JAVS Spring 2023

and music, and they indelibly affected the rest of his life. Similar to many of the sensitive artists plunged into military service, Bliss was acutely aware of the stark contrast of realities manifested by war. He recounts: I found in France, as so many others did, that the appreciation of a moment’s beauty had been intensified by the sordid contrast around: one’s senses were so much more sharply on the alert for sights and sounds that went unnoticed in peacetime became taken so for granted. But a butterfly alighting on a trench parapet, a thrush’s songs at “stand to,” a sudden rainbow, became infinitely precious phenomena, and indeed the sheer joy of being alive was more relished for there being the continual possibility of sudden death. Christopher Palmer argues that Bliss’s wartime experiences were responsible for the “unmistakable streak of violence which has broken out sporadically in Bliss’s music ever since” and the “constant stream of sad processions winding their way through his music.” Both of these moods are particularly prevalent in the Viola Sonata. Within this context, Bliss’s decision to withdraw these early chamber works seems understandable. They present a sunny, joyous, and un-encumbered musical world, full of piquant melodies and lightly-flowing slow movements. For a composer returning home in 1918 from multiple months-long stints on the front lines in the trenches, as one who suffered a gas attack, and whose brother had

been killed in battle, this decision was undoubtedly influenced by the horrors of war he experienced and can be viewed as a renunciation of youthful naïveté. Fortunately, both works survived in manuscript and were published by Edition Peters in 2007. Several prominent viola passages in the two works offer a window into the young composer’s writing for the instrument. Each three-movement work contains a movement that begins with an extended melody for unaccompanied viola: the second movement of the string quartet (ex. 1) and the first movement of the piano quartet (ex. 2). In both works, these are the only extended unaccompanied moments for any instrument. These melodies display some of the enigmatic and quasi tonal features that appear throughout the Viola Sonata. Both exhibit a somewhat natural minor tonality that explores the viola’s characteristic middle register. Bliss uses triplets in the later sections of both melodies to prolong and propel them toward their resolution. The piano quartet melody’s structure—four plus six measures—is more straightforward than the string quartet melody’s halting six-measure shape. Bliss’s harmony in the piano quartet further contributes to this enigmatic quality. Considered alone, the melody appears to be centered in E minor; however, the other instruments arrive in m. 7 on a clear A minor chord. Two gestures embedded in the opening melody hint at this harmonic polarity: the first firm down beat in m. 3 is on the pitch A, and the closing gesture is a descending perfect fourth from A down to

Example 1. The opening viola solo line from Arthur Bliss’s String Quartet [no. 1] (1914), mvt II, mm.1–11.

Example 2. The viola’s unaccompanied opening melody from Arthur Bliss’s Piano Quartet, mvt. I, mm. 1–6.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 39, No. 1, Spring 2023