Jacob Bancks: Approaching the Quartet

This Friday, Spektral takes to the road for a day of masterclass and performance at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. We're very much looking forward to premiering a new work by Jacob Bancks, entitled Canticle, who I've known for several years since he was a student at the University of Chicago and I played Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time with his wife Kara, an excellent clarinetist.  Here are some thoughts from him about his personal approach to composition and the string quartet genre.

JAW: In approaching a new work for string quartet, do you find the tradition of the repertoire inspiring or encumbering? What are your favorite quartets and did you draw any inspiration from them for this work?

JB: A lot of composers talk about being weighted down by Mozart, Shostakovich, whomever, when writing string quartets. Honestly, I never let old, famous works in any genre get in my way; that would be like my three-year-old daughter getting her crayons jumbled by the specter of Picasso. And plenty of people can't tell the difference between the two anyway. There are however a few canonical string quartets that I'm constantly engaging, in this project and elsewhere. As a nerdy undergrad I went up to Performers' Music on Michigan Ave. and devoutly bought that red faux-leather volume of the complete Bartók quartets like it was the Book of Common Prayer. Every couple of years I go back to those, and my mind is newly-blown; they're like six new works each time I hear them. Of late I've also become an unwitting fan of Joseph Haydn's quartets. I tell my theory students, Haydn's like your dad: you think he's boring now, but the older you get, the more grotesquely fascinating he will become. And I always go back to Beethoven, especially Op. 130 (B-flat Major) which is personally very sentimental to me, and Op. 131 (C-sharp Minor), which I find both exhilarating and baffling. But my real string quartet fetishes of late, which might be obvious from the new work for Spektral, have been Ravel and Debussy. They each wrote only one quartet: why mess with perfection?

JAW: How did you approach putting pen to paper for this work? Did you begin with an idea of the piece as a whole or smaller moments?

JB: In this particular piece, I started with several musical images that I attempted to shape into a cohesive whole. The centerpiece of the work is this temperamental, bold, coarse cello solo, which has the other instruments responding in various stages of confusion and amazement. The rest of the piece centers on two basic ideas, both of which are transformed through the lens of the cello solo: excruciatingly slow, solemn polyphony; and uncontrollable, quietly nervous flickering.

JAW: How has life as a composer changed with your new role as a faculty member, compared to your past life as a composition student at University of Chicago?

JB: I loved UChicago, so leaving was hard. I was actually teaching for two terms before I came back to defend my dissertation, which was when it struck me that I had spent the last six years around some of the most brilliant musical minds on earth. But Augustana has been an ideal gig for so many reasons: I have excellent colleagues, I enjoy my students, my class sizes are small, and I have been able to build a composition program essentially from scratch. And I can swim to Iowa any time I want. Teaching has, without question, made me a better composer. For one, I nag my students enough about their productivity that I've started expecting more out of myself as well. And I love teaching undergraduates from all kinds of backgrounds: there's nothing like playing Firebird for someone who's never heard it before, or helping a student progress from barely reading notes to beginning to digest works of Berio and Feldman within a couple of years. More than anything, teaching keeps me constantly working toward expressing only the most worthwhile ideas with clarity, passion, and coherence, which is exactly what I hope for in my music as well.

(Re)Arranging the Seven Last Words

This Holy Week marks the third year that Spektral Quartet has played Haydn's "The Seven Last Words of Christ".  We view it as a yearly tradition and approaching this incredible work, full of reverence and depth, is humbling every time.  However, while billed as adapted by Haydn, the quartet version of this masterpiece has moments of thorny voice leading and awkward doublings, while leaving out some interesting lines from the chorus and orchestra original.  We have our suspicions that an eager publisher hired out the creation of this quartet version to make a quick buck.  

 

So, we decided to engage our friend Joe Clark to arrange a new version for string quartet, while maintaining as much of the original as possible.  Below, Joe describes his process and shares a bit about what it meant for him to grapple with this work. Tonight, we debut the new version at University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel.

I began exploring Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ by researching the history of the work's inception, revisions, and publication. Since there were many different arrangements of the work during Haydn's own lifetime (for orchestra, solo piano, string quartet, and choir), there were a lot of places one could start and a lot of resources to refer to.  Since I didn't want to radically reinterpret the quartet treatment, I used the Trautwein plates of the string quartet version as a point of embarkation and began entering that score, in its entirety, into Finale. I received some assistance with this step from my friend and copyist Jeff Schweitzer.

I then cross-referenced each measure of the newly entered score against the 1801 Breitkopf und Härtel choral version: my primary source.  Throughout the project, I also referred to the Bärenreiter Kassel edition of the orchestral score, and the Edition Peters and Henle urtext editions of the string quartet. And, just in case I needed a second (or third or fourth) opinion, I made a Spotify playlist of every version of the piece I could find.

