Philip Glass / String Quartet No. 4, "Buczak"
Grief gives way to hope and healing in a meditative impression of an artist struck down by AIDS.
Growing up with classical music, I learned early that, sometimes, your heroes die too soon.
The liner notes accompanying my favorite albums told the tragic tales of composers lost while scaling new heights in their work. After periods of declining health, Franz Schubert died at 31 and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at 35, while Felix Mendelssohn, whose Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream proved one of my first musical enchantments, suffered a series of strokes that led to his death at 37.
So when I became obsessed with the visual arts as a teenager, it didn't take long to notice a similar trend among the contemporary artists whose work captivated me — many had died at an incomprehensibly young age.
Keith Haring, the Peter Pan of New York City's art world in the 1980s, whose radiant babies and cartoonish creatures scrawled on subway station walls spoke to his belief that art was for everyone, died at 31. Robert Mapplethorpe, who imbued his black-and-white photographs of flowers and male nudes with grace and sculptural beauty in equal measure, lost at 42. Derek Jarman — the prolific artist, writer, filmmaker, activist, and horticulturist — took his final breath at 52.
But unlike my composer friends who had lived centuries ago, when average life spans were lower and the risk of infectious disease much higher than today, each of these artists had died within my lifetime, their obituaries reporting the same cause of death: complications from AIDS.
It wasn't just AIDS that cut their lives — and the lives of so many others — short. The devastation of the plague that swept across the globe in the 1980s was amplified by religious leaders who evangelized the notion that those infected — primarily gay men, sex workers, and intravenous drug users — were vermin not worthy of pity or aid, by US government officials who cracked jokes about rising body counts behind closed doors, by an ultra-conservative society that equated expressions of homosexuality with death and disease.
Just over a decade after the Stonewall Uprising provided the burgeoning gay rights movement with increased momentum and widespread visibility, an entire generation was being exterminated by neglect, hatred, and misinformation. And while I've come to know well the life stories of many artists lost during the AIDS crisis, there are many more names to be discovered — those who weren't given the chance to experience the full bloom of their talents before their bodies, incapable of immunity, gave out on them.
Names like Brian Buczak.
Before his death in 1987, at the age of 32, Brian Buczak had amassed an astounding body of work: more than 400 paintings, 800-plus drawings, and an independent printing press for artists he founded with his partner, Geoffrey Hendricks, a prominent member of the Fluxus movement.
Brian and Geoffrey met at a loft party in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood in 1976, where the pair danced all night, the first of countless tender moments they'd experience over their 10-year relationship as lovers, friends, and collaborators. Both artists were active in the downtown scene and spent the summer months on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia alongside a close-knit group of New York artists — including Philip Glass, Joan Jonas, and Richard Serra — who made the tranquil Canadian locale their creative sanctuary. Alice Neel, the great chronicler of bohemian New York, composed a double portrait of the couple in 1977, and Brian sat for her again in 1983.
Blurring the lines between art and life, Brian led the transformation of the 1820s Federal-style house he shared with Geoffrey at 486 Greenwich Street into a living art project. Together they meticulously restored and decorated their home using salvaged materials contemporary to its construction, with Brian scouring dumpsters, charity shops, and antique stores alike for furniture, cookware, and other early 19th-century artifacts — right down to the cast iron nails that secured the floorboards. He designed moldings and archways, and painted one room in the style of a 19th-century watercolor by Jacob Maentel, crafting the stencil he used on the room's walls from the leaf of a locust tree Geoffrey had planted in front of the house.
That merging of past and present, the discipline of traditional craftwork with a fiery vision of modern art, was a thread Brian wove throughout his artistic practice. He took inspiration from a kaleidoscope of visual sources — from Buddhist and Masonic iconography to corporate logos, pornography, religious paintings, and masterpieces of Romanticism like Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. The result was a collection of work that Brian called his "search for accidental significance," noting that "my subjects appear to me in sleep, and the work is painted in a deep trance in total darkness."
One year after he was diagnosed with HIV, Brian Buczak died of AIDS-related illness the night of July 4, 1987, as fireworks illuminated the sky outside his hospital room overlooking the East River — an explosive tapestry of color that, like his art, transcended an abyss of enveloping darkness.
In 1989, Geoffrey commissioned his friend Philip Glass to compose music to be performed on the second anniversary of his partner's death, part of an exhibition of Brian's work he was curating at New York's Hauser Gallery. To pay tribute to Brian, Philip developed what he called a "musical impression" of the artist in his Fourth String Quartet — an intimate, monochromatic score that stood worlds away from the wild stage spectacle of his six-hour abstract opera, Einstein on the Beach, and the extroverted, rock-band energy of the Philip Glass Ensemble.
But Philip's choice of genre for this commission isn't surprising. Not only did he frequently apply his signature style of composition based on repetitive musical structures to standard classical forms — from the symphony and opera to the piano etude and violin concerto — but the string quartet had long been a refuge for composers to express their most personal, vulnerable thoughts. As someone who fell in love with the quartets of Beethoven and Schubert as a child, Philip was keenly aware of the emotional weight of the form's history, writing: "It's almost as if we say we're going to write a string quartet, we take a deep breath and we wade in to write the most serious, significant piece we can."
