What happens when one of Chicago’s most innovative contemporary music ensembles can’t rehearse or perform?
In the case of the Spektral Quartet, the musicians apparently go through several stages of reaction, including shock, acceptance and renewal.
“Like for most ensembles and most people in the arts, this has been frankly a scary time,” says Spektral violist Doyle Armbrust, referring to the shutdown of concerts due to the coronavirus.
“We had our biggest touring season to date coming up this spring, and we watched all of those dates and all of that income evaporate pretty much overnight. ... Of course, the reaction you have to having all of your work disappear – initially, that is just terrifying.
“And it’s a different experience than how we feel now. It’s still scary, but we’re more into: How do we navigate this mode?”
One thing the Spektrals didn’t want to do was instantly switch simply to presenting their events online. Considering the rather low technical and aesthetic values of many livestream performances deluging the Internet, that may have been a wise approach. There’s something numbing about seeing all those heavily edited Zoom “concerts” in which musicians are reduced to so many tiny rectangles.
Or as Armbrust puts it, “One thing that is important to us is that what we offer virtually is not some sort of square peg in a round hole – shoving something into a virtual format. To us that would be a giant mistake, to take the Chicago season we’ve had planned for a year now and try to shove that online somehow.”
So the Spektrals took a little time to figure out a more personalized approach. On April 17, they launched the puckishly titled New Music Help Desk, which their website bills as “an opportunity for composers and performers to get face time with Spektral – to ask pointed questions about notation, feasibility, tuning systems, and even (gasp!) string harmonics. Our aim is to use our skills to both build community and keep creativity flowing for artists hemmed in by this quarantine.”
In effect, the Spektrals were taking their philosophies online, rather than merely placing their performances there.
For in the residencies that the quartet has done across the country, “We get to have workshops, master classes, etc., with young and emerging composers,” says Armbrust. “This is a way of opening up that conversation, albeit virtually.”
In essence, the musicians realized that in order to form a personalized identity online, they needed to feature at least one key component that drives all their work: interactivity.
“For us, it’s all about community building,” explains Armbrust. “Our mission is really to demystify unfamiliar music and to strip away whatever preconceived notions people have of what a classical music concert is. I know that sounds a bit high-minded. But if the point is for us to make everyone feel welcome, for us to be online it needs to feel like a conversation. That’s what our concerts are like.
“We’re known as a talky group. Not as a history lesson, but to share why we love the music we’re playing, why we’re putting it forward.”
Thus they also created The Floating Lounge, described on the website as “a community-focused, online listening series produced by Spektral Quartet to bring curious listeners together during a time of isolation.”
The first one, on April 29, was an interactive listening party featuring the debut release from Sideband, a new Chicago record label.
And the next Floating Lounge, from 7:30 to 9 p.m. June 10, will be “George Lewis Plays the Hits,” featuring the singular composer-author-instrumentalist. Lewis, a MacArthur Fellowship winner and a Columbia University music professor, wrote the monumental study, “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music” (University of Chicago Press).
To spend time with Lewis, online or off, is a privilege not easily passed up.
“Interacting with George, which some of us have done personally and which we have done as a group, is just an eye-opening experience,” says Armbrust. “He’s such a font of knowledge, and his way to cross-reference things that were never connected in some way is pretty outstanding. And he has a great dry sense of humor. So it made sense to ... ask him to come and bring some music with him.”
For the event, the Spektrals will converse with Lewis via Zoom, perhaps listen to “at least a snippet” of the quartet he wrote for them, says Armbrust. “But the thrust is whatever music he decides” to play. “We’ll listen to a track and open it up” for discussion.
“We’ll have questions for him.”
And, of course, those who tune in can ask their own.