In my ears — Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 8, allegro molto, breakcore flip. In my head — a bit of a do. In my soul — the nobility of feelings ignoble.
Shostakovich composed the String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110, in just three days, 12-14 July 1960, while visiting Dresden, ostensibly to write music for a film about the Allied bombing of the city. He was rather cooked, having coercedly joined the Communist Party, which for him was a personal catastrophe and moral capitulation. He told his friend Isaak Glikman that the quartet was “a pseudo-autobiographical work” and that it was dedicated “to the memory of the composer of this quartet.”
The quartet is built entirely on the DSCH motif (Dmitry Shostakovich’s musical monogram in German notation, D-Es-C-H = D. Sch.) and quotes almost all of his major works: the First, Fifth, Eighth, and Tenth Symphonies, the Second Piano Trio, the First Cello Concerto, and the opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”. The allegro molto (second movement) is the most violent, frantic, brutally bursting piece that apparently goes so well as a breakcore.
