(E Jason Wambsgans / Chicago Tribune)
If the walls of Spektral Quartet’s Rogers Park rehearsal space could talk, they’d tell you about all the remarkable music they’ve heard there in the past 12 years, selections from Debussy and Schubert sitting comfortably alongside, say, Sufjan Stevens arrangements.
Then, they’d probably groan about the godawful viola jokes they’ve overheard.
Violinists Clara Lyon and Theo Espy (who previously performed under the name Maeve Feinberg), violist Doyle Armbrust and cellist Russell Rolen are unrepentant on that point — after all, you’re talking to the quartet who once released an album cover of Armbrust mid-tumble on Northwestern University’s quad.
“Humor is pretty essential to what we do and how we approach our programming,” Lyon says.
It’s also precisely what endeared them to classical music acolytes, serious and not-so-serious alike. During that time, the string quartet blossomed from a local treasure to an internationally renowned, Grammy-nominated juggernaut, especially in the sometimes-niche sphere of contemporary classical music.
“They come from that big-boned ‘three Bs’ (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms) world, and they’re not turning their backs on it. They’re trying to open what classical music can be,” says Luna Edward, an artist and DJ who estimates he’s been to at least 10 Spektral performances since learning about the group five years ago. “I think there’s no more noble way to do it than to also make it fun.”
In November, Spektral Quartet shocked fans like Edward when they announced they would split up at the end of the season. Rather than tackle new initiatives, the remainder of Spektral’s final season is dedicated entirely to projects lost to the pandemic. It’s all capped by a hometown farewell bash at Salvage One, a West Town furniture reseller and event space, on June 12.
“Bill Murray may or may not show up,” Rolen says, to snorts from the rest of the quartet.
If a salvage shop seems like an odd host for a string quartet concert, that’s mostly par for the course for Spektral, whose other marquee event of the season is in no less psychedelic a space than Adler Planetarium’s domed Grainger Sky Theater. There, on April 7 and 8, they play Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s first quartet, “Enigma” — a Spektral commission — with a projected installation by Sigurdur Gudjonsson.
You’d be forgiven for assuming Gudjonsson’s video art depicts a craggy lunarscape as seen through a telescope, or perhaps a grayscale nebula. But it’s practically the opposite: It’s the surface of a carbon fragment, as captured by an electron microscope. The slippage between the massive and the minuscule echoes the blurred binaries in Thorvaldsdottir’s score — pitch and sound, rhythm and flow.
Seeing the Spektrals perform the piece live only deepens “Enigma’s” sonic sleight of hand. Thorvaldsdottir’s quartet sounds far greater than the sum of its parts, an elemental force awakening through the crunch of bows against strings and harmonics whistling like high winds.
“They were so enthusiastic about doing everything right. As a composer, it’s a dream to work with performers like that,” Thorvaldsdottir says.
The same out-of-the-box thinking that dreamed up the interdisciplinary “Enigma” has been a core commandment of Spektral’s since it was formed in 2010 by Armbrust, Rolen, and founding violinists Aurélien Fort Pederzoli and Austin Wulliman. Some of the quartet’s early projects included a collaboration with Julien Labro — a virtuoso of the bandoneón, a cousin of the accordion foundational to tango music — and its “Mobile Miniatures” series, for which the quartet commissioned 45 composers to write original, downloadable ringtones.
After Lyon replaced Fort Pederzoli in 2014 and Espy replaced Wulliman in 2016, the Spektrals embarked on more ambitious projects still. Their “Once More, With Feeling!” concerts presented new works in two complete run-throughs, with a discussion in the middle, and in 2017, they performed Morton Feldman’s six-hour-long “String Quartet No. 2″ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
“We advertised that the way you would a marathon: We asked people to pledge to be there with us for the whole thing. And about 50 people signed up,” Lyon remembers. “They won some pretty silly headbands.”
