If any chamber group can rival the jack’s quarantine frenzy, it is the Spektral Quartet, a wide-ranging ensemble based in Chicago. The members of the Spektral—Clara Lyon, Maeve Feinberg, Doyle Armbrust, and Russell Rolen—have kept themselves occupied by launching two absorbing live-stream programs, the Floating Lounge and New Music Help Desk, which mix music and discussion. The group has also made several appearances in the virtual realm. As part of a streaming series hosted by Cal Performances, in Berkeley, the Spektral joined the Haitian-American composer, vocalist, and flutist Nathalie Joachim to reprise material from Joachim’s entrancing album “Fanm d’Ayiti” (New Amsterdam), which mixes arrangements of Haitian folk songs with Joachim’s original compositions inspired by songs in Kreyòl. During a tense season, the complex radiance of Joachim’s musical sensibility may have the effect of palpably lowering your blood pressure. The group will soon celebrate its tenth anniversary with a virtual gala titled Keep Spektral Weird.
The Spektral’s major project of the benighted year 2020, though, has been an album titled “Experiments in Living,” which is certain to appear on my year-end list of notable recordings. It is a tour-de-force survey of repertory, classic and modern, demonstrating in almost textbook fashion how nineteenth-century Romanticism evolved into twentieth-century modernism and then into the all-devouring experimentalism of recent decades. If you listen to the album in the given order, you will begin with Brahms’s Quartet in C Minor, from 1873, in which the traditional process of thematic development is pursued with a kind of microscopic intensity that presages the breakdown of conventional harmonic structures. That breakdown is achieved in Schoenberg’s Third String Quartet (1927), even as the exposition and development of musical ideas obey classical rigor. A further breakdown takes place in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet (1931), a monument of American modernism; in its Andante, discrete thematic ideas dissolve into a continuously undulating texture. From there, the path is open to a group of latter-day American composers: Sam Pluta, Anthony Cheung, Charmaine Lee, and George Lewis.
Yet the Spektral players encourage their listeners to break from proceeding in a straight-ahead chronological fashion. They propose that the tracks be shuffled, but not in the sense of the shuffle feature in Apple Music, which randomizes tracks on a playlist. Rather, the physical packing for “Experiments in Living” comes with a deck of tarot-style illustrated cards, one for each track on the album. The listener is invited to shuffle the cards, lay them out on the table, and determine the track order by flipping them. A set of smaller cards are printed with adjectives—“labyrinthine,” “relentless,” “frisky,” “deviant,” and so on—which listeners can use to tease out connections among the various pieces. You choose one to identify continuities on the playlist.
As one who relies too much on adjectives professionally, I made sparing use of the smaller cards, but I enjoyed the physicality of the shuffling. The cards have a lovely touch of the occult about them, as if a fortune-teller were pointing up secret connections. And, indeed, resemblances crop up all over, especially when one of the historical composers butts against a living one. Rapidly skittering figures in Pluta’s “binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state” pick up from Crawford Seeger’s mercurial textures. A delicate interplay of short motives in Cheung’s “The Real Book of Fake Tunes,” for flute and string quartet—Claire Chase joins the Spektral players on the recording—is akin to the contrapuntal games of the Schoenberg. To hear the fractured vocalizations of Lee’s “Spinals” after the Brahms’s vigorous finale risks whiplash, yet the transition from one to the other had the revelatory shock of a masterly cinematic cut.
At the end of the “official” sequence comes Lewis’s “Experiments in Living,” from which the album’s title comes. Lewis found the phrase in John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” in a passage discussing the freedom of individuals to express themselves within a harmonious social whole. The composer writes, “I’m looking for listeners to experience the volatility of memory, resistance, and hope.” This is the heftiest of the contemporary pieces, and, in it, various strands from the older works seem to come into play, as if the composer were making a grand synthesis of string-quartet tradition even as he unleashed the devices of the post-1945 avant-garde. I felt a peculiar sense of connection between Lewis and Brahms, although I had difficulty pinpointing just what it was. Eventually, I realized that the players’ application in the Brahms of the seemingly old-fashioned gesture of portamento, sliding lushly from note to note, forms an unexpected link to Lewis’s thoroughgoing use of glissando.
