The Ciompi Quartet has served as Duke University’s string quartet in residence for several decades, and has commissioned and premiered many works by their composition faculty colleagues at the institution. A Duke Moment celebrates three of those collaborative commissions, featuring music by Stephen Jaffe, Anthony M. Kelley, and Scott Lindroth. Saxophonist Susan Fancher joins the quartet for the Lindroth work.
Stephen Jaffe’s String Quartet No. 3 (“A Tapestry”) is a taut six movement work that manages musical materials with economy throughout. “