Here we are in the studio, folks. Our first album is happening: a bevy of new works by Chicago composers. First stop, Chris Fisher-Lochhead's "Dig Absolutely". In a couple weeks, we'll be back under the mic for music by Marcos Balter and Hans Thomalla. More to come...clicking embiggens these pics.
Producer Kyle Vegter.
Getting at the finer points of CFL's difficult-to-perfect double-stop harmonics.
a guest post by Elizabeth Davenport, Dean of Rockefeller Chapel
The first time I heard Spektral Quartet play I thought, “It would be out of this world to get these guys to come and play at Rockefeller Chapel.” And now it’s happening! Seven days from now, to be precise: March 28, 2013. They’re going to play Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ in the context of a dramatic liturgical moment of the year – the Tenebrae of the night before Good Friday, a night when we strip the Chapel bare of all the extras, candles and fabrics and silver.
Rockefeller Chapel is a vast space. The word “chapel” conjures up an intimate space, but it really means a private space – like the chapel of a stately home, or of a hospital, or of an airport… or, in this case, of a university. Rockefeller Chapel is the spiritual and ceremonial center of the University of Chicago, where the Spektral Quartet is ensemble in residence.
Rockefeller Chapel is a place where we engage in art and performance on a large scale, matching its eighty-foot high arches and resonant stone with grandeur of sound and beauty of image and word. It’s a place where we speak to the nobility of our human quest for meaning and our great capacity for awe, as generations before us intended for us to do. It’s a place where people of many different traditions find a spiritual home. Designed after the shape of a great medieval cathedral, it’s used today in ways which mirror the world’s changing patterns of human religious encounter. But, as it was at the beginning, it’s still a place where the liturgical seasons of the Christian year are observed, along with its many other uses.
And so we gather for the solemn ceremonies of Holy Thursday – a short, stark, bare celebration at the altar, with bread and wine and hardly any music, and then the sounds of Haydn, the slow movements of the Seven Last Words, ringing through the gradually darkening building in the première of a new Spektral arrangement prepared by their friend and collaborator Joe Clark. And with it, the last words of Christ as recorded in sacred text, juxtaposed with poetry. We use poetry often at the Chapel, finding in its art a means of touching truths of new kinds (in an era where once unquestioned beliefs no longer make sense to many). On this night, we will use poetry written at or after the unthinkable death of one too young to die – a mother mourning the death of her son, which is after all part of the time-honored script of the crucifixion.
Last words. One poem for each “word,” and the closing heart-rending words of Psalm 22 (“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). The terrible knock at the door in the early hours of the morning… the police officer standing there and saying, “I’m sorry.” And then il terremoto, the earthquake, the fast, furious presto, the sudden, sharp end.
It’s an experiment, like much of what we do. We haven’t done Holy Thursday quite like this before, and Haydn’s cherished work hasn’t been played quite like this before. But in this space, and on this night, the script is rewritten. Rewritten for today, for now, for the mothers who have lost their sons and daughters, for the young caught up in the violence that tears us apart, now as then.
We read and we listen – and perhaps we gain some new insight into the old, old story, and for sure we hear afresh Haydn’s achingly beautiful writing. And we mourn for the lives lost, for the tragedy of it all. And yet, even in despair, we find some fragment of hope – some chord that lifts us out of our reverie, some new thing, some sense (as is the promise of Easter) that there is more to come.
If you’re anywhere near Chicago on March 28, I hope you’ll be there (7 pm at Rockefeller Chapel at Woodlawn and 59th). And if you’re not anywhere near Chicago, please make your travel arrangements now. You should not miss the Spektral Quartet offering their magnificent artistry in this most wondrous of spaces on this most solemn of nights… with their very own re-imagining of this beloved music.
Last Thursday, we pulled Verdi's String Quartet out of the pile of quartet parts in our respective studios and rehearsed it for the first time in over two months. But, this was no normal quartet session hidden away in one of our living rooms, we intended to do work on the slow movement in front of a small audience. Our goal was to get them immersed in our process, and have them learn about the way we do work.