In the end, the Spektral’s ingenious presentation is simply to invite active and repeated listening—to move the music from the background to the foreground, to read it like a book. The album also invites repeat encounters because it is sensationally well played. The account of the Brahms is a feast of rhythmic clarity and lyrical thrust. The Schoenberg, so often cluttered and frantic-sounding in performance, has flow and dance. Extreme precision of intonation and articulation highlights the fact that the Crawford Seeger is an essentially perfect score, every note charged with purpose. The same meticulousness governs the group’s approach to the contemporary pieces, yet fury comes to the fore when called for. The Spektral has accomplished the signal service of obliterating the dividing line between past and present, tradition and avant-garde; chronological barriers collapse, and the sounds roam free.
– Alex Ross
Kill Yr Idols: The Movie Issue
Ghosts in the Machine
Spektral Quartet is one of the many, many excellent string quartets on the contemporary scene (the 21st century has, so far, been the era of the string quartet in classical music, every new, young quartet that comes along seems to be already playing at the highest level, which I have to think is a tribute to what conservatory training is like nowadays, at least for string players). Everybody plays well and has a repertoire that stretches from the 18th to the 21st century—something that used to be novel is now commonplace, which is a good thing for the music but can make it hard to mark one group, or performance or recording, as compelling vis-a-vis the others.
Spektral presents itself in a way that does separate the group from the crowd. There is the willingness to go deep into the literature—they’re one of the few groups to actually sit down and perform Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2—and also an attitude that balances seriousness and personality. They are trying to get beyond the album/program format, an idea that in normal circumstances would be quirky but that now, when we are stuck in the album format, is a relief from the creeping monotony of the listening experience. At the end of the summer, they put out Experiments in Living, a digital double-album (over two hours) that has two salient features. One is the adept, passionate playing that encompasses Brahms’ String Quartet No. 1, Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet (one of the great works in the literature), Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 3, and new pieces; The Real Book of Fake Tunes, written by Anthony Cheung and with Claire Chase added on flute, Charmaine Lee’s Spinals, with Lee performing with her voice and using electronics, Sam Pluta’s binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state, and the title piece, courtesy of George Lewis.
Yes, you say, great old and new music, superb! But what’s so different about this? Since this is a digital release, the quartet set up a Tarot-deck based randomizer (they call it a choose-your-own-adventure thing) where you can pick cards, or generate a random draw, and shuffle the tracks of the album (it’s here, you need to enter an email address and your name but don’t need to opt-in to any marketing list).
In the scheme of things, which here means my own experiences in and knowledge of music, this is cute and not much of a thing. If you download the album, or play it through a streaming service, you can shuffle tracks. It’s a make-your-own-playlist that millions of people do all the time. But in the world of classical music, this is something of a step into the unknown. I’m agnostic on whether or not it’s a useful step, but any and every question toward the hidebound, bourgeois protocols and ceremonies of the recording and performing format is worthwhile, because the need is acute.
And, to give Spektral credit, they’ve got something going on today, Friday, October 9, that looks exciting. The group has been working with Anna Thorvaldsdottir (the most important contemporary composer) on a work she made for them, Enigma (with video artist Sigurdur Gudjonsson). The pandemic cancelled the premiere and tour, but Spektral is going to record the music, and that starts off with them getting together to rehearse it again. And you can be there! A, if you will, fly-in-the-hair experience.
This is a happening over the intertubes, of course, 4-5:30pm EST. Go to this page to RSVP. I think this kind of thing has long legs. Don’t give me rebranded shuffle, let me see how this stuff is made, let me see how you get from that first note on the page to the finished performance. Rehearsals, well run, are more fascinating than performances, and I really think that’s true for the vast non-classical music public as well. Rehearsing through a piece of composed music is a resource, and a deep one, classical music has at its disposal, and no other music has this. Use it, people.
