Introducing the Newest Spektral: Maeve Espy Feinberg!

Allow us introduce our brilliant new violinist, Maeve Espy Feinberg! With a spirited fervor for new music and a nuanced vision for the traditional repertoire, Maeve locked into the Spektral vibe as though she'd been playing with us for years. That she shares our absurd sense of humor means that you can expect our concerts to retain and even embolden their weird wonderfulness.

Maeve hails from New York City, and studied at the New England Conservatory (with Lucy Chapman) and the Universität Mozarteum (with Paul Roczek). Her chamber music credits include the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Program, the Sandor Vegh Institut für Kammermusik, Kneisel Hall Music Festival, the Sarasota Music Festival, and most recently, she was a Composers Conference Contemporary Performance Institute Fellow.

Maeve's love of contemporary music can be traced back in part to the New York apartment in which she grew up. Her father, concert soloist Alan Feinberg, has over 200 premieres to his credit, including the world premieres of Charles Ives's "Emerson" Piano Concerto and John Cage's Piano Concerto. We can make an educated guess that there was 1000% more Feldman being played in her childhood home than in any of ours...

The newest Spektral has a few words about all of this for you:

I am thrilled to be moving to Chicago as the newest member of the Spektral Quartet! As someone who grew up in a household where it was considered fairly normal to be humming 12-tone rows to oneself, it is a dream come true to meet and play with musicians whose artistic interests and goals align so closely with my own, and who share a deep love for and commitment to music both old and new. Clara, Doyle and Russ are incredible musicians with serious chops and not-so-serious senses of humor; I can’t wait to create some beautiful (and weird) sounds with them, and to experience the strange and bewildering phenomenon of "deep-dish pizza."

Maeve will be on stage with us for the entirety of the rest of our season, including our Morton Feldman Quartet No. 2 performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Toledo Art Museum, our Chamber Music America showcase, and our tour to Rome this summer. Make sure to come up and say hello (or offer her a post-concert bourbon) the next time you come to a show!

(photo: Joe Mazza–Brave Lux)

Serious Business Remixed (Part II): Dominic Johnson vs. David Reminick

Next up in our series of Serious Business remixes features the one-and-only Dominic Johnson. Dom is a fantastically versatile artist, and listeners may remember that our first-ever remix of anything ever was his re-tooling of Marcos Balter's "Chambers" from our debut album.

Now available for (free) download to all of you is his re-tooling of David Reminick's "Killing the Ape" movement from The Ancestral Mousetrap. It's a sexy little lounger that masterfully transforms our bow clicks...and we hope it makes your evening a swinger.

Dominic Johnson (electric violin) and Searchl1te at Harris Theater

Thank you for your GRAMMY consideration of 'Serious Business'

Serious Business Remixed (Part I): Max Tamahori vs. David Reminick

To celebrate Serious Business being on the GRAMMY ballot, we've commissioned some of our favorite electronic artists to remix tracks from the album and let you download them for FREE!

First up is the incredible Max Tamahori, who you may have seen spinning late-night around Chicago. Max chose to reimagine David Reminick's "Bringing a Dead Man Back Into Life" from The Ancestral Mousetrap as an even more sinister, club-ready banger. Listen and download your copy below!

Thank you for your considerably considerate consideration...

Chicago Tribune: Weekend Ear Taxi Festival events include several winning premieres

(photo: Patrick Gorski)

"The work whetted one's ears for one of Thomas' own pieces, "Selene (Moon Chariot Rituals)," a Tanglewood Festival-Third Coast co-commission receiving its Chicago premiere. The impetus of dance is never far from the surface of this exhilarating score, which melds the complementary natures of a percussion quartet and a string quartet to produce a study in inexorable rhythmic dynamism. One of Gusty Thomas' most inventive creations, it drew a supercharged performance from the combined forces of Third Coast and Spektral."

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"The Friday evening concert held six world premieres shared by the Spektral Quartet and Ensemble Dal Niente.

A broken cello string early in the performance of George Lewis' String Quartet 1.5: "Experiments in Living" forced the string players to take it again from the top, giving listeners roughly one and a half hearings of the explosive lexicon of noises by the longtime member of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

Leaner of texture and much more introverted of expression was a movement from a string-quartet-in-progress by Chicago Symphony Orchestra resident composer Samuel Adams. Snare drums activated by tranducer speakers lent otherworldly rattles to extremely delicate string writing that suffered for lack of a larger musical context.

