Bruce Whiteman’s greatest hits

Sean Brenner and Jeanette LaVere | April 7, 2025

For 30 seasons, Chamber Music at the Clark has treated audiences to beautiful music performed by world-class soloists and ensembles in the ornate surroundings of the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. For 25 of those seasons, an integral part of the experience has been the writing of Bruce Whiteman.

Whiteman became head librarian of the Clark in 1996, and in 1999, he began composing program notes — the brief narratives that give concertgoers historical and artistic context for the music they’re hearing — for each performance. Whiteman’s writing is not only informative but also remarkably engaging and even entertaining; it’s easy to imagine audience members, reading his prose, chuckling audibly in the midst of a string quartet.

On April 27, the chamber music series will present a concert in Whiteman’s honor. Before the Borromeo String Quartet takes the stage for an all-Beethoven performance, audience members will receive a commemorative volume containing dozens of Whiteman’s favorite essays. In its introduction, Rogers Brubaker, the artistic director of Chamber Music at the Clark and a UCLA sociology professor, writes: “The notes are deeply informative, but Bruce also has fun with them. If ‘unbuttoned’ … is a word he uses often, his writing might itself be described as unbuttoned; it is certainly the opposite of stuffy.”

Whiteman left his post at the library in 2010, but he has continued providing program notes to this day. Following is a selection of snippets from Whiteman’s evocative, insightful and witty descriptions of the chamber music performed at the Clark over the past quarter century.

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October 12, 2003: Richard Strauss, Sonata for Violoncello and Piano and Piano in F Major, op. 6
“A teenager might not be expected to face the emotional demands of a slow movement quite as successfully as the challenges of a sonata–allegro, and indeed the D-minor Andante of the Cello Sonata, though hardly a failure, is perhaps more surface than depth. … This is music that Mendelssohn must have applauded from the shades.”

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May 15, 2005: Johannes Brahms, Quartet for Piano and Strings No. 1 in G Minor, op. 25
“The slow third movement begins with one of those stately, lush vocal-like lines that are so echt Brahms that two bars are enough to make it perfectly obvious that no other composer could be responsible for them. … The build-up to the final statement of the gypsy theme has all of the players more or less tearing about like wild animals, and the movement ends with great drama.”

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October 9, 2005: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, String Quartet in F Major, K. 590 (“Prussian”)
“For all that it contains moments of allusion to doubt, and for all its amazing technical sophistication, this is music that seems to flow as naturally and inevitably as light or water. Even its several unexpected pauses feel as though they arise from spiritual recognition more than from mental apprehension.”

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February 14, 2010: Brahms, Piano Quartet No. 3 in C Minor, op. 60
“The final bars fade away mysteriously, and again Brahms chooses to conclude with a major chord. One Brahms scholar has suggested that this final fillip represents “Werther pulling the trigger,” but this seems too silly. Wouldn’t a bullet to the head be in the minor key?”

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December 2, 2012: Brahms, Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano in A Minor, op. 114
“All of these works tend to get characterized as ‘autumnal’ or ‘crepuscular’ by commentators, partly because they come at the end of Brahms’s life and partly, no doubt, because of his use of the dark timbre of the solo instrument. Each piece certainly has its reflective moments, but all of them are also replete with high spirits and determined formal exploration. They may represent the autumn of the composer’s life, but there is still a lot of warm weather and lively outdoor exercise encoded in their notes.”

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February 3, 2013: Igor Stravinsky, L’histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale)
“If, ultimately, ‘L’Histoire du soldat’ is about music’s inability to rescue anyone from life’s pitfalls and darknesses, its dependence on the dance leaves us with the counter-impression that, in truth, music, darkness or no darkness, can make us happy at least in the moment.”

Whiteman speaking with Rogers Brubaker, artistic director of Chamber Music at the Clark (left), and Bronwen Wilson, director of the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, outside of the Clark Library.

October 20, 2013: Dmitri Shostakovich, Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, op. 110
“There are times — blessed, fortunate, impassioned times — in the lives of some artists when an unpredictable collocation of circumstances makes work seem like magic. Emotion, desire, nerves, even some ephemeral embodiment of the weather like a bit of sunlight dappled through leaves and falling on a wall, combine with manifest auspiciousness, and the work of art — a poem or a string quartet or a painting — just suddenly comes into being as though it were discovered rather than made. How otherwise [to] explain the extraordinary fact that Shostakovich composed his Eighth String Quartet, a work of great formal depth and stunning emotional honesty, in just three days? …. Most of us, after all, would need a day or two just to copy the score of the Eighth String Quartet.”

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April 17, 2016: Gabriel Fauré, Piano Trio in D Minor, op. 120
“Marcel Proust, for example, once averred that he knew Fauré’s music well enough to write a 300-page book about it. (One wishes he had!) The general musical public, however, thinks of it as a bit of an acquired taste, like retsina or fried grasshoppers.”

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March 26, 2017: Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, op. 95 (“Serioso”)
“The coda, in any case, is like a burst of comic high spirits at a funeral …. Perhaps one of Blake’s proverbs — “Excess of sorrow laughs” — can help to explain the extraordinary conclusion of this remarkable quartet.”

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December 10, 2023: Béla Bartók (1881–1945), String Quartet No. 4
“Here the accompanying modes of articulation include strumming (viols as ukuleles!) and the famous Bartók pizzicato, in which the string is plucked hard enough to strike the fingerboard with a satisfying thwack. One does not think of Bartók as a composer with a sense of humor, but an entire movement played pizzicato cannot but make one giggle just a little.”