The Road to Sound: August 2020 in Experimental Music
“Experiments in Living is another somewhat retrospective album, traversing the classic sound of Johannes Brahms and the always surprising vocal improvisations of Charmaine Lee alike. Spektral Quartet shows off their chops on this album — they’re equally adroit at performing Ruth Crawford Seeger’s biting early 20th-century modernism as they are George Lewis’ wild experimentations. There’s a current of energy that runs through each piece that ties the different sonic worlds together, creating the monolithic package of modern string quartet music that Experiments in Living represents.”
Chicago Reader: Spektral Quartet’s Experiments in Living upends the timeline to stake out a fresh vantage point
“The through line of Spektral Quartet’s first studio release in four years, Experiments in Living, is that there is no through line—at least on the surface. The double album covers 150 years of history, from Brahms to living lions such as George Lewis, but rather than foist a chronological or thematic flow onto the recording, the Chicago ensemble encourage nonlinear pathways and heavy use of the “shuffle” feature. Preorders of the album through their site even come with a deck of tarot-like cards with collages from Danish artist ØjeRum; each card corresponds to a different track, so that every reading reveals a distinct playlist.
On one of my shuffled listens, I pinballed from the skittering major-key rejoinder in the first movement of Brahms’s String Quartet no. 1 into its shadowy analogue in the opening of Schoenberg’s String Quartet no. 3. In the same session, I hurtled from Binary/Momentary Logics: Flow State/Joy State by Chicago-based composer Sam Pluta, which glows with the heat of a live wire, straight into Lewis’s String Quartet no. 1.5, “Experiments in Living,” a 16-minute cataclysm that pulls the rug out from under you at every turn. I was struck by how both pieces simultaneously embrace and rail against the universe. The album also features a commanding interpretation of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1931 String Quartet (a masterwork as timelessly radical as The Rite of Spring) and a definitive version of Anthony Cheung’s The Real Book of Fake Tunes (commissioned for Spektral and flutist Claire Chase, who performs here with her usual sensitivity and verve), as well as a freewheeling improvisation with experimental vocalist Charmaine Lee called Spinals.
Experiments in Living endorses a topsy-turvy view of time that casts the familiar in a new light and presents wet-ink works like they’ve been around since the 19th century, but the whimsy and effervescence of Spinals make it stand out even on this delectably disorienting album.”
Sequenza 21: Spektral Quartet – Experiments in Living
The Spektral Quartet takes advantage of the open-ended playing time of a digital release to create effectively a double album for their latest recording, Experiments in Living. While double albums often suffer from a bit of flab, this one doesn’t have an extraneous moment. It is a well curated release that attends to meaning making in contemporary music with a spirit that is both historically informed and deeply of this moment.
A clever extra-musical addition to the project is a group of Tarot cards that allow the listener to ‘choose their own adventure,’ making their way through the various pieces in different orderings. These are made by the artist/musician øjeRum. The tarot cards may be seen on the album’s site.
It might seem strange to begin an album of 20/21 music with Johannes Brahms’s String Quartet Op. 51, no. 1 in C-minor (1873). However, Arnold Schoenberg’s article “Brahms as Progressive” makes the connection between the two composers clear. It also demonstrates Spektral’s comfort in the standard repertoire. They give an energetic reading of the quartet with clear delineation of its thematic transformations, a Brahms hallmark.
Schoenberg is represented by his Third String Quartet (1927). His first quartet to use 12-tone procedures, it gets less love in the literature than the oft-analyzed combinatorics of the composer’s Fourth String Quartet, but its expressive bite still retains vitality over ninety years later. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet (1931), an under-heralded masterpiece of the 20th century, receives one of the best recordings yet on disc, its expressive dissonant counterpoint rendered with biting vividness.
Sam Pluta’s Flow State/Joy State is filled with flurries of glissandos, microtones, and harmonics to create a thoroughly contemporary sound world punctuated by dissonant verticals. One of Pluta’s most memorable gestures employs multiple glissandos to gradually make a chord cohere, only to have subsequent music skitter away. Charmaine Lee’s Spinals incorporates her own voice, replete with lip trills and sprechstimme that are imitated by string pizzicato and, again, glissandos.
