In their first complete performance of Feldman’s quartet, the Spektral members (violinists Clara Lyon and Maeve Feinberg, violist Doyle Armbrust and cellist Russell Rolen) brought tonal refinement, focused ensemble, and a terraced array of dynamics—consistently exploring the extreme degrees of pianissimo where most of the music lives.
Illustration: Ryan Snook
Six hours onstage, with no intermission and rests barely long enough to sip water. Sounds more like Marina Abramović performance art than a chamber music concert. But that’s precisely what the daring local ensemble Spektral Quartet will undertake on March 11 at 6 p.m. at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago when the group performs Morton Feldman’s formidable String Quartet No. 2. Lasting somewhere between five and just over six hours, Feldman’s work is the longest in the canonical string quartet repertoire. Here, in anticipation of the performance, the four musicians detail their seven steps for survival.
At about 4 p.m. on the day of the event, eat enough to last eight hours. Protein over carbs, which might make Feldman-induced serenity (he’s known for quiet pieces) tip over to food coma.
One of the more fascinating elements of Feldman’s second quartet is that of memory. Yes, it’s an absurdly long, absurdly quiet piece, but as untethered as that might sound, it’s the recurrence of material that keeps us mindful of something passing, rather than just existing. And just like memory, it is wholly unreliable. The material sounds familiar, but one tiny detail of it has been renovated.
It reminds me of one of my most indelible memories from childhood. As a family that didn’t really do vacations, visiting my grandparents in Indianapolis was borderline exotic. I can’t remember what I was performing last month, or what I’m supposed to pick up from Whole Foods on my way home today, but I can feel my 10-year-old self sitting atop scratchy astroturf on their back porch, underneath a garden table, eating my Nana’s liverwurst sandwiches and icebox cookies. This fort was killer. I had ultimate agency–no one bothered me under there and I could read until dusk–and when I was lucky, it would rain. I can still see the way the sunlight filtered through the undulating, emerald fiberglass canopy above. I can smell the funk of the liverwurst. I start salivating at the thought of the crunch of perfectly-browned cookies.
The music is exquisitely quiet, so while string players don’t have to exert great pressure on their instruments, they hold their bows for what must feel like an eternity during long tones, which are only occasionally interrupted by pizzicato plucks. With recently enlisted violinist Maeve Feinberg joining Doyle Armbrust, Russell Rolen, and Clara Lyon, Chicago’s Spektral Quartet will provide the long overdue local premiere of the quartet in conjunction with the current Merce Cunningham exhibition “Common Time” (Feldman was one of many brilliant 20th-century composers who collaborated with the choreographer).
"The sense of time distortion and suspension present in Feldman 2 for me recalls the timelessness of many sleepless nights spent in love with nighttime rambles, and the hidden things only those who stay awake will see and hear. There is a certain way in which a non-linear, conceptual piece like Feldman 2 requires a listener to accept, absorb, and re-assemble kaleidoscopic patterns in a way that is similar to the music you can hear if you listen closely to a forest at nighttime–something I did a lot of growing up and, as the chance has presented itself, over the years. Once your eyes and ears and brain quiet down and adjust to the soft darkness of a forest it’s music is rarely quiet, often loud, seldom stagnant, and moves in a shape-shifting activity all it’s own: to find music in this place is to create a structure out of the tones and rhythms of unpredictable winds and birds and stars and raindrops and insects and who knows what other manner of creatures.
"For me, this piece evokes a vivid childhood memory I have of being on a sailboat with my older brother. At one point during our sail, almost without warning, the wind dropped and a thick fog began to roll in. The sensation of watching this opaque wall of vapor approach and then completely engulf us gave me a strong feeling of inexorability and then almost total sensory deprivation. I found that in the total white-out my sense of hearing felt heightened, and yet, as we sat waiting for the fog to lift, without any concept of where we were or how fast we were moving, if at all, my sense of time became completely skewed. When the wall of fog began to dissipate and we were finally able to make out the distant outline of the coast, we found ourselves in a completely different place that we had expected and it felt that minutes or even hours could have passed.
