"...[the Ninth] can sometimes seem to be unnecessarily intellectual, too preoccupied with formal aspects."—Vasco Mariz

Ah, poor Heitor Villa-Lobos. Forty-some odd years after his death, this fellow is still pushed around by the textbookers of twentieth century Western music as a reactionary/neo-conservative/eclectic. His music gets good press in Brazil, but generally falters at the walls of twentieth century's technoid Valhalla: the music of Villa-Lobos is stunningly unconcerned with revolutionizing its means while struggling against tradition or sabotaging the machinery of the culture industry. The greatest sacrilege: his music is happy—content, comfortable, and in part about comfort. But then, when Villa-Lobos' music does get complex—when he decides to strike the sword of a bewilderingly unflagging imagination against more flinty, cragged rock—a guy like Mariz is there to call him on it. Hence, one of the composer's more searching works, and by far his most out-there quartet, is stamped with the label "intellectual." Alas, this labeling is reduced to absurdity: Villa-Lobos simply didn't take a "stand" as so many other twentieth century composers did. Instead, his fecund imagination and perpetually synthesizing creativity spread itself out, tendril-like, to many different stances. The Ninth, for instance, has many different angles that each, if followed, lead to arch-stances. The "intellectual" element Mariz speaks of is embodied in Villa-Lobos' employment of actual 12-note themes. Similarly, the quartet diverges from other Villa-Lobos quartets in the stringency of its harmony, often exploiting "cold" intervals like the major second, fourth, and minor seventh. This pitch material is wedded to gestural contours of intensive angularity, as in the staccato triplets of the opening Allegro or the hard-biting sixteenth notes of the finale. All of these elements come together to create an overall impression of a new sleekness, as if that warm, Paul Gauguin tropicality had suddenly silvered. But not really: the quartet is more "playing" twelve-tone than being twelve-tone; continuing a trend seen on the previous quartet, the Ninth tries on the clothing of a more chromatic, sharp-edged music but doesn't actually operate by that music's "rules." The Villa-Lobos sequences and ostinati are all still there, as is a patently un-argumentative approach toward form. For Schoenberg's dialectical methods and encrypted hexachords, Villa-Lobos easily substitutes a kind of delighted distraction.

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