We had first tried this concept at the Scrag Mountain Music Festival in December and were eager to try some of its possibilities out in the Music Institute of Chicago's lovely Nichols Concert Hall in Evanston. So, we decided it would be great to have our inquisitive board member Natalie Bontumasi on hand as the non-performer moderator. We also invited the inimitable Hans Jensen to provide his deep brand of thinking into the musical ideas and string playing issues at hand. Both are pictured here:
Mathias Tacke, a former member the venerable Vermeer Quartet, was also on hand providing thoughtful and provocative comments:
While we learned from what our mentors had to offer, we also picked up new thoughts from our audience's insights and questions as well.
We even got in a few laughs.
We'll definitely be doing this again, in many subtly different forms, in the hopes that exposing the inner workings of what we do can provide new sources of inspiration for both the audience and ourselves.
As we exited the Chicago suburbs, and the corporate jungle evaporated, I found myself excited by all the shockingly open space in Illinois. We were on our way to Bloomington/Normal for an appearance on the Red Note Music Festival at Illinois State University. During our time there, the students were highly receptive and energetic at our master class and composer readings, not to mention the engaged and interested audience for our evening concert of works by Carter, Balter, Fisher-Lochhead, Dehaan and Thomalla.
Sometimes you're acutely aware you're arriving somewhere much different than home:
Our Monday arrival at ISU and Russ in action coaching Ligeti's solo sonata:
Backstage before Monday evening's concert, things sometimes get a bit punchy:
A view of downtown Bloomington from my Tuesday morning run:
Tuesday afternoon's composer readings included feedback from the venerable Joan Tower in the lovely concert hall at ISU.
Winter storms could not stop us from a swift return to the windy city:
As we exited the Chicago suburbs, and the corporate jungle evaporated, I found myself excited by all the shockingly open space in Illinois. We were on our way to Bloomington/Normal for an appearance on the Red Note Music Festival at Illinois State University. During our time there, the students were highly receptive and energetic at our master class and composer readings, not to mention the engaged and interested audience for our evening concert of works by Carter, Balter, Fisher-Lochhead, Dehaan and Thomalla.
Sometimes you're acutely aware you're arriving somewhere much different than home:
Our Monday arrival at ISU and Russ in action coaching Ligeti's solo sonata:
Backstage before Monday evening's concert, things sometimes get a bit punchy:
A view of downtown Bloomington from my Tuesday morning run:
Tuesday afternoon's composer readings included feedback from the venerable Joan Tower in the lovely concert hall at ISU.
Winter storms could not stop us from a swift return to the windy city:
We Spektrals and our cohorts laid eyes upon Alice Millar Chapel, the likely site of our recording of Marcos Balter's "Chambers". Hopefully, followers of this blog will remember our long history with this piece. This is the first leak of a long series of forthcoming posts about our first album, featuring a bevy of works by Chicago composers.
Clicking embiggens these pictures.
This March finds us taking a slice of Chicago down-state to Illinois State University's Red Note Festival for new music. We'll bring some of our favorite Windy City composers to Bloomington, including Chris Fisher-Lochhead, Hans Thomalla, Daniel Dehaan and Marcos Balter. We'll cap off the concert with a performance of a piece that's quickly working its way into our favorite repertoire: Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 2, a work of astonishing breadth of expression and compositional command.
The festival features a full week of performances and a bevy of performing artists, including featured guest composer Joan Tower. We'll be at ISU for two days, with a range of activities including master classes for string students and readings of new works by student composers. We're looking forward to more than just bringing our repertoire to this new place, but discovering the culture around newly composed music at ISU and hearing the new sounds their students are dreaming up.
Illinois State University's Performing Arts Center.
Our week at University of Chicago started with a fantastically fun chamber music reading party with some of the chamber music students in the Music Department. Music by Bach, Mendelssohn and Handel was followed by pizza. (Click the pics for enlarged versions.)
And, the week ended with an epic quartet-fest: three great new works by U of C Graduate students, and our dear friend Albumblatt, by Hans Thomalla.
A primo benefit to being a quartet that plays loads of new music is that we get first-looks at minty fresh scores. Our UChicago New Music Ensemble concert this Saturday is exactly that, and we are all impressed by the imagination and polish of the music featured by their talented composition students.