Spektral is joined by flutist Claire Chase on Anthony Cheung’s “Real Book of Fake Tunes,” which combines all manner of effects for Chase with jazzy snips of melody and writing for quartet that is somewhat reminiscent of the techniques found in the Schoenberg, but with a less pervasively dissonant palette. Cheung’s writing for instruments is always elegantly wrought, and Chase and Spektral undertake an excellent collaboration. One could imagine an entire album for this quintet being an engaging listen.
The recording’s title track is George Lewis’s String Quartet 1.5; he wrote a prior piece utilizing quartet but considers this his first large-scale work in the genre. Many of the techniques on display in Pluta’s piece play a role here as well. Lewis adds to these skittering gestures, glissandos, and microtones the frequent use of various levels of bow pressure, including extreme bow pressure in which noise is more present than pitch. The latter crunchy sounds provide rhythmic weight and accentuation that offsets the sliding tones. Dovetailing glissandos create a blurring effect in which harmonic fields morph seamlessly. The formal design of the piece is intricate yet well-balanced. More string quartets, labeled 2.5 and 3.5, are further contributions by Lewis to the genre. One hopes that Spektral will take them up as well – their playing of 1.5 is most persuasive.
Avant Music News: AMN Reviews – Spektral Quartet – Experiments in Living
In its willingness to disrupt ordinary ways of listening to music within a highly diverse tradition, The Spektral Quartet’s Experiments in Living is certainly a challenging recording, and a stimulating one as well.
A Closer Listen: Spektral Quartet ~ Experiments in Living
What is good music? Who gets to decide? We do, of course! Just kidding, all we do is chime in. While it’s safe to say that Arnold Schoenberg’s “String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30” (1873) and Ruth Crawford (Seeger)’s “String Quartet” (1931) have been accepted as canonical, it’s also fair to call Spektral Quartet’s renditions exquisite; and for some modern listeners, a revelation. These compositions fill what would under other circumstances be the first of two discs, the difference being that these works are not meant to have a designated batting order. One may approach them from a Cageian perspective, tossing the cards like an I Ching; one may pick and choose; one may even limit the playing time to a suggested 15 to 55 minute session. Their presence on vinyl or disc would be limiting. If Spektral Quartet does have a rule, it is that there are no rules.
So let’s get to that new music! As a member of the Wet Ink Ensemble, Sam Pluta is already an established name, and “binary / momentary logics: flow state / joy state” allows him to show off his playful side. Spektral Quartet apologizes for the fact that there will be “no hit singles” from this album, but why not? And what is a hit single anyway? It’s a hit if we say it is, and this one has Top of the Pops written all over it. Everyone loves dissonance, sudden timbre changes, abrupt strokes of the bow and the vast borderland between electronic and organic. Once one has listened to all the great 19th and 20th century auteurs, Pluta fits right in. And as Brahms has proven, accessibility and simplicity need not be barriers to (eventual) popularity. Looking at the cards, we choose skittering, glitchy and gutsy. Who’s having fun now? We are.
Wow, we would not want to fall off that bookcase. Okay, now back to the music! Anthony Cheung‘s “The Real Book of Fake Tunes” is highlighted by the sublime flautist Claire Chase. These five brief movements, each short enough to be a single (okay, we’ll let it go) continue the sense of experimentalism with humor and verve. The zesty trills and somber strings flirt with one another, suggesting that they are not so easily pigeonholed. Methinks the violin doth protest too much. The lines blur between past and present, an advantage of composition untethered to populist preferences. The music is brash and bold; for an image, we need something confrontational. The giant eye and dark coats of Card #7 fit the bill, although they are tagged Schoenberg. Now we seek a link between the two, not difficult to find, especially between Shoenberg’s fourth movement and Cheung’s third.
