“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.
ClassicalQueer: Theo Espy - Violinist
Maeve Feinberg (they/them, b. 1993) is a violinist from New York City currently based in Chicago as a member of the Grammynominated Spektral Quartet. Maeve studied for two years at the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg with Paul Roczek, and later received a Bachelor’s degree in Violin Performance from the New England Conservatory under the supervision of Lucy Chapman. They have attended Greenwood Music Camp, Sarasota Music Festival, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, the Composer’s Conference Contemporary Performance Institute, and the Lucerne Music Festival as a student, and was invited back to the Composer’s Conference in Summer 2019 as a member of the faculty ensemble and chamber coach. In their free time, Maeve enjoys drawing with micron pens, film photography, tending to their plants, electronic music production, and hanging out in the woods.
I was connected to Maeve via the wonderful people at Spektral Quartet in Chicago. Maeve has been a violinist with the group for a few years. Listening to them talk about their upbringing as a child of two musicians was about as wonderful and foreign as I could imagine being child of a probation officer and an engineer. We had this lovely chat in February, which of course now feels like years ago. In the interview we talk about touring and future concerts. All of which are of course now cancelled. The pandemic has not been kind to many industries, but performance has been, and will continue to be, hard hit for a very long time. When Maeve and I talked about posting this interview, we discussed leaving out the future details. Not even mentioning the concerts that never happened. But, I think of it as a bit of a time capsule. No one is sure when schedules like this will return, but somehow I find it oddly comforting to read. I hope you enjoy what Maeve has to say.
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.
NewCity: Music 45 – Who Keeps Chicago In Tune 2020
#8
Since we last profiled the indefatigable chamber ensemble, they’ve earned three additional Grammy nominations (for 2019’s “Yo Soy La Tradición” with Miguel Zenón and 2020’s “Fanm d’Ayiti” with Nathalie Joachim) and made its NPR Music Tiny Desk concert debut, all while keeping a full (pre-pandemic) calendar of tour dates and hometown concerts. One of its most memorable Chicago gigs was an event at the Music Box Theatre. “We presented an evening of queer voices through music and film,” says founding member Doyle Armbrust, “including Alex Temple’s ‘Behind the Wallpaper’ with vocalist Julia Holter, a commission by composer-performer Gene Knific, and the short ‘Uzi’s Party’ (shot in Chicago) by Lyra Hill (in partnership with the Chicago Film Society). It was an absolutely magical evening.”
Chicago Tribune: The Spektral Quartet takes philosophies online, rather than placing their performances there
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.
WQXR: Hear Me Out – Fanm d’Ayiti
“It’s difficult to describe — in a single word or overwrought analogy — how Haitian-American composer / flutist / vocalist Nathalie Joachim’s Fanm d’Ayiti makes me feel. So, I’m going to tell you something about myself that, somehow, encapsulates the emotional journey I have when I listen to Famn d’Ayiti.
I used to cry a lot, until I was about 14. Unsurprisingly, this was a source of frustration and confusion and annoyance for my parents, presumably because no one wants to be out in public with a 12-year-old boy prone to breaking down and weeping at the slightest emotional disturbance. The weird thing about those tears was that they weren’t (always) from genuine sorrow or pain. They just showed up, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was a wave of emotion that was less “this is very very bad” and more “I just gotta wash out these vibes so I can get on with my day.” I’m bringing this up because that feeling — the one that used to precede a deluge of tears onto my boyish cheeks — is exactly what Joachim does to me on this album.
The first part of the album is bright and comforting; the sound of Joachim’s voice is what I imagine a cloud to feel like (refreshingly vapor-y). The strings of the Spektral Quartet in the opening track, “Papa Loko,” are restless, as if they’re waking up from the most rejuvenating of slumbers, but don’t actually need to be awake at the moment. They take their time getting ready, emphasized by the cello walking ever-so-slightly behind the beat, but then catching up right before the bar ends.”
Chicago Reader: The best Chicago albums of the 2010s
Chambers is the 2013 debut of Spektral Quartet, a Grammy-nominated string ensemble that often operates in the classical realm and just as often redefines it. The album is an entirely Chicago affair, released on Parlour Tapes (a local cassette-focused label dedicated to contemporary art music) and featuring works by six local composers—which Spektral Quartet attacks with Windy City grit and passion. On the LJ White piece Zin Zin Zin Zin (credited to Liza White and inspired by Mos Def's wordless freestyling on the Roots song "Double Trouble") the musicians get about as percussive as possible while mostly bowing their strings—you can hear them strike their instruments while making sonic booms of downstrokes.
Chicago Tribune: Chicago’s classical scene has Grammy magic, mojo that comes from a group of creative women on the city’s new music scene
There are a few explanations for this sustained record of achievement, but there is one common denominator: women. Together, the names of Julia Nicols-Corry, Deirdre Harrison, Reba Cafarelli, and Alyssa Martinez form a super pack of women who direct the operations behind the creative virtuosity of Cedille, Eighth Blackbird, Third Coast Percussion and the Spektral Quartet. On Sunday, Third Coast hopes to repeat its 2017 victory as the best chamber music/small ensemble, and Nathalie Joachim – former flautist of the four-time Grammy winning Eighth Blackbird – celebrates her first nomination with her debut album “Fanm d’Ayiti” – a collaboration with the thrice nominated Spektral.
When Brooklyn flautist Joachim moved to Chicago to join Eighth Blackbird five years ago, her solo projects were buoyed by the support of women’s networks across the arts and business communities. She says, “Women supporting women’s work is not (akin) to tokenism.” Her “Fanm d’Ayiti” (Women in Haiti) is the result. “This debut album is my very first step in claiming my identity in my music as a Haitian woman, as a black woman and as an American female composer.” Martinez agrees that “mentorship in the arts is essential, and when it can happen from woman to woman, even better. In Chicago, I see the same talented women popping up in different organizations, roles, and capacities over the years, on both the administrative and creative sides of projects. They make Chicago music great.”