Just as Brian had foraged through centuries of art history for inspiration, so did Philip's new quartet find its roots in the expressive style of another age, that of 19th-century Romanticism. Turning away from the unbridled energy of the broken chords and racing rhythms that dominate many of his scores from the 1970s and '80s, Philip instead channels the melancholy and hypnotic lyricism of Schubert, exploring how subtle shifts in timbre and texture can guide us on a journey through grief, hope, and healing — a complex emotional palette from which the Fourth Quartet's central movement is born.
Over a meditative mantra in the lower voices of viola and cello, the violins incant a song of sorrow in their ethereal upper register, the mystical overtones of their whispered hymn manifesting a golden halo that gradually fractures, giving way to a cascade of shadowy sighs. The cello then introduces a new theme amid the swirling sea of sound, each rising arabesque dancing across the strings with bold confidence before transforming into a long-held note of searing intensity.
Unable to sustain this energy, the cello descends into its gravelly depths before joining the first violin in the movement's opening material. The two voices — one planted on our earthly plane, the other floating in a spiritual realm — remain separated by an insurmountable chasm as they navigate their melody's expressive contours. Ghostly silences begin to interject themselves into the scene until, as if in mid-thought, the music simply evaporates.
Much of the music created to address the AIDS crisis in its first decades aimed to capture the entirety of the suffering wrought by the epidemic — from Robert Savage's AIDS Ward Scherzo, a work of fiery dissonance Savage wrote while confined to his hospital bed, to John Corigliano's First Symphony, subtitled "Of Rage and Remembrance," in which the composer honors the many friends he had lost. But in his Fourth String Quartet, Philip confronts AIDS on an intimate scale.
Instead of trying to express the totality of loss, he conveys the quiet devastation of losing a loved one, and how a series of metaphysical sounds produced by four stringed instruments can return them to us, even if just for a handful of moments. And in the process of experiencing this work, we discover that the act of mourning, like Brian's art, is in itself a process of layering past and present, in which we're called to celebrate the miracle of life, accept the depths of our current grief, and trust that the love and memories that remain will serve as a beacon of light that leads us out of darkness.
Take a listen …
The Smith Quartet Ian Humphries & Darragh Morgan, violin Nic Pendlebury, viola Deirdre Cooper, cello (Listen to the complete quartet on YouTube.)
Postscript
Although Brian Buczak's story speaks to another time, it's never been more important to recognize the catastrophic loss HIV/AIDS continues to cause today.
Thanks to a steady stream of medical breakthroughs over the past 30 years, HIV/AIDS has become a manageable disease, and the number of annual deaths has dropped by two thirds from an all-time high of 1.9 million in 2004. But the path to long-term treatment remains difficult to impossible for those without access to affordable healthcare, and the rate of infection remains high among men who have sex with other men, transgender people, and adolescent girls in eastern and southern Africa.
And now, with the confounding actions taken by the new US administration over the past month — shuttering the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) that has saved more than 25 million lives worldwide, deleting all resources related to HIV/AIDS from whitehouse.gov, and freezing funding for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides lifesaving HIV prevention and treatment services in more than 100 countries — we stand on the precipice of a brutal new chapter in the epidemic's evolution, as marginalized people across the world continue to be neglected by our most important institutions.
Statistics speak for themselves. According to the most recent data from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS):
39.9 million people globally were living with HIV in 2023, 1.4 million of which were children under the age of 15.
1.3 million people became newly infected with HIV in 2023.
630,000 people died from AIDS-related illnesses in 2023.
In 2023, someone died of HIV and AIDS-related illnesses every minute.
42.3 million people have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the start of the epidemic.
If you live in the US, I urge you to voice your deep concern about our current administration's lethal actions. The writer-activist Alexander Chee has assembled a collection of detailed scripts you can use to contact your elected representatives in Congress and add to the mounting public pressure to restore these critical resources.
I'd love to hear about your time journeying through Glass's hypnotic, heartbreaking musical impression of his friend. Let me know — either by replying to this email or sharing a comment below.
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Hi, Michael. I confess, I’ve never been a great fan of Phillip Glass’s music, but I found this quartet very moving, especially after reading your sensitive commentary, which put it in context. I especially liked Part 3. I was born the same year as Brian Buczak, and lived in NYC during the 80s. I worked at the Joseph Patelson Music House behind Carnegie Hall. We lost a lot of people to AIDS there, many talented musicians and artists. Thank you as always, for sharing this. A new discovery for me.
Michael, this is just so poignant and, well, important. I came of age as AIDS became a national talking point BUT ALSO when wearing a red ribbon was a symbol of support and inclusiveness. I was young but this time period had such an influence on me. Never did I think we’d go backwards after so much progress. And that’s because I’m shamefully naive. This Glass piece sounds like the anxiety that has undoubtedly trembled under the surface of every person who is outside of the hetero and/or cis sphere, no matter who is in charge. It’s disheartening. It’s outrageous. But there are good humans like you who continue to give stories like these the light they deserve. Thank you 💙