Spektral Quartet misses playing live on stage, but in particular, Spektral Quartet misses performing for the rabid new-music fanatics of Bowling Green State University. The multi-GRAMMY-nominated ensemble returns to campus virtually on April 12th sporting a keyed-up program of many of their most notable commissions.
Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Enigma marks Spektral’s most audacious project to-date – eventually slated for premieres in planetarium dome theaters around the world – and the Quartet is happy to share an especially stirring movement from this new piece with the BGSU community. Former Chicago Symphony composer-in-residence Samuel Adams claims a spot on the marquee as well with the hypnotic second movement of his String Quartet No. 2, “Current” which employs four snare drums excited by transducer speakers that envelop and enhance the acoustic strings.
As long-time collaborators, composers Eliza Brown and Katherine Young will be familiar names to Spektral fans. Brown’s hyper-elongated chord progression in her String Quartet No. 1 remains one of the group’s most-cherished and most-played numbers, while Young’s pokey reimagining of Arthur Russell’s Hiding Your Present From You makes not smiling essentially an impossibility.
Finally, two absurdly talented performer/composers – Tomeka Reid (AACM, Tomeka Reid Quartet) and Gene Knific (IVERSON, Gene Knific Trio) – bump up the energy quotient with two shorts that have made it into heavy Spektral rotation. Premiered at the storied Ear Taxi Festival in 2016, Reid’s groove-heavy Prospective Dwellers was written in the midst of conducting interviews with residents of Chicago’s Dorchester Projects on the city’s South Side. Meanwhile, when asked to arrange a song of their choosing by the quartet, Knific immediately zeroed in on Sufjan Stevens’ chirpy-though-dark track Arnika, somehow translating the cognitive dissonance between the song’s lyrics and music into a non-verbal score.
Spektral Quartet’s programming is supported by our members, our donors, and by the following foundations and organizations:
