On June 12th, we're giving the world premiere of Sam Pluta's binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state at our season closer, YACHT ROCK – so Doyle chopped it up with Sam about his new piece, his process, and why he has nightmares about waterskiing.
Serious Business, the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet knowingly calls its collection of four pieces exploring humour in music. And there’s no question of the foursome taking any of this music lightly: these are superb performances, vivid and strongly felt, convincingly argued and full of rich, characterful detail.
‘This album is not funny,’ writes Spektral Quartet viola player Doyle Armbrust in his booklet-note about the quartet’s very not-funny new release of music by Sky Maeklay, David Reminick and Chris Fisher-Lochhead, with Haydn plopped down surreally in their midst. The resulting geeky, highly interactive, creative and collaborative fun and games drenched in pop culture are, as advertised, unlike anything its intended audience - or anyone else - has ever heard.
Humour in music can be in short supply but the Spektral Quartet did its best to remedy that in an upbeat evening celebrating its recent CD release. Cellist Russell Rolen introduced Sky Macklay’s Many Many Cadences: (2014), grinningly referring to it as ‘sadistic’. Macklay’s dazzling exercise sounds as if she collected the endings to dozens of works and then grafted them together in a series of descending scales. If it is sadistic for the musicians, it is sheer pleasure for listeners, especially with the Spektral players’ ear-tickling precision.
"Things have already fallen apart at the outset of Beat Furrer’s String Quartet No. 3; the center has given way to a marginal babel: scrapes, scratches, plucks. On Sunday at the Goethe-Institut, the superb Chicago-based Spektral Quartet, making its Boston debut, took on Furrer’s challenge of reassembling such halting signals into coherence — while still, in its playing and programming, drawing out the equivocality of Furrer’s undertaking: striving toward communication, uncertain of the possibility."
"The front cover of “Serious Business,” the Spektral Quartet’s new album, shows three members — violinists Austin Wulliman and Clara Lyon, and cellist Russell Rolen — walking toward the camera, earnest looks on their faces, while the fourth, violist Doyle Armbrust, is falling helplessly on his behind. On the back cover, Armbrust is seen writhing in pain while the other three are shown in poses of desolation and mourning — for his viola.
It’s the perfect advertisement for an album whose works incorporate humor, in wildly disparate ways, into the often severe matter of contemporary music. The photos also say something important about Spektral’s talented and ambitious musicians: serious about the music, not about themselves."
"...All were formidable, none more so than the Spektral Quartet’s free Sunday afternoon show at Fullerton Hall at the Art Institute of Chicago. The foursome of Austin Wulliman, Clara Lyon, Doyle Armbrust and Russell Rolen focuses on new music, but isn’t beholden to it. Their latest, chirpy release on the Sono Luminus label, “Serious Business,” quizzically looks at musical humor through three works from the last two years, and a fourth by an up-and-comer named Franz Josef Haydn.
Straiter laces prevailed here for an engrossing program, “Prismatic Memory.” The quartet proved that they have everything: a supreme technical command that seems to come easily; a capacity to make complicated music clear; and, most notably on this occasion, an ability to cast a magic spell of silence over a restless, gallery-going audience.
The first potion was the premiere of “Bagatellen” (2015) by Hans Thomalla, who teaches at Northwestern University. In the third of nine tight, hushed miniatures, a trill was stretched out, slowly obliterated; in the fourth, a chorale became immobile, yet still comprehensible; the last was a brushing arioso, bowed on the instruments’ bodies, necks and tuning pegs.
The players brought a similarly un-self-conscious approach to the extended techniques in Beat Furrer’s String Quartet No. 3 (2004), an enveloping, bona fide masterpiece that stretches over 50 uninterrupted minutes. For some reason, the reputation of the Swiss-born Mr. Furrer has not properly crossed the Atlantic. It should..."
Composer Chris Fisher-Lochhead's Hack for string quartet takes its inspiration and musical materials from an unlikely source: the vocal stylings of stand-up comedians. Chris carefully transcribed the pitch, rhythm, and cadence of 16 great comics of the past and present, and composed a piece of music with a completely unique harmonic world and sense of flow .
We've created this custom video player so that you can explore Chris's ingenious musical character study with two classic bits from Dave Chappelle and Sarah Silverman.
Hit play and then move the slider to crossfade between the original audio and the quartet music. (Note: this player works best on a desktop browser, and does not work at all on iOS.)
For a more in-depth look into the process of creating Hack, see Chris's 6-part blog series at Hack UnPacked
Hack is featured on our new album Serious Business, now available on the Sono Luminus record label. Find it on Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play
In Medieval times musicians were essentially court jesters—entertainers who performed music, told jokes, and did tricks to entertain the nobility or to make money at fairs and markets. But somewhere along the long and winding road of the Western music tradition, music became much more serious.
Fast forward to the 21st century, where opera houses and concert halls protect and preserve a canon of “serious” classical works. Audience members dress in suits and gowns, sit quietly in their seats, read expertly-crafted program notes, stick their noses in the air and, most importantly, never clap between movements.
Or at least, that’s how it feels sometimes. But the Spektral Quartet is here to dispel that classical concert-going stereotype and inject a little much-needed comic relief into the classical music realm.
Spektral’s new album, titled “Serious Business,” is anything but serious. The album comprises four different perspectives on humor through the lens of classical music, featuring three new works by living composers and one classic from that late, great father of the string quartet, Joseph Haydn.
Perhaps the funniest few seconds of "Serious Business," the new recording by Chicago's cutting-edge Spektral Quartet, is the entry of Franz Joseph Haydn's well-mannered String Quartet No. 2 (Opus 33) on the heels of David Reminick's decidedly ill-mannered "The Ancestral Mousetrap" (2014), in which the instrumentalists play and sing (sometimes in four-part harmony) an absurdist-macabre text by Russell Edson.
The first step in any musical treatment of speech is transcription, the translation from recorded source material into musical terms and notation. Just like conventional music, the sounds of speech are defined by pitch, rhythm, and loudness, but unlike conventional music, those qualities are constantly in flux. This makes it difficult to accomplish an exact translation, but through some ingenuity and a willingness to simplify, an acceptable approximation is possible.
Throughout Hack, the transcribed source material is subjected to a range of transformations. These include the extraction of accompanimental figures based on the pitches and rhythms of the speech, the fragmentation and distribution of the speech melody among several instrumental parts, and the creation of new musical lines extrapolated from musical artifacts found in the source material.
In the Transcribing Speech section above, I demonstrated how, at the end of “3 - Dave Chappelle,” I maintained the speech rhythms of the original material but expanded the single vocal line into a full harmonic texture. While, in itself, speech already has a melodic contour and a pattern of rhythmic emphasis, it does not suggest harmonies of any kind. Therefore, in order to write contrapuntal or harmonic textures for the string quartet (a medium that excels at both), I found it necessary to abstract harmonies from the speech melodies.
