Suspended and caught in the moment between sleeping and waking, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s Enigma inhabits a hazy, hallucinogenic dream-world of half-formed shapes fusing hypnotically in and out of focus. It’s a striking first string quartet by the young Icelandic composer, rendered here with glacial grandeur by the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet, whose acutely detailed, inordinately sensitive playing precisely pitches itself at the boiling centre of still-forming immensities.
Spektral Quartet brings a surgical precision to every aspect of the score, which demands from its interpreters sensitivity to quarter-tone pitch alterations, subtle gradations of bow pressure, and the ability to play at the level of a whisper. Beyond the usual bowing and plucking, scrapes, slides, taps, clicks, pops, and other tactile gestures are required for the realization of the work. Such effects are in keeping with the composer's concept, which has to do with the “in-between,” the shadowy zone between sound and silence. Immense concentration by the players is needed for the three-movement work to blossom and transform at a measured pace that feels natural. Texture and sound design override melody in her micro-detailed tapestry, which isn't a critical observation but rather a descriptive one. Enigma isn't without emotion either, as moods and tones arise ranging from solemn and cryptic to ecstatic and lyrical.
Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir has consistently evoked the sounds and vistas of the natural world in her instrumental writing—the fecund valleys and stark coasts of her homeland, in particular—and her first string quartet is no exception. Masterfully performed by Chicago’s Spektral Quartet, this three-movement gem balances astringent abstraction—including unpitched noises and percussive extended techniques—with melancholic grandeur, often voicing those polarities at once. The aptly titled Enigma is fueled by a sense of mystery, translating sounds foreign and familiar to our holistic experiences on Earth in order to deliberately smear the line between the quotidian and the sublime. Sounds from each side of the divide overlap, collide, and inform one another, producing a deliciously ambiguous trip that seems apropos for our fraught times. Despite the emotional uncertainty some passages transmit, spiked as they are with dissonance and brittleness, there’s an abiding humanity at the heart of the music that provides a guiding light.
Describing Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Enigma – her first string quartet – is not easy, but imagine you're suspended in some primordial gas cloud where matter is transforming, regenerating, building toward the birth of a planet. In the final section of the half-hour piece, long arcs of shifting sound deliver melodies in slow motion, while the composer's extended techniques for the players can make a violin sound like a woodwind or a synthesizer. Percussive creaks and snaps collide with slippery glissandos that flash across the score like tails of cosmic particles in the black nothingness. The performance, by the Spektral Quartet, makes the music feel vast and intimate at once. In an introduction to the score, Thorvaldsdottir dispenses some colorful advice: "When you see a long sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling." Good luck.
The voices on the three-movement piece sigh and howl, caress and gash, cry out and whisper. Some scratching sounds inevitably give me goosebumps on the skin, the way the human nails kiss the chalkboard (I wonder what the articulation for those “notes” looks like on a sheet), as I imagine phantoms in the dark, their shadows on the walls and in between my bedsheets. There is a movement in the corner of my room, but when I look it’s gone, and only curtains slowly sway with their disdain and laughter. This music is unnerving, ominous and raw, and, once again, I wonder how these sounds can convey a real feeling.
Spektral’s execution is so microscopically precise that it gives it a voltaic momentum.
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But this is no mere collection of eerie sound effects — Enigma evolves as the mysterious noises gradually blend into the chordal structures. In the third movement, particularly, multiple layers of sound spin centripetally into harmoniously stable grounds, only to ebb away at last into the pitchlessness of the opening. With that deceptively simple approach, Anna upends the string quartet genre and takes the listener on a nearly psychedelic trip into the unknown.
And yet, what is most disquieting about Enigma is that its most harrowing and despairing moments — contrasted by those elusive, not-so-consoling chorale progressions — make the listening experience uncomfortably familiar in our time. Whether a dirge for the countless Covid-related deaths that could have been avoided, or for the depletion of our natural resources, it is a death knell for the 21st century cast in a centuries-old musical form. Listen with the lights off.
