Chambers is in the Can

Hark! I bring you tidings of great joy! Spektral Quartet and Parlour Tapes+ have all six pieces on Spektral's debut album on tape!

Our final session.

I'm so excited about this record, and couldn't be prouder to have recorded such challenging, intelligent and expressive music for our first disc.  Here are some things I can tell you:

-Recording Ben Hjertmann's piece on Friday and Eliza Brown's on Saturday was one of the biggest challenges this quartet has ever faced.  Both pieces are incredibly difficult individually and for the ensemble, and in drastically different ways: the wild virtuosity and rapid-fire changes of Ben's piece versus the intricately interwoven web of microtonal harmony, pulsating rhythms and subtle timbres in Eliza's work.

-The record is titled "Chambers", a nod to Marcos Balter's piece on the album, the unique sound world of each piece, and that thing the four of us do every day.

-I am a danger to my instrument...after breaking my good violin during our first collaboration with Julien Labro (that video has me playing on a second-rate loaner after I ripped the top off my fiddle with a bow whip), I've proved once again "why we can't have nice things".  Luckily, I was using my secondary violin to play the guitar-picking sections of Ben Hjertmann's piece in our session on Friday.  Check out the sound of me knocking the bridge off my instrument with a big hit behind the bridge:

Also, things get a little loopy when we're hunkering down in the studio.  Our coping mechanism seems to be extreme wackiness...thanks to Jenna Lyle for taking notes on our silliness during Friday's session:

“And THAT’s why they call him ol’ One Take Armbrust!”-Austin

“What do we want?? Time travel!! When do we want it?? That's irrelevant!!”-Aurelien

“Are there any shorter chairs? I can’t hunch over the way I like with these.” -Austin

“Bar 60 was the best we’ve ever done it that time.”-Russ
“Yeah, seriously. Speed it up, do a little pitch correction in post... It’ll be great.”-Doyle

“Why Guitar Players Have Frets: Part 800”-Austin

“Ya know, it should be more like ‘da-doo-dat-doo-dat--dat’”-Russ

“Well that was definitely tragic.”-Russ

“Ca-Kaww!”-Austin/Aurelien

“There’s the performing phase, and there’s the judging phase. And when you go too long....one takes over...How about 5. Take 5?” -Russ

Stylistic Maneuvers

I've never been the kind of musician (or music fan) who feels the need to be exclusive in my tastes.  While it may surprise some of you who are more familiar with me writing about Haas or Carter, I'm just as likely to listen to Ke$ha or Chick Corea's "My Spanish Heart" without the slightest tinge of irony.

If I spend too long playing strictly concert hall music, I get a bit itchy.  I'm certainly listening to other stuff, like my recent obsession from an amazing super-group.

That's why the the beginnings of our collaboration with Julien Labro for an album on Azica Records have brought me musical energy just when I thought I was burnt out from a long concert season.

First of all, Julien sent us a new arrangement of this scorcher a few months back to start work on:

Given the mixed meters and quicksilver solo lines, it's a good thing we've had some time to absorb the tune.

I'll be honest, I'd never heard of any of the artists on this track before Julien sent it our way.  And, it's more of the same with a few other composers and tunes on the record.  That includes the thorny hubbub of Fernando Otero's "De Ahora en Màs" and a couple tunes by the incredibly talented Diego Schissi, whose adventures in nuevo tango have a flavor of Stravinsky.

It's not like I've never listened to Latin jazz before, but diving into the styles and listening with actually playing these different moods and grooves in mind has been an adventure in uncovering some really special musical personalities.

Our first shows with the new material are on Tuesday at the Clark Street location of Uncommon Ground and on the Pittsburgh Chamber Music Society the following day.  Look for more shows this fall, and the album later in the concert season!

But, it's not our first time playing together and we'll be bringing back some familiar arrangements from familiar names:

Scrapbook of a Recording Session

This past Tuesday morning, we made the trek down Lakeshore drive to the Performance Hall in the Logan Center at U. Chicago.  Our friends from Parlour Tapes+ were already mostly finished in their setup as we warmed up and got situated.  We came into this session feeling confident about our preparation and eager to get Hans Thomalla's "Albumblatt" on tape.  It may be the piece we've played the most over our first three seasons as a quartet.

Adjusting to the incredibly clear acoustic of the hall took some time, but once we started playing full takes of the piece we began getting in a rhythm.  Once the initial concern about getting it perfect wore away, it came down to playing the piece the way we know how...microphones be damned.

Having Hans' exacting ears there for the session was a boon, helping tweak our dynamics and articulations for the room and the microphones.

As the session wore on and it came down to making sure we were happy with everything, we realized we were better off having a coffee than continuing the session.  We're looking forward to refining the sound of the recording the same way we've tweaked our conception of the piece over the last year.

Introducing Parlour Tapes+

A first foray into any realm of great importance is best made with friends.  So, as we programmed our debut album it was self-evident that we record works by our composing comrades here in Chicago. And when we were approached by our pals Jenna Lyle and Kyle Vegter (who have teamed up with more amazing people in Andrew Tham and Ellen McSweeney) to be part of launching their new record label the choice was clear: an album of Chicago composers on a Chicago label.

We're thrilled to be a part of the birth of the first Chicago label devoted entirely to contemporary art music, Parlour Tapes+.   You can come see the label take its first public steps at "The Guilty Party" on May 16, an evening of music and mystery.  We'll be there, helping to score the action as we unmask the "killer" of Third Coast Percussion's David Skidmore!

And the good news is, this recording is really happening!  We already have Chris Fisher-Lochhead's "Dig Absolutely" in the can, and recently recorded Marcos Balter's "Chambers" in Northwestern University's reverberant and spacious Alice Millar Chapel.

Check it out.

Getting the mics set with our inimitable producer Kyle Vegter:

In case you were wondering, this place is pretty majestic.  We had mics getting room sound up there...

Doyle preaches the good news of the viola to the congregation:

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.

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.

Minty Fresh Quartets

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:

Juicebox: Bypassing Preconceptions

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.

 

A Juicebox for Chicago's Preschoolers

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.