This Friday, January 27th, marks the Chicago debut of our fantastic new violinist, Maeve Feinberg, and we thought you all might like to get a glimpse behind the scenes at what she's like...and why her personality is a perfect fit for our brand of skylarking.
Doyle: So...Beethoven Op. 74, Ravel Quartet, and Dai Fujikura’s first quartet. We’re not exactly easing you into your first Chicago concert, are we?
Maeve: I want a raise.
DA: So this show is all about pieces that feature pizzicato. If you were going to get a finger tattoo, what would it look like?
MF: Well, they say you should never get tattoos on your hands but I’m thinking “FUJIKURA” across my knuckles would be suitable for this concert.
The third in our lineup of Serious Business remixes is a real brain liquefier, and it comes by way of the one-and-only Bevin Kelley (aka Bevin Blectum)!
It turns out that "The Joke" is far from a new one for Bevin, and she had this to say about creating the remix:
I remember playing this quartet, one semester when I was a violinist at Oberlin many years ago, and I still love the second movement especially! This remix was made in and out / back and forth between Ableton Live and ProTools softwares. It uses only the source material — the Spektral recording of the second movement. The source was fragmented, layered, effected and processed in various ways, fragmented again, and finally restructured and layered again, and played/recorded live in Live. It flows in a similar trajectory to the untouched Haydn, but renegotiates the experience of time, timbre and layer. It sometimes magnifies the microscopic, or extends a stay in the whirlpool of a sound, or smashes moments together while shifting character. It is computer/electronic music responding to the digital imprint of the acoustic moment.
(photo: Brian Jackson for Chicago Tribune)
Miguel Zenon and the Spektral Quartet at Logan Center, Sept. 24:
The 10th Hyde Park Jazz Festival featured several memorable events, but one stood out: the world premiere of Zenon's "Yo Soy La Tradicion" ("I Am Tradition"), a tour de force of composition, performance and improvisation. Zenon's score was packed with remarkably complex string writing for Chicago's Spektral Quartet, the musicians finessing it all, while Zenon offered freewheeling phrasemaking one moment, carefully scored lines the next.
- Howard Reich
Allow us introduce our brilliant new violinist, Maeve Espy Feinberg! With a spirited fervor for new music and a nuanced vision for the traditional repertoire, Maeve locked into the Spektral vibe as though she'd been playing with us for years. That she shares our absurd sense of humor means that you can expect our concerts to retain and even embolden their weird wonderfulness.
Maeve hails from New York City, and studied at the New England Conservatory (with Lucy Chapman) and the Universität Mozarteum (with Paul Roczek). Her chamber music credits include the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Program, the Sandor Vegh Institut für Kammermusik, Kneisel Hall Music Festival, the Sarasota Music Festival, and most recently, she was a Composers Conference Contemporary Performance Institute Fellow.
Maeve's love of contemporary music can be traced back in part to the New York apartment in which she grew up. Her father, concert soloist Alan Feinberg, has over 200 premieres to his credit, including the world premieres of Charles Ives's "Emerson" Piano Concerto and John Cage's Piano Concerto. We can make an educated guess that there was 1000% more Feldman being played in her childhood home than in any of ours...
The newest Spektral has a few words about all of this for you:
I am thrilled to be moving to Chicago as the newest member of the Spektral Quartet! As someone who grew up in a household where it was considered fairly normal to be humming 12-tone rows to oneself, it is a dream come true to meet and play with musicians whose artistic interests and goals align so closely with my own, and who share a deep love for and commitment to music both old and new. Clara, Doyle and Russ are incredible musicians with serious chops and not-so-serious senses of humor; I can’t wait to create some beautiful (and weird) sounds with them, and to experience the strange and bewildering phenomenon of "deep-dish pizza."
Maeve will be on stage with us for the entirety of the rest of our season, including our Morton Feldman Quartet No. 2 performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Toledo Art Museum, our Chamber Music America showcase, and our tour to Rome this summer. Make sure to come up and say hello (or offer her a post-concert bourbon) the next time you come to a show!
(photo: Joe Mazza–Brave Lux)
Happy Cyber Monday everybody!