Born in 1991, the youngest composer on the set is a testament to the fact that brilliance determines its own schedule. Offering the album’s only vocal piece, Charmaine Lee leads the quartet with trills, pops, growls, gargles, breath and other onomatopoeia, sounding like a cross between Minions, a Coke can and a balloon. The “hi”s at the end are charming. For this, we need a 21st card; why not draw our own? The Quartet “closes” the album with George Lewis‘ “String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living,” ostensibly the title piece, although also ~ should one choose to play it first ~ an overture. If sounds had words (and thanks to the smaller cards in the deck, they do!), these notes might correspond to the utterances of Lee, the garbled tragedy of 19th century reviews, or the reactions of your friends, who really, really want you to choose something else to play. That is, until you break out the cards, play the game, compare notes, and establish the case that accessible and inaccessible, popular and unpopular, durable and disposable are all functions of perception. By (literally) shuffling the deck, Spectral Quartet calls the assumptions of listeners to task while providing multiple access points for appreciation.
Music City Review: SPEKTRAL QUARTET TOUTS NEW LISTENING EXPERIENCE
The Experience
First and foremost I will say this: the album is performed, recorded, and produced beautifully. It delivers – and exceeds – the promise of quality that you would expect from a group of this caliber. The dazzling performances of Claire Chase (flute) and Charmaine Lee (composition, voice, and electronics) add variety and push this project beyond a “par for the course” String record. The music speaks for itself, but the selling point of the album is the interactive experience.
When I first downloaded the album and sorted through the promotional material I was torn. The angel on my right shoulder was saying that it was an interesting idea; that I should give it a chance. The devil on my left was saying the only innovative thing they’ve managed to achieve is complicating a handy little invention commonly referred to as “the shuffle feature”. The premise is that you can listen to this album in a different order each time. Instead of going through the tracks numerically you can skip around and choose your own adventure. That idea, in itself, is not at all novel. As a matter of fact, you can already do that with any album you choose. Blood on the Tracks is around fifty-two minutes long, but sometimes I just want to listen to “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Shelter from the Storm”. The question that I kept coming back to was this: how is that any different than creating a playlist on Spotify?
We are all so used to streaming our music. That ease of access is a catch 22. Any song we want is at the touch of our finger, but that ease sometimes makes us lose the reverence we should have. Igor Stravisnky said, “For one can listen without hearing, just as one can look without seeing. The absence of active effort and the liking acquired for this facility make for laziness.” He was talking about radio and the phonograph, but it is shocking how much more accurate this statement becomes when applied to streaming.
I used to buy CDs. I would spend every cent of my Christmas money at Best Buy as a teenager. There was a ritual to unboxing the disk, looking at the album art, reading the liner notes, and intently following along with the lyrics for the duration of the album. That ritual has been replaced – and I hate to admit it, but I feel that I am not alone here – with absently listening to one movement I like from a Mozart Symphony, two or three Drake songs, and half of a podcast episode; all while cleaning my house, eating dinner, scrolling on Instagram, and texting. That is what makes this album so remarkable. The act of receiving those Tarot cards in the mail, opening the box, reading about the album, picking the order of tracks. The experience forced me to take a minute and be actively involved.
Will this revolutionize how we consume art music in the 21st century? No, probably not. Is it meant to? I don’t think so. I think it was meant to be an experiment, but it is an experiment with value that we should all take a part in. The experience is a truly beautiful thing.
Classics Today: Spektral Stimulation
Artistic Quality: 9
Sound Quality: 10
To be sure, more expansive and genial readings of Brahms’ C minor Quartet can be had (for example, the Alban Berg Quartett, the Quartetto Italiano), yet Spektral’s lean textured, contrapuntally clear outer movements and deliberately held-back Allegretto hold comparable validity. Shapely nuance and intelligent use of portamento and vibrato enliven Schoenberg’s still-foreboding syntax: compare Spektral’s conversational bounce in the Allegretto to the relatively stiff and clipped New Vienna String Quartet recording, or the specificity of their melodic pointing in the Adagio next to the Leipziger Streichquartett’s more generalized though impeccable execution.
Their interpretation of Ruth Crawford’s astonishing 1931 Quartet easily matches the Pacifica Quartet’s reference recording, especially in the finale’s nimbly phrased unison lines. By contrast, the Sam Pluta composition is all about percussive attacks and releases. It often evokes DJs employing scratching techniques at super speed. The music demands and receives as vivacious and hard-hitting a performance as one is likely to hear.