Those are some reasons I was all aquiver when I heard that Anna Thorvaldsdottir, one of the preeminent composers of our time, had written a string quartet. The work, called Enigma, premiered in Washington DC in 2019 and is finally being released on August 27th in a stunning performance by the Spektral Quartet, beautifully produced by Dan Merceruio for Sono Luminus. Right from the start of the three-movement work it's obvious that Thorvaldsdottir is operating on her own trajectory, with little reference to what's come before in the medium. Beginning with some mysterious alchemy that has the strings sounding like a distant wind, or someone's breath, Enigma is instantly arresting. Long, drawn-out chords further the pi
On Wednesday, May 26th, you have the chance to see a private screening (from home) of the immensely powerful documentary CURED. We recorded the soundtrack, our first, with pianist Daniel Schlosberg in Dallas just days before quarantine orders came down and it remains one of the most intense sessions we’ve been a part of. CURED composer Ian Honeyman is a longtime friend of Russ’ from their time in school at Peabody and Doyle recently caught up with this busy film scorer by phone.
Doyle Armbrust: When you and Russ met in college at Peabody, were you already heading down this path towards film scoring or was that something that came later for you?
Ian Honeyman: That developed later because at that time, when we were in music school, I don't think there was a lot of information about film scoring. I knew about Danny Elfman and John Williams, but I didn't know that that was a job that you could just have.
In a year all but bereft of upsides, streamed concerts have offered something close to a silver lining. They’ve flung open doors to otherwise inaccessible performances — whether fiscally or physically — and abetted novel performances that might not have happened otherwise, like a freewheeling Pauline Oliveros opera staged over Zoom last April, cellist Seth Parker Woods’s audiovisually mouthwatering performance of a work inspired by The Chicago Defender (and composed by the inimitable Nathalie Joachim), and Spektral Quartet’s lineup of side-splitting, chin-stroking conversation series.
Gossip Wolf has long hailed the virtuosic string shredding, herculean productivity, and synergetic programming of Chicago's Spektral Quartet. During the COVID-induced absence of concerts, violinists Clara Lyon and Maeve Feinberg, violist Doyle Armbrust, and cellist Russell Rolen have continued to engage their audience via a series of Zoom Q&A sessions called New Music Help Desk. In keeping with the quartet's collaborative sprit, previous events have included composers Alex Temple, Allison Loggins-Hull, and Chris Fisher-Lochhead, and the next one features Pulitzer-winning Chinese composer Du Yun. It's on Friday, March 5, at 3 PM, and though it's free to attend, you must register at Spektral's website.
Cover art by: Alanna Zaritz
Stephen Anthony Rawson: You’ve partnered with a number of Chicago-based organizations—the MCA, GirlForward, the Rebuild Foundation,
the Mosaic School, Openlands Lakeshore Preserve—as well as many composers and performers from this area, and, in 2017, Spektral Quartet was named Chicagoans of the Year. What do you see as your responsibility to Chicagoans?Russ Rolen: I think it’s just being a good citizen. Our responsibility as artists is to be good “citizen artists.” And a “citizen” is different from a “resident.” A “citizen” is someone who participates in the life of the city; someone who is adding to it as they can. It also means being that city’s champion in a way. When we’re in Chicago, we want to be involved in many different artistic conversations that are happening. We want to be making friends all over the city. We want to be adding to it and doing our part in the ways that artists can. And when we go out of the city, we feel like it’s important to bring art from Chicago to other places so that the art that’s being created here is not siloed here. It’s using the platform that we have as an opportunity to share what’s happening where we come from.
All proceeds from this issue of Comfort Hive will benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository. Grab a copy!
The Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation funds many Chicago theaters, dance companies, music groups and other mostly small arts organizations. In recent weeks, the foundation has conducted a comprehensive survey of its grantees, asking a variety of questions as to how they were coping with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The results, shared this week with the Tribune, offer a fascinating snapshot of a more difficult cultural life in a changed city.
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“We have gone farther this year than ever before when it comes to bringing our loyal fan base into the fold, so to speak, because we have noticed how fulfilling it is on both sides to continue building a sense of unity and teamwork in spite of our physical isolation,” wrote the Chicago music group known as Spektral Quartet, echoing similar responses from theater and dance companies.
