A String Quartet for a Time of Decay
One hundred years ago, Alban Berg began work on his string quartet, the Lyric Suite. Berg was deeply Viennese, electing to never leave the city when other members of his circle did. While the string quartet as a genre traveled more than Berg, it is important to note that it was practically invented by Haydn, a fellow Austrian.
While the work is well known for its rich references to Berg's own life–with explicit connections to Zemlinksy and implicit connections to Berg's paramour Hanna Fuchs-Robettin–I also wonder how he understood himself in relation to what he would have perceived as the cultural and political decay of his own time. The string quartet, after all, was born at the height of enlightenment aristocracy, while Berg found himself in the inflationary regime of the First Austrian Republic with its proto-Fascist overtones in the wake of devastating war.
In 2025, and for years before today, there has been a sense that our deeply rationalized and financialized world is nonetheless decaying into a totalitarianism dumber than that experienced by Berg. While I do not claim the stature of even the third rate, obscure members of the Second Viennese school, let alone Berg, I am attracted to the idea of creating a rather rational and technical rendition of a string quartet in response to the problems (and wonder) of the current moment.
A Place of Decay
While the German speaking world was undoubtedly the epicenter of totalitarian collapse in the 1920s and 1930s, I would like to nominate Florida as the symbolic center of an American collapse–with our book banning; our stupidity; our mastery of simulation and forays into outer space; our deeply pollutable, highly marketable water, which threatens to engulf us as the exhaust from our SUVs cause the earth to boil, summoning hurricanes to flood the land of the Timucua and Seminole with Karenia brevis.
This blog will document my attempts to create a "string quartet" well suited to expressing the sense of decay in a Floridian tone.