Tag: contemporary string quartets

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AMN Reviews: Quatuor Bozzini – Alvin Lucier: Navigations[2021; CQB 2128_NUM]

There have been many technical and technological innovations in music since 1945 but one of the most important aesthetic innovations has been in new ideas that focus on listening. Innovators like Pierre Schaeffer proposed the idea of reduced listening – an attitude in which sound is listened to for its own sake as a sound object, removed from its source. John Cage invited listeners to hear any sound as music. Pauline Oliveros encouraged listeners to actively experience all sounds through a practice she described as “deep listening”. These ideas all contributed to contemporary music’s focus on the experience of sound itself.

Alvin Lucier’s compositions and installations make use of sounds that are often the results of acoustic phenomena. His work focuses our attention and perception on the physical presence of sound interacting within a particular space. Performing Lucier’s compositions requires performers to learn to recognize, activate, play and interact with acoustic phenomena. The Quatuor Bozzini were clearly up for the challenge when they recorded “Alvin Lucier: Navigations”. The album opens with “Disappearances”, a piece that is a single note. That description may sound like it is minimalist to the extreme but to my ears it is a piece rich with development. You hear changes in weight and timbre as each string joins together in unison. The controlled motions of the string’s bows cause phasing and filtering of the sound. The tiny subtle changes in pitch causes beating which reveals pulsating difference tones. Each of these phenomena disappear into one another creating a feeling of movement and making the listener aware of the tiniest changes in pitch and timbre.

The album contains two realizations of “Group Tapper”, a piece that explores room acoustics by having the instrumentalists treat their instruments as percussion. The performers tap on their instruments in various places and reflect the sound coming from their instruments around the room. The recording engineer does a great job of making the room present on this album so that you can really hear how the group’s performance interacts with the room. Placed in between the two realizations of “Group Tapper” is for me the most striking piece on this recording, “Unamuno”.  The piece was inspired by early twentieth century Spanish writer  Miguel de Unamuno and it was originally written for voices. “Unamuno” is based around four pitches that are continuously arranged into different patterns. It has a probing and questioning kind of vibe to it. The Bozzini’s perform the piece with both strings and their voices. The result is absolutely stunning. 

The album finishes with “Navigations for Strings”. At a high level “Navigations for Strings” and “Unamuno” share some of the same types of ingredients. Both pieces are based on four pitches and both make use of slowly changing combinations and difference tones. However, despite these high level similarities the two pieces sound very different.  “Navigations for Strings” is a somewhat dark piece in which continuous changes in microtonality, dynamics and tempo create a sound mass that feels like it is becoming a stasis, but it’s continuous changes never allow it to rest. It is a very haunting piece.

With “Alvin Lucier: Naviagtions” the Quatuor Bozzini have gone well beyond the surface of Lucier’s scores and have totally embraced his challenge to performers to be sonic explorers. “Alvin Lucier: Naviagtions” is a wonderful album with captivating performances of one of the most original and innovative experimental composers of our time.

Highly Recommended!

Chris De Chiara

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Spektral Quartet – Experiments in Living [New Focus Recordings FCR270]

Given the easy accessibility of recorded music of virtually every type and era, at times it seems that musically, all time collapses into the present time. It’s a strangely ahistorical contemporaneity we seem to inhabit—is the internet eternity’s jukebox?–but even if it makes for a certain uneasiness, the random-shuffle possibilities it opens up may provide opportunities for musical illumination.

Realizing some of those possibilities is something Chicago’s Spektral String Quartet sets out to do with its ambitious double album Experiments in Living. The group selected seven string quartets written between 1873 and 2018 and, inventing a randomizing process to be realized with a deck of cards, offer the listener the chance to order and reorder the pieces for playback.

The works the group chose are Brahms’ 1873 String Quartet in C Minor; Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 3 (1927); Ruth Crawford’s String Quartet of 1931; Anthony Cheung’s Real Book of Fake Tunes for string quartet and flute (2015); George Lewis’ 2016 String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living; Sam Pluta’s binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state (2016); and Charmaine Lee’s 2018 Spinals for string quartet, voice and electronics.

The eighty year lacuna between Crawford’s work and Cheung’s represents a conceptual as well as a chronological discontinuity. A developmental continuity binds the earlier three works: the Schoenberg quartet conserves something of the romanticism of the Brahms, while the dissonant counterpoint of the Crawford quartet plays peculiarly American variations on Schoenberg’s serialism. As distinct as these three pieces are, all are fully composed and squarely within the elastic but still recognizable tradition of Western art music. The pieces on the other side of the great divide, by contrast, break out of that tradition as much as they take their bearings from it. They sound different, to begin with—their vocabularies draw as a matter of course on extended performance techniques that at times push their surface textures to extremes of noise and fragmentation.