Performers have long sprinkled contempo- rary pieces in classical programs like raisins in a pudding. Proposed affinities provide an often tenuous rationale for inclusion. This project by the Chicago-based Spektrals ex- plodes that formula. Everything about it is anatomized, theorized, and curated to pro- voke listeners into forming their own con- nections among musical units. That there are connections is assumed.
Schoenberg, in his essay “Brahms the Progressive,” lauds not only Brahms’ late harmonic daring but also the asymmetry of his phrasing: a composer should be “afraid to offend by repeating over and over what can be understood at one single hearing, even if it is new.” (Such “elitist” mid-centu- ry orthodoxy drove Philip Glass to additive rebellion.) The first example Schoenberg cites is Brahms’ C Minor Quartet op. 51, no. 1—which opens the Spektrals’ album. It’s followed by Schoenberg’s Third Quar- tet, which introduced his 12-tone method (even notes should not be repeated too soon!). I don’t expect to hear more meticu- lous or penetrating readings of either piece. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Quartet 1931 fully holds its own in this company, with equally dedicated playing.
Part Two of the album features works by living composers, many of which pose technical challenges that are easy to under- estimate. Sam Pluta’s binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state asks the quartet to enact the timbres and parallel pitch fluidity of electronic instruments. Anthony Cheung’s Real Book of Fake Tunes adds Claire Chase on flutes to spoof the conventions of jazz fakebooks. Charmaine Lee’s Spinals calls for group improvisation around Lee’s vo- calized effects. The whole project takes its name from performer, scholar, and MacAr- thur “genius” George Lewis’ wide-ranging String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living—a title that quotes in turn from a John Stuart Mill passage proposing that “individuality should assert itself.”
That’s the playlist—if you begin and just keep going. But the Spektrals want you to choose your own adventure. University of Chicago professor Patrick Jagoda helped them “gamify” the experience for the era of Spotify and sampling. In the spirit of Flux- us, and of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, they commissioned Na- talie Bontumasi to design a striking deck of 20 cards backed with collages by øjeRum. Each card identifies a track; shuffling and drawing determines playback order. From a pack of 60 smaller “bridge” cards, bear- ing a wild assortment of words, the listener chooses one that suggests a conceptual link between each musical unit and the one last heard. (For those forgoing the card set and hi-res files, Romanian firm Critique Gam- ing has produced a free online emulator with mp3-quality audio at eil.spektralquar- tet.com.) While this tarot-tracking can be whimsical, its serious purpose is to prompt close listening and new discoveries with each hearing.
Since the pieces couldn’t all be record- ed in the same venue, Grammy-winning engineer Dan Nichols, a self-confessed “maximalist,” built a multi-armed “Love- craft array” for four pairs of spot mikes so the players could see each other—and so a single virtual space could be conjured in- dependently of physical location. The per- fectionist Spektrals chose the best phrases from many takes to assemble Nichols’ “ransom note that doesn’t sound like one.”Even at 176.4kHz/24-bits, the seamless result is the most intimate, musically adven- turous simulacrum imaginable. Baudrillard would be proud.
This has been a…trying…year, but the time away from the stage has also given us the opportunity to reevaluate our dreams and goals as an ensemble. What has also been made crystal clear is the interdependence between us and the communities we serve. More specifically, you have shown us with your generosity that you want to help us past this difficult stretch – and that is so incredibly affirming and inspiring to us.
“Debussy Rameau”; Víkingur Ólafsson (Deutsche Grammophon)
Liza Lim, “Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus”; Peter Rundel and Stefan Asbury conducting the Klangforum Wien, with Sophie Schafleitner and Lorelei Dowling (Kairos)
Ethel Smyth, “The Prison”; James Blachly conducting the Experiential Orchestra, with Sarah Brailey and Dashon Burton (Chandos)
“Experiments in Living”: Music of Brahms, Schoenberg, Crawford Seeger, Pluta, Cheung, Charmaine Lee, George Lewis; Spektral Quartet, with Claire Chase (New Focus)
