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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
*misbehaving parents will be asked to sit in time out chairs for a period of 15min.
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.