About the Event

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 will perform Glass’s tribute in a free concert organized by composer Nick Hallett as part of the Memorial’s live art series. The performance will include introductory 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, whose historic West Village home he shared with Hendricks was recently profiled in T Magazine, 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

About the Performers

The Mivos Quartet is devoted to performing works of contemporary composers and presenting diverse new music to international audiences. The quartet, founded in 2008, commissions and premieres new repertoire for string quartet, and is dedicated to creative collaborations with a wide variety of artists. Mivos maintains an active international performance schedule, regularly appearing as ensemble-in-residence at festivals including June in Buffalo, Shanghai New Music Week, and Wien Modern. Mivos participates in many educational residencies at universities and summer festivals, working with young performers and composers to develop their skills. The quartet also runs two composition prizes to help discover and promote emerging composers in the US and abroad. Beyond these activities, Mivos is committed to collaborating with guest artists, exploring multimedia projects, and performing improvised music. The Mivos Quartet is Olivia De Prato, violin, Maya Bennardo, violin, Victor Lowrie Tafoya, viola, and Nathan Watts, cello.

Location

Thanks

Cultural programming at the New York City AIDS Memorial is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Special thanks to Philip Glass, Richard Guérin, the Geoffrey Hendricks Estate, Brad Melamed, and Andrea Evans.

Banner Image: Brian Buczak, Phil, 1986 (Detail), Courtesy of the Geoffrey Hendricks Estate