One other significant break lies with the newer works’ engagement with improvisation as something major to do, emulate, or draw inspiration from. Lee’s relatively short, single-movement work, which was created in collaboration with the ensemble, is completely improvised. Lee, who joins the quartet in their performance, is an improvising vocalist who augments her voice with electronic amplification; the piece is an abstract blend of wordless vocals and largely unpitched sounds. Pluta describes his rapidly moving, twenty-five movement quartet as being about the “joy of opening up the mind to improvisatory exploration;” what’s explored is an electronically inspired collection of quick-cutting, scratchy, oscillating sounds that the quartet convincingly translates onto acoustic string instruments. Cheung’s lyrical, five-movement piece layers a flute line played by Claire Chase in an improvisational spirit over compact, song-length settings. Although improvisation plays a significant role in Lewis’ musical poetics, his exuberant quartet, which like Lee’s, Pluta’s, and Cheung’s was commissioned by the ensemble, is a fully notated work that weaves together various extended techniques into an episodic, but audibly cohesive, tissue of sound.

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.

https://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/experiments-in-living

https://www.newfocusrecordings.com/

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Quatuor Bozzini – Phill Niblock: Baobab [Collection QB CQB 1924]; Simon Martin: Musique d’art [Collection QB CQB 1922]

Founded by the Bozzini sisters, cellist Isabelle and violinist Stéphanie, the eponymous Montréal-based string quartet has been a significant presence in Canadian new music since the early 2000s. The Bozzini’s two CDs, one each of works by US composer Phill Niblock and Québec’s Simon Martin, are the latest additions to a substantial catalogue of recordings of sound- and concept-based contemporary music.

Baobab presents two large-scale works by Niblock (b. 1933). Both pieces—Baobab, originally composed in 2011, and Disseminate, composed in 1998—were first written for orchestra and appear here as revised in 2017. By means of multi-track layering, they’ve been rearranged for string quartet multiplied times five. Both pieces are quintessential Niblock—thickly textured swarms of drones made up of microtones and moving timbres. Sustaining the requisite long tones undoubtedly is a challenge to the players’ physical stamina, but the sounds never falter.

For Musique d’art, a five-movement, hour-long work for string quintet by Martin (b. 1981), the quartet—which in addition to the Bozzini sisters includes violinists Alissa Cheung and Clemens Merkel—is joined by double bassist Pierre-Alexandre Maranda. Like Niblock’s two pieces, Musique d’art is centered on the development elongated chords, but with more variability of density, dynamics and rates of harmonic change. Pitches drop out and fade in; discordant tones come and go as the intervals between notes widen and narrow; bow articulations shift to introduce changes to timbre and to add complexity to the stacked overtones. Not all of this is about pitch relationships: while at times the quintet sounds like a robust, tuned and detuned tamboura, at other times their collective sound dissolves into harsh, grey noise and rough, unpitched textures. Martin set out to create a fecund dialectic of sound and music with the piece, and in that he has succeeded.

https://www.actuellecd.com

http://www.quatuorbozzini.ca

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Reinhold Friedl / Quatuor Diotima – String Quartets [Bocian Records]

Berlin-based composer Reinhold Friedl (b. 1964) occupies an emblematic place within contemporary art music. As the latter has become increasingly open to influences from other genres and cultures, it has ample room for a composer like Friedl, who has worked with artists from worlds as diverse as punk and post-punk rock, free improvisation and noise. Friedl’s background is itself diverse, including training in piano performance, mathematics and musicology as well as composition; as a pianist specializing in the techniques of playing inside the instrument, he performs with Zeitkratzer (“time scraper”), a chamber ensemble fluent in the musical languages of electronic sound, minimalism and improvisation as well as modern composition, which he founded and serves as musical director.

Not surprisingly, Friedl’s three string quartets, realized for this collection by the Quatuor Diotima, deliberately avoid the traditional string quartet conventions of linear and contrapuntal writing in favor of a texture-based manipulation of mobile sound masses. In String Quartet No. 1 (2005), he accomplishes this by centering the nine-and-a-half minute work on the development of a single gesture: circular bowing. The piece, which was commissioned by the BBC and is dedicated to cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, rides on a slowly crescendoing surf of white noise, glassy harmonics and muted and open strings. The ebb and flow of the sound follows the movements of the musicians’ bowing with an uncanny transparency.

At double the length of the first quartet, String Quartet No. 2, composed in 2009 for the Diotima quartet, erects an abstract acoustic wall of sound that develops by increases in saturation, volume and intensity. As with the first quartet the piece, which is constructed around sustained tremolo bowing of ever greater speed, is an essay in gestural crescendo.