Anthony Cheung’s The Real Book of Fake Tunes amounts to a textural tour-de-force, where flutist Claire Chase’s amazing command of extended techniques assiduously integrate within the composer’s boundless gestural arsenal. The fourth movement in particular stands out for Cheung’s blending of pizzicato punctuations and sustained chording, and for the climactic cascading runs with instruments in all registers.
New York Times: Orchestras Looking to Broaden Horizons? Start Improvising
And the Spektral Quartet’s new double album, “Experiments in Living,” juxtaposes works from the Germanic canon with newer, more experimental pieces — including the fully improvised “Spinals,” which the group conceived with the improvising vocalist Charmaine Lee, taking two weekends to train in Ms. Lee’s improvisational practice.
“We wanted Brahms on there; we wanted Schoenberg,” the violinist Maeve Feinberg said. “We just kind of liked the idea of the whole range there. And trying to make the statement that Brahms could exist in the same place as something being improvised in the moment.” (The album also includes a fully notated George Lewis work.)
Ms. Lee said in an email that while two weeks wasn’t enough time to fully ground the Spektral players in her style, the resulting piece succeeded in achieving “an honest engagement and representation of my practice.” She added that she was grateful to the quartet for its openness toward improvisers. Mx. Feinberg said that it was important to the group, as novices at improvisation, to do its best to learn Ms. Lee’s particular approach.
“If you’re going to try to do the thing and step out, you also don’t want to slight this tradition,” Mx. Feinberg said. “The worst thing I could imagine is sort of putting it on a bigger stage and doing it a disservice.”
That may have been what Bernstein inadvertently did in 1964. But with the New York Philharmonic committing to increasing its diversity of offerings over “a lengthy process,” there is yet time for the orchestra — and others like it — to catch up and branch out.
Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: August 2020
One of the reasons Spektral Quartet have remained favorites of Chicago’s new music scene is their holistic interest in the trajectory of classical music and how it connects with contemporary repertoire. This superb new double album expands the way the group often programs its concerts. Yes, it’s strange to include a performance of Brahms’ String Quartet in C Minor in this column, but the group features the piece because the composer’s harmonic sense was celebrated by Arnold Schoenberg, the 20th century paradigm-shifter whose String Quartet No. 3 is also performed here. Also included is Ruth Crawford Seeger’s brilliant and perennially overlooked 1931 String Quartet. The second half of the collection zooms in on the present; the slashing intensity and radical dynamics of Sam Pluta’s “binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state;” the transplanted harmonic language of jazz within a formal classical structure behind the splintered melodies of guest flutist Claire Chase on Anthony Cheung’s “Real Book of Fake Tunes;” the purely spontaneous electricity of the quartet’s splattery yet cogent collaboration with improvising vocalist Charmaine Lee on “Spinals;” and the, by turns, eerie, violent, serene, and percussive George Lewis work “String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living.” The second disc provides a potent sampler of some crucial threads in 21st century composition.
LA Times: Why George Lewis’ revolutionary ‘Shadowgraph, 5' can last 3 minutes or 4 hours
(Micah Fluellen / Los Angeles Times)
Through it all, Lewis has insisted on the crucial African American contribution to Western music — in particular improvisation in all its ramifications — and he has been critical of those who ignore or deny it. In an influential musicological essay, Lewis positioned the influences of Charlie Parker and John Cage on modern music, noting the difference between the revolutionary shock of Bird’s bebop and what he considers the more aestheticized aspect of Cage’s uses of indeterminacy. It is a nice touch that the newest recording of Lewis’ music, his quirkily imaginative “String Quartet, 1.5: Experiments in Living,” written for the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet, will be released Aug. 28, the day before what would have been Parker’s 100th birthday.
Floating Lounge On-Demand: Charmaine Lee (video)
It didn’t surprise us at all that improvisor/vocalist Charmaine Lee showed up to deejay The Floating Lounge on July 1st with waaaay more music than we could ever hope to squeeze into 90 minutes. She’s like that…bold, inexhaustible, and boiling with creativity. Charmaine has been an important mentor to us as we swim out further into the inky waters of improvisation, and our collaboration on our upcoming record – Experiments in Living – is easily on of the most cool, most scary things we’ve ever attempted. We know you’ll get lit up both by her exuberance and her playlist, so dig in!