Phil Taylor's Spandrels is alternate doses of tranquility and eruption, draped across an architecture that keeps the listener satisfyingly rooted in the present. Jae-Goo Lee's Cold and Sharp pulls the camera in tight, examining a shivering and delicate world through microscopic-seeming string techniques. Andrew McManus has proven himself to be a major talent at writing for strings, and his The Sacred and the Profane moves through shades of prismatic harmonics, jazz-like jaunts and vital rhythmic counterpoint before disappearing altogether.
Esteemed Northwestern University faculty composer Hans Thomalla's Albumblatt has quickly become a cornerstone of our repertoire, and we are thrilled to be bringing this perspective-warping piece to Hyde Park to round out the program. Imagine glissandi originating from separate corners within the quartet, converging at microtonally-constructed major chords for just an instant. It makes us throw our hands up and shout, "It's SO GOOD!" every time we rehearse it.
Saturday, Feb. 16 at 8 PM. FREE!
University of Chicago - Fulton Recital Hall (map)
1010 E. 59th Street, Goodspeed Hall, 4th floor
Austin wrote about Hans' piece previously on the blog, and you can see us playing it live at Northwestern University here:
Norman Lebrecht, of the blog Slipped Disc, was kind enough to show interest in our experiences at Juicebox and asked for some thoughts about the experience. Here's what Doyle shared:
3-year-olds love Elliott Carter…at least the 3-year-olds found scurrying beneath the iconic Tiffany dome of Preston Bradley Hall on Friday morning. Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) has launched a fresh new series with the intention of immersing toddlers and their caregivers in contemporary music, dance and theatre, cleverly titled "Juicebox," and Spektral Quartet is thrilled to have been the lead-off ensemble. We are also still wiping Cheerios dust off our strings.
What seems clear to DCASE, and certainly to our quartet, is that listeners have to be taught to bristle or sneer at certain flavors of music. Take Carter's Quartet No. 2, which tends to elicit some of the more emphatic responses, from ecstatic to cynical, from our audiences. We've developed larger-than-life character descriptions for each instrument's role, a self-composed play synopsis for the movements, and had open conversations with each other about the piece in front of the audience prior to performing it in an effort to create a foothold for first-time listeners. This has been encouragingly successful. On the other hand, tell toddlers, "This piece is awesome," play it with gusto, and their response is, "THIS PIECE IS AWESOME!"
For our Juicebox debut, Spektral excerpted Thomas Adès's Arcadiana, Hans Thomalla's Albumblatt, and Marcos Balter's Chambers in addition to the Carter. With the help of Spektral violinist Austin Wulliman's mother Phyllis, who translated our ideas into Toddler, we approached each composer as an explorer. Adès explores the alchemy of painting into sound: parents here rocked with their children back and forth during the fog-veiled gondola ride of Arcadiana's first movement. Thomalla explores the sounds around him in everyday life: violinist Aurelien plays the bariolage measures, likening it to an ambulance siren, and dozens of tiny eyes widen. Balter explores the world as if through a microscope: Phyllis encourages the children to look skyward, and has them pick out a tiny snowflake from among the myriad details of the brilliant, colored glass dome. Finally, the fourth movement and conclusion of Carter's each-instrument-as-independent-character masterpiece is introduced as four people all talking simultaneously, not listening to each other until the second violin reins in the proceedings and restores order. After all, what's a kid's concert without an under-the-radar morality lesson?
At a concert of Mozart for (primarily) septua- and octogenarians the previous evening, one well-intentioned but concerned gentleman asked, "Tonight you're playing for an enthusiastic group of old people who love this music. Who comes to your other shows?" Spektral Quartet has been focused on breaking the fourth wall since its inception, commandeering bars as performance spaces and experimenting with seating the audience up-close, encircling the quartet. We've also prioritized playing works by emerging and local composers, so we were able to respond confidently that our audience is young and open-eared.
Ultimately, it can be distilled down to this: bypassing the need for "un-learning" preconceptions about new music is why the Juicebox series is a powerful artistic venture, and one we will continue to support.