The closest Friedl comes to traditional string quartet writing—and really it isn’t that close—is on 2016’s String Quartet No. 3, commissioned in Copenhagen and dedicated to Diotima cellist Pierre Morlet. The solidly constructed piece consists of long-toned, pungent chords arranged as sound blocks slowly moving in lockstep across audio space.

https://bocian.bandcamp.com/album/reinhold-friedl-string-quartets

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Ben Johnston & The Kepler Quartet: String Quartets 6, 7 & 8 [New World Records 80730]

fileX5pG6.jpg.fullIn both its scale and its fundamental reimagining of the form, the cycle of ten string quartets by microtonal composer Ben Johnston represents one of the most ambitious compositional projects of the second half of the twentieth century. With the release of this CD, the Kepler Quartet completes its own ambitious project of recording the cycle in its entirety.

As a composer Johnston, who celebrated his 90th birthday last month, was a protégé of microtonal experimentalist Harry Partch, having spent six months of 1949-1950 with him in California before going on to study with Darius Milhaud at Mills College. In 1951 Johnston took up a position at the University of Illinois, Urbana, where he stayed until his retirement in 1983. In between he studied with John Cage in 1959, after a brief and unsatisfactory attempt to work with the early electronic instruments at the Columbia-Princeton electronic music center. As early as the 1930s, Johnston showed an interest in acoustic theory as a basis for tuning and a corresponding dissatisfaction with equal temperament. Although he composed some works in equal temperament—including the First String Quartet, a serial work—the bulk of his compositions were done in sometimes quite expansive iterations of just intonation. Johnston’s reasons for adopting just intonation weren’t formal so much as they were expressive; as Kepler Quartet Second Violinist Eric Segnitz put it, the often complex array of pitches called for were “only byproducts of the emotional nuances” Johnston wished to convey. Johnston ceased composing in 1995.

Johnston’s expanded just intonation produced a very complex, difficult to perform body of work. Therein lies the paradox of just intonation: It reduces pitch relations to simple ratios, but these simple ratios in turn ramify into complex collections of microtonally distinguished, individual pitches when multiple keys are involved. The minute distinctions of pitch naturally demanded a special notation, which presents interpretive challenges of its own quite beyond the challenges of having to hear and reproduce as many as 1200 distinct pitches (as is called for in the Seventh String Quartet). Given the challenges inherent in the work, it isn’t surprising that it took the Kepler Quartet—who are, in addition to Segnitz, Sharan Leventhal (violin), Brek Renzelman (viola) and Karl Lavine (cello)– fourteen years and close consultation with the composer to accomplish the recording project, which began with their premiering the Tenth Quartet in 2002.

This final installment of the resulting series of recordings covers the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Quartets, composed between 1980 and 1986. One of them—the Seventh—had never been performed before the Kepler Quartet took it up for this recording. And it’s this most notoriously difficult quartet that opens the set.

Finished in 1984, the Seventh quartet is divided into three movements, the first two short and the last very long relative to the others. Johnston described the first movement in terms of Kafka’s Metamorphosis because of its densely “scurrying” microtones. The sound is cloudlike—a swarming but somehow weightlessly airy mass of finely graded pitches circling each other. By contrast, the second movement is anchored by a walking pizzicato line with harmonics layered on top. The long third movement plays off of the opposition of horizontal lines that deviate perceptibly from what a lifetime of exposure to equal temperament would have one accept as “right” sounding, although vertically the pitches add up to chiming, rich chords that sound precisely calibrated.

The four movement Eighth quartet (1986) is one of Johnston’s neo-classical compositions. The first movement features a figure/field structure that sets a lead melody against a chordal background, while in the second movement the individual voices move in a fully-developed counterpoint. Like the second movement of the Eighth quartet, the third movement again uses the device of a regular but complexly cyclical pizzicato pulse as a framework, which in the fourth movement mutates into a more robust rhythm of unexpectedly added and dropped beats. The melodic last movement has the sound of a distantly recollected folk song, one whose melody is somehow distorted by the unreliability of memory.

The final quartet in the set, the Sixth (1980), is a single, long movement aptly subtitled “legato espressivo.” Johnston returns to twelve-tone writing here but in just intonation; the twelve-pitch set is made up of six tones from the D overtone series and six from the so-called undertone series of D#. One doesn’t need to hear this underlying structure to be affected by the slightly melancholic gravity of the piece. The unorthodox crossing of serial form and microtonal content makes for a moving work; the complexity of the formal arrangement only enhances the essentially expressive intent of the piece.

The set closes with Quickness (1996), a short piece for string quartet and voice reciting lines from the Persian poet Rumi. The piece is dedicated to the memory of Johnston’s late U Illinois-Urbana colleague Salvatore Martirano; the voice recorded here is Johnston’s.

The pleasure of listening to these landmark works is much enhanced by the indispensable liner note by Kyle Gann, a one-time student of Johnston’s.

http://www.newworldrecords.org

Daniel Barbiero