kind of meditation that takes its tone from this painting’s remarkable integration of intense affect, mysterious repose and secret geometry.Besides Zurbarán’s painting, the piece is occupied with a purely musical object of contemplation: the hymn tune “Picardy,” best known with the text “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.”  This tune permeates the harmonic and melodic life of the quartet, sometimes appearing in a very simple, straightforward fashion, but often hidden amidst more complex structures.  I was attracted to the melody for its musical qualities, but later realized that the hymn’s text also resonates with the mood of the painting; the words speak of a reverent awe, of “cherubim with sleepless eye,” and of the mystery of the Incarnate Word who must suffer: “King of kings, yet born of Mary…”

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