No need to call a babysitter for Spektral's next concert!
We are thrilled to be the lead-off ensemble on the Chicago Dept. of Cultural Affairs brand-new series, Juicebox. Created for pre-kindergarteners and their parents, Juicebox is bringing some of City's most cutting-edge new-music/theatre/dance under the Tiffany dome at the Chicago Cultural Center, transforming it into a kid-friendly performance space. Cheerios in a ziploc? Bring 'em. Feel the need to dance or squeal? Go for it! Forgot your wallet, Mom and Dad? It's free!
Guiding Spektral's all new-music set is early childhood development ace (she raised Austin, after all), Phyllis Wulliman. Conjuring narratives and inspiring children to interact with the music, Phyllis and the Quartet will take the audience on a voyage through the brilliant and evocative scores of Elliott Carter, Hans Thomalla and Thomas Adès.
So pack those diaper bags and join us for a morning of new-music hoopla!*
WHERE Chicago Cultural Center
Preston Bradley Hall
78 E Washington, Chicago
WHEN Friday, Feb1st, 2013
10am
TICKETS Free
*misbehaving parents will be asked to sit in time out chairs for a period of 15min.
This Friday at 7:30 marks the fourth concert we've given in Goshen, Indiana in this quartet's short life. This is no coincidence, as I was born and raised in Goshen and my parents still live there as an active part of the Mennonite community surrounding Goshen College. We've already played Haydn's "Seven Last Words" in the College Church, as well as music by Brahms, Ades and more in the acoustically wonderful Reith Recital Hall in Goshen College's Music Center. You can take a trip back in time to last year's trip in a blog post about our snowy drive, or read about this year's concert on their website.
Goshen College Music Center
We return with a program of music by vocally inspired composers: Verdi, Mozart, Wolf and James Blake (as re-imagined by Chris Fisher-Lochhead). All these composers have an amazing imagination for musical characters: sneaky villains, beautiful heroines and comic fools will all show their face as the musical drama unfolds.
For a little taste of what you'll see at the show, you can see us in a very intimate live performance at Comfort Music this summer:
The folks at Scrag Mountain Music have set the bar high for hospitality. Our week in Vermont wasn't just full of scenic beauty and wonderful people, but some of the best and freshest food we've ever had. Bacon and eggs from around the bend on the mountain never tasted better before a marathon rehearsal day! Mary Bonhag and Evan Premo, directors of the series, were extraordinarily gracious...especially since we had a third host, their two-month-old, Glen!
Here's the story of our week in photos.
Things started off a little slap-happy at O'Hare in the early morning Monday.
We got our stuff into our hosts' homes as the sun set over the Green Mountains.
Our second day there, we rehearsed all day...and then had another public session in the evening. Rehearsing in front of people really makes things more productive in an urgent way if you choose something early in the learning process! Stay tuned for more of these, Mary and Evan's idea of the "Very Open Rehearsal" is a great one.
Our plan of doing a different program each day, Friday through Sunday, meant some long rehearsal days. It wasn't always pretty. Here's Evan, helping us set up for the day with Glen in tow.
Doyle explains the finer point of "balancing to the viola line" to Russ.
And finally in action (fueled by some deliciously Vermont-roasted coffee).
A long day of rehearsal isn't complete without some brown liquid. We went to check out The Prohibition Pig and Aurelien got a taste of some of the local rye flavor made by Whistle Pig.
CUTE ANIMAL BREAK! Here's my new friend, Raven. She was pretty much the best.
Our run of three shows began Friday, we played a piece by Evan with him sitting in and Mary sang a piece by Earl Kim with us. The quartet played Ades' "Arcadiana", the Verdi Quartet and Chris Fisher-Lochhead's version of James Blake's "I Never Learnt to Share". The greeting party didn't bother to clean up for us. (Did you catch the theme of the week yet, as well?)
Saturday, things were a bit more refined for a church concert in Warren. The quartet played Mozart, K. 575 and Marcos Balter's "Chambers". Here's our warmup session with Mary on Earl Kim's "Three French Songs".