One had no problem connecting at once with "Prospective Dwellers" by cellist and composer Tomeka Reid, an active presence on the local jazz scene. Jazz-inflected musings and quasi-pop harmonies gave her piece its easy, good-natured appeal. It and its companion pieces elicited incisive readings from the amazing Spektral foursome."

Read the full article here

Live Painting of Hyde Park Jazz with Miguel Zenón

Credit: Brian Jackson / Chicago Tribune

We are still glowing after our debut at Hyde Park Jazz, performing Miguel Zenón's "Yo Soy La Tradición" to an enthusiastic and packed house! Miguel's eight-movement suite, steeped in traditional music from his native Puerto Rico, is deceptively challenging in its rhythmic and harmonic complexity...and when you're on stage performing with the composer blowing solos that can melt steel...well, it was a thrill ride in every sense of the term.

You may have seen Howard Reich's review in the Chicago Tribune, in which he boldly states that Miguel should submit this piece for Pulitzer consideration. All we can say is, we concur with Howard. It is a riveting piece that curves through blistering virtuosity and elegant lyricism with total ease.

One unexpected highlight of the show was being approached after we left the stage by artist Lewis Achenbach, founder of the Jazz Occurrence™ project. Lewis draws in real-time during performances, and we were really taken by his kinetic chalk renditions of our quintet. We thought you might like to take a peek:

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Chicago Tribune: Hyde Park Jazz Festival review - Music embraces a neighborhood

(photo: Brian Jackson for Chicago Tribune)

The centerpiece of the festival brings a capacity audience to a hush for the world premiere of Zenon's "Yo Soy La Tradicion" ("I Am Tradition"). Commissioned for the occasion by the Hyde Park Jazz Festival, the piece elegantly blurs distinctions among jazz, classical and folkloric music. Substantive yet accessible, rhythmically intense but often melodically soaring, "Yo Soy La Tradicion" shows Zenon — as in previous work — finding inspiration in the musical, cultural and religious rituals of his native Puerto Rico. Yet this is no kitschy appropriation of familiar dance forms. Instead, Zenon has crafted a vast work in which meter, tempo, texture and instrumental technique are in constant flux. Certain passages bristle with complex interactions between Zenon and the Spektral Quartet. Others prove disarmingly direct by virtue of their poetic melodies or buoyant rhythms or extended passages of hand claps for all the musicians. Zenon has built forward motion into the string writing so deftly that you never really miss the rhythm-section accompaniment that typically drives small-ensemble jazz. It's a major work that ought to be recorded, and Zenon should enter it for the Pulitzer Prize music competition.

Read the whole article here

Always Read the Comments

Photo credit: David Bontumasi

Earlier this summer we were invited to perform at the Ravenswood Manor Park concert series – a charming series in which Rolling Stones cover bands are the more typical fare – and we had one of the most charming summer shows in our history. The skaters who took a break from kickflips to creep up behind us for a listen to Schubert, and the three-year-old kid who danced his little heart out really made playing with the sun in our eyes totally worth it.

Some days later we received an email from a woman who found herself amongst the picnic blankets that night. She authors a gratitude blog, and felt inspired to capture her experience while listening to us steer through Mendelssohn and Reich. Having a member of the audience put her thoughts to virtual paper, so thoughtfully and poignantly, is something both lovely and unique.

Below is an excerpt from Deborah Hawkins's No Small Thing blog. If you feel inspired to write up your own review or thoughts on one of our shows, send it to us...we love it!

"On this perfect mid-summer night’s eve, in a park only blocks from where I spend far too many nights on my couch tuned in to whatever options Comcast is offering, I gave in to the spell of the Spektral Quartet.

Here were top-notch musicians bowing their way through works by Schubert and Steven Reich (a peer of Phillip Glass).

Even before a member of the group shared a few remarks about their philosophy, I had already slipped into appreciation mode. It seems, in grokking on this site-specific concert, I was the perfect audience for what they wanted to impart.

When sitting down to listen to trained musicians, it’s automatic to tune up your listening senses.

The precision of their runs, their changing pace and dynamics seemed to render the natural noises of the environment (the sound of the descending gates at the nearby train crossing, pets and their people enjoying the park) especially BEAUTIFUL."

Read the entire piece here