We thought we'd bypass the discounts all together and just give you a set of our ringtones for free. Use the code "CASEOFTHEMONDAYS" over on our merch page (for iPhone click here, for Android/other click here) to get a set of ten ringtones/text alerts/wake-up alarms by David Lang, Augusta Read Thomas, George Lewis, Tomeka Reid, Dominic Johnson, Jen Wang, Greg Saunier, Katherine Young, Mischa Zupko, and Andrew Tham...for $0.00.
Your telephonic device just leveled up.
Next up in our series of Serious Business remixes features the one-and-only Dominic Johnson. Dom is a fantastically versatile artist, and listeners may remember that our first-ever remix of anything ever was his re-tooling of Marcos Balter's "Chambers" from our debut album.
Now available for (free) download to all of you is his re-tooling of David Reminick's "Killing the Ape" movement from The Ancestral Mousetrap. It's a sexy little lounger that masterfully transforms our bow clicks...and we hope it makes your evening a swinger.
Dominic Johnson (electric violin) and Searchl1te at Harris Theater
To celebrate Serious Business being on the GRAMMY ballot, we've commissioned some of our favorite electronic artists to remix tracks from the album and let you download them for FREE!
First up is the incredible Max Tamahori, who you may have seen spinning late-night around Chicago. Max chose to reimagine David Reminick's "Bringing a Dead Man Back Into Life" from The Ancestral Mousetrap as an even more sinister, club-ready banger. Listen and download your copy below!
(photo: Patrick Gorski)
"The work whetted one's ears for one of Thomas' own pieces, "Selene (Moon Chariot Rituals)," a Tanglewood Festival-Third Coast co-commission receiving its Chicago premiere. The impetus of dance is never far from the surface of this exhilarating score, which melds the complementary natures of a percussion quartet and a string quartet to produce a study in inexorable rhythmic dynamism. One of Gusty Thomas' most inventive creations, it drew a supercharged performance from the combined forces of Third Coast and Spektral."
"The Friday evening concert held six world premieres shared by the Spektral Quartet and Ensemble Dal Niente.
A broken cello string early in the performance of George Lewis' String Quartet 1.5: "Experiments in Living" forced the string players to take it again from the top, giving listeners roughly one and a half hearings of the explosive lexicon of noises by the longtime member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
Leaner of texture and much more introverted of expression was a movement from a string-quartet-in-progress by Chicago Symphony Orchestra resident composer Samuel Adams. Snare drums activated by tranducer speakers lent otherworldly rattles to extremely delicate string writing that suffered for lack of a larger musical context.
One had no problem connecting at once with "Prospective Dwellers" by cellist and composer Tomeka Reid, an active presence on the local jazz scene. Jazz-inflected musings and quasi-pop harmonies gave her piece its easy, good-natured appeal. It and its companion pieces elicited incisive readings from the amazing Spektral foursome."
This violinist feature needs little-to-no introduction because it's Mr. Clara's Dad! We are very fortunate to be working with the exceptional James Lyon for our Ear Taxi shows, and given his role as violin prof. at Penn State, we expect to learn a thing or fifteen from the experience. Keep reading for string technique secrets, TMZ-level dirt on Clara, and some USDA Prime dad jokes. This run with Jim is going to be an absolute hoot!
Doyle Armbrust: Hi Jim! At one point in your career, you were a member of a quartet with a rather unusual framework. Can you tell us a bit about it?
James Lyon: Yes, for seven years I played in the Harrington String Quartet out in west Texas (insert obligatory yeehaw here). HSQ had three missions: (1) to bring the glories of the string quartet repertoire to the good people of the Texas panhandle (B) to serve as string faculty at West Texas State University (now West Texas A&M) (3) to serve as principal players in the Amarillo Symphony (D) to go where no string quartet had gone before…whoops, NASA wanted us to keep that top secret! I guess I eventually got the proverbial seven year itch and we moved to beautiful central Pennsylvania where I have taught violin and chamber music for 25 years now! (insert nature sounds and the purr of a friendly mountain lion). It was an honor to be associated with the fine musicians of the HSQ and we have remained friends as members have gone on to play in the St. Lawrence Quartet, the Montreal Symphony, San Francisco Opera, and the like.