That night, it snowed. Vermont is special. I wish I'd taken my phone with me on my run into the countryside that morning. The pastures of cows with no humans to be seen for miles were incredibly beautiful. Here's the barn outside Evan and Mary's house.
Our final concert was in Montpelier, in a local theater. An incredibly open-minded crowd laughed with us as we gave a ten minute presentation and conversation about Carter's Second Quartet, as well as playing Wolf's "Italian Serenade" and repeating Chris' "I Never Learnt to Share" adaptation. Doyle had an intimate moment with his phone before the audience arrived.
Thanks for everything, Scrag Mountain folk and Vermont in general! One thing I won't miss: discussions of the pronunciation of "Montpelier" with Aurelien. It's really embarrassing for all of us when we start trying to pronounce French words.
This week, Spektral gives its first-ever performance of Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 2 at the National Pastime Theater. I've now had two separate incidents of someone asking me if we decided to play this monumental work after learning of Carter's death. I only wish I traveled with the score, so as to quickly (and passive-aggressively) answer their query. Unpacking this piece, with all it's hocket-ed composite rhythms and wickedly-challenging passagework, has been an experience equally frustrating and gratifying for us. This is Carter, though. That's what HE DOES.
The title of the show is a quote from the man himself, that reads: "An auditory scenario for the players to act out with their instruments." It is not specifically tied to Quartet No. 2, but it closely parallels the individuality of each part, or character, around which Carter wrote this score. Aurelien's imaginative synopsis of the "plot" will be included in the program, and each of us will offer descriptions from the stage of who we feel our character is.
I thought I'd preempt Wednesday's show by giving you my (unauthorized by my quartet-mates) film analogies to these personalities. The concert is BYOB, so with enough rye in your flask, these will make perfect sense…
Austin:
Aurelien:
Doyle:
Russ:
Tickets are $5 cheaper in advance. See you on Wednesday!
As a freshman in high school, I signed up for an email listserv focusing on 20th century music. Being from a small college town in Indiana, I hadn't had much exposure to classical music written after the Rite of Spring. At this point in my life, I hadn't even really considered the possibility of playing the violin professionally. In fact, my sentiments as recently as a year before would have led me to prefer prioritizing my spot on the wrestling team over playing a note on the violin ever again.
But, around my fifteenth birthday I began discovering music again, and finding that that the weirder it was the more I wanted to hear it. I wanted more than just to know about it, I wanted to "get it". This listserv proved pivotal in my musical development, even if I only followed it for a month and they never discussed much of what I now consider to be truly avante-garde.
A message discussing a disc of Boulez conducting Varese piqued my interest. Who was this Varese guy? However, I quickly found that the headliner of the disc (as far as my project to digest wildly new musical styles was concerned) was clearly the "Symphony of Three Orchestras" by Elliott Carter.
From the devastating Hart Crane quote in the liner notes to the sheer volume of musical ideas bursting from this piece, I knew I had found something I truly did not understand. But, it was a revelation. In not understanding, I saw a vast landscape of music in front of me, shrouded in fog. I couldn't even begin to know where the horizon was.
It was exhilarating to have this work take over my world so completely, with its impossibly expressive lines interacting in ways that never ceased to amaze. Listening to the piece again now, I feel lucky to have found it when I did. Just months later, when my private instructor planted the seed of working to be a professional violinist in my mind, visions of playing new and exciting music inspired me to take on the challenge.
To this day my perceptions of musical expression and time are being influenced and changed by Carter's infinitely subtle and sensitive art. In fact, as this blog post goes live, I will be rehearsing the fourth movement of his Second String Quartet with my mates in Spektral Quartet. Every rehearsal reveals the lines more clearly, hearing how they interact and converse in the most organic, yet unexpected, ways.
Just yesterday, as I walked out of a rehearsal of the quartet, my facebook feed was filled with memorials to Carter and his work. I can think of no more fitting way to find out of his passing than from my peers. His music will be a constant in our lives, an unavoidable pillar of the American canon. I know my story is far from special - many of us were introduced to the deep questioning and probing expression of great new music through Elliott Carter's work.