CHARMAINE'S PLAYLIST
* denotes tracks we ran out of time for last night....bonus!
Luciano Berio Sequenza III https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGovCafPQAE
Erin Gee Mouthpiece I (2000) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f76Hb6wV4oA
PHRASING AND LINE DEVELOPMENT
Cecil Taylor - Indent (1973) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOtMTgYCgTY
Evan Parker - The Snake Decides (1986) https://youtu.be/xXUAX-gBEY0
* Henry Fraser - your soul is the size of a thread (2018) https://henryfraser.bandcamp.com/track/your-soul-is-the-size-of-a-thread
FORM
Eric Wubbels - the children of fire come looking for fire (2012) https://soundcloud.com/eric-wubbels/album-preview-the-children-of-fire-come-looking-for-fire-12
* Bryan Jacobs - Dis Un Il Im Ir https://soundcloud.com/bryanjacobs-1/dis-un-il-im-ir
SOUND/AESTHETIC
Robert Ashley (1930) - Automatic Writing (1979) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh_TC8j_JkE
Andrea Pensado - Without Knowing Why (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbztuglWap4
* Earle Browne - Octet No. 1 (1953) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTxX-7EAn94
SICKNESS - PostRock Harsh Electronic DSP (2004) https://youtu.be/bVKVUrsQqV4
SOPHIE - Lemonade (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdLvp630plc
Floating Lounge On-Demand: George Lewis (video)
Anyone who knows (or knows of him) could have predicted it, but George Lewis’s Floating Lounge listening party appearance on June 10th (2020) was off the charts amazing. With a stack of primo recordings set to melt brains, George treated his playlist as a kind of sonic autobiography. Below is the video of this unforgettable event. Just know that you are very likely to discover your new favorite music here…
Check out the links below to chase down the music, books, and references George shared that night. Enjoy!
Here is George's playlist for your deep pleasure. We’ve provided YouTube and Spotify links where we could find them, but you also might find them on other streaming services. Also, please note that some of these were not played during the show for sake of time, but we include them here anyway.
PART 1
John Coltrane: Naima (1959, performance 1966) (Youtube)
Anthony Braxton: N-M488-44M-Z [Composition 6 D], for trio (1968) (Youtube)
Alvin Singleton: Mestizo II, for orchestra (1970)
Roscoe Mitchell: Nonaah, for alto saxophone (1972, performance 1976) (Spotify)
Muhal Richard Abrams: Roots, for piano (1975) (Youtube)
PART 2
David Behrman: On the Other Ocean (1977) (Youtube)
Richard Teitelbaum: Blends (1977, performance 2002) (Youtube)
Kees van Baaren: Musica per Orchestra (1966)
Misha Mengelberg: Mooche Mix (1990) (Youtube)
Louis Andriessen: De Tijd, for large ensemble (1980) (Youtube)
PART 3
Carola Bauckholt: Zugvo?gel, for reed quintet (2011) (Youtube)
Bernhard Gander: o? , for mixed quintet (2005)
Franck Bedrossian: Charleston (2005-07) for fifteen instruments (Youtube)
Chaya Czernowin: String Quartet (1995) (Youtube)
Akiko Yamane: Dots Collection No 6, for orchestra (2010) (Youtube)
And here are a few links for things that came up in the course of the conversation:
A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music by George E. Lewis
George Lewis: Afterword - The AACM as Opera + International Contemporary Ensemble
Talking Back: Performer-Audience Interaction in Roscoe Mitchell’s “Nonaah” by Paul Steinbeck
Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago by Paul Steinbeck
cat on the piano - filmed by Misha Mengelberg, 1967 (the original keyboard cat)
George Lewis: The Past is Prologue (Acornometrics)
Olivier Messiaen - Catalogue d'oiseaux (Book 2) (Youtube)