When this paper named the ensemble Chicagoans of the Year in classical music that year, it praised the quartet’s “concert series bringing fresh formats to unusual venues across the city.” Rolen says the group’s tradition of shaking up conventional concert experiences was indirectly inspired by Chicago’s experimental and storefront theater scenes, which “welcomed their audiences into an immersive experience.”
“One of our longest-serving board members, who’s a cellist herself, once talked to us about going to concerts all her life and still feeling like an outsider — like she was being presented to, not like a valued, reciprocal member of the experience,” he says. “From the very beginning, that fed into a desire to make the experiences that we produced welcoming. It would be OK not to know what’s on the program, (because) the social space was taken care of.”
“Spektral is just as liable to do a traditional recital in a wooden, acoustically nice hall somewhere, or take a walk through the forest with their music, or do this Adler thing,” says Edward, the Spektral superfan. “They get that music is about where it sits, too — if it’s only ever in that special, secret type of space, you’re missing all the other options on the table.”
Virtual spaces were no exception. When COVID-19 touched down in the U.S., Spektral pivoted to Zoom early on but eschewed attempts to stage traditional performances in that format. Instead, the quartet brought attendees together for offbeat, interactive events, starting with an irreverent talent show in April 2020. (With a giggle-turned-grimace, Lyon and Armbrust recall their hairdresser dropping in to give attendees an all-too-prescient masterclass in cutting their own bangs.) More virtual programming followed: “Floating Lounge,” a musical show-and-tell of sorts featuring a guest musician’s playlists, and “New Music Help Desk,” an open forum for attendees to ask composers nuts-and-bolts questions about their scores.
“As COVID was hitting, Spektral’s events were one of our lifelines,” says Lou Philipson, an endocrinologist and professor at the University of Chicago Medicine.
An amateur violist, Philipson says his personal repertoire hews to the 18th century: Haydn, Mozart, early Beethoven. After learning about Spektral during its seven-year-long residency at the University of Chicago, Philipson has discovered plenty of new music through the quartet — including Miguel Zenón, the saxophonist and composer behind Spektral’s 2018 album, “Yo Soy La Tradición,” which was nominated for a Grammy in the Latin Jazz category. “Fanm d’Ayiti,” a love letter to Haitian women with music composed by vocalist and flutist Nathalie Joachim, was nominated the following year for Best World Music Album. Spektral is touring both projects this season with Zenón and Joachim.
“I don’t get the sense that (other quartets) have the same spread or the same love for almost any kind of music, any kind of style. If it appeals to them, they’ll figure it out,” Philipson says.
Or, at least, they had for more than a decade. Buoyed by a surge of support during the pandemic, the Spektrals maintain that budget shortfalls weren’t a factor in their decision to disband after this season. But the quartet was guarded when it came to specifics about their split, beyond pointing to the breakneck pace of its pre-pandemic seasons and the self-reflection afforded by concert standstills.
“As we all assessed what’s important to each one of us, we realized there were factors pulling us apart. We decided it was better to be intentional about how things finished, rather than be pulled apart and struggle against that pulling,” Armbrust says.
But the formal conclusion of Spektral’s Chicago season in June is far from the last audiences will hear from the quartet. In the summer, they give an encore performance of “Enigma” in Reykjavik, Iceland, where Thorvaldsdottir and Gudjonsson both are from, and they plan to release a virtual reality version of Gudjonsson’s installation at a later date. Also in the pipeline are recordings of other recent projects: a to-be-announced release of Tonia Ko’s “Plain, Air” — originally performed in Highland Park’s Openlands Lakeshore Preserve in 2018, with new narration by “Braiding Sweetgrass” author Robin Wall Kimmerer — and Alex Temple’s “Behind the Wallpaper,” featuring singer Julia Holter, out on New Amsterdam Records in 2023.
“Having reflected and talked about this so much allowed us to end on our own terms — not with a fizzle, but with a bang,” Espy says.
–Hannah Edgar