One of the reasons I love arranging is that each project is different and requires different ways of assessing musical problems and thinking both creatively and practically.  Sometimes, the principle challenge of a project will come from adapting an idea for a large ensemble to a smaller instrumentation (or vice versa). Other times, a challenge will arise translating material from one instrumentation to one with radically different strengths and limitations.  However, for this project, those kinds of broad issues were not particularly applicable since I was adapting a work for string quartet for, well, string quartet.

Instead, the challenges that I encountered  were making changes that would fix tuning, balance, voice leading, textural consistency, contrapuntal clarity, etc. while being subtle, stylistically appropriate, and always respectful of what Haydn, a master of the string quartet, put on the page. I was extremely fortunate that the Spektral Quartet prepared a list of passages in the work that were especially thorny and I was surprised when I found some considerable inconsistencies between the string quartet and choral versions: sections originally marked fortissimo marked pianissimo, missing melodies in the winds, omitted chord tones from the tenor line, etc.

I sent  finished drafts of each movement to Dr. Cliff Colnot, who would edit my work.  It was Dr. Colnot who introduced the quartet and me, and I have been very fortunate to work with and learn from him on many projects. After implementing those changes, I sent the score to the quartet, who then played through the work and offered thoughtful suggestions, which resulted in the final version of the score.

Arranging "The Seven Last Words of Christ" required focus and fastidiousness, but the process was very meditative. I found myself suddenly recalling memories of observing Lent as a child: attending "The Stations of the Cross" devotions, traveling to different churches on Holy (Maundy) Thursday, and fish on Fridays. Regardless of one's faith, there is a beauty in remembering dying and their last moments. I am very thankful for the opportunity to work on this project with the Spektral Quartet and I look forward to our next collaboration.

Recording Dig Absolutely

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 Very Open Conversation

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.

Being Weird in Normal

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:

Being Weird in Normal

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:

Reconnoitering the Claim

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.

Red Note Festival

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.

A Winter Week at U of C

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.

Return to the land of Goshen

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:

Vermont Sojourn

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.

Expressions of Carter Over Time

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.

Maiden Voyage to Milwaukee

This weekend marked out first trip to Milwaukee for a concert at the Unruly Music Festival. We had a fantastic day, beginning with a workshop with students and ending with a concert at the Marcus Center's Vogel Hall.

Friday, the day before the trip.  We rehearsed from nine in the morning 'til four in the afternoon, and just before we left we discussed the last details of our travels the next day.

Saturday morning, after reading sketches by University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (our hosts) for works they'll complete for the spring edition of the festival.

Alterra Coffee for lunch! We got a little excited.

Arrival in the Marcus Center.

Diving into the ritual of setting up for tech rehearsal of Black Angels.

It's almost showtime...

We're outta here!  What's Aurelien looking at?

It's a reveler too drunk to stay on his bike! Luckily the police are here to help him.

Launching the Logan Center

We're incredibly excited, thrilled, pumped up and stoked to be playing one of the first concerts in the amazing new Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago.  If you're reading this blog, you probably know that we were recently named Ensemble in Residence at U. of C., so it feels particularly fitting to be launching our brand-spanking-new residency with a performance in a brand new venue.  There's an entire festival of events this weekend, and we hope we'll see you in the Performance Hall for our show on Friday.

But, this building is way more than just a new concert hall.  This is a ten story building with a unique "Performance Loft" on the 9th floor with this view (clicking photos makes 'em get big!):

It's an architectural wonder with many amazing corridors and open spaces:

It asserts itself in the Hyde Park landscape boldly:

And, it has space for a full range of artistic activities.  But, that's not why you're here.  We're so excited about the new concert hall in this building.  We had the chance to try it out last spring (before it was fully completed) when the team from Kirkegaard Associates was in town to see how their work was sounding.  Here we are, getting used to a stage we hope to take many times:

Greetings from Deutschland

As many of you likely know, I also play violin for the contemporary music group Ensemble Dal Niente.  Starting last weekend, and continuing through this week, I am in Darmstadt, Germany with the ensemble for the (in)famous Summer Course for New Music.  You can expect more thoughts from me once I'm not in the midst of rehearsal on some of the most challenging music I've ever tackled - especially on the amazing chamber performances by the Arditti Quartet and Ensemble Recherche in works by Brian Ferneyhough.

For now, I hope you enjoy my photo-blog...since my phone is mostly useful as an mp3 player and camera here.  Clicking a photo makes it bigger!

The opening concert of the festival, with Ensemble Modern playing Cage.

The amazing Arditti Quartet with Brian Ferneyhough after performing his String Quartet No. 6.  More on this later.

A side-street in Darmstadt, that I discovered en-route to my and Jesse Langen's Shangri-La of espresso drinks.

Daniel Vezza plays the hero as well as the composer at Dal Niente's composer workshop by killing a Godzilla-sized spider.

Dal Niente's workshop concert got a bit crowded when extensive piano preparations moved us into a small chamber hall.

The view from my hotel room balcony.  I'll see you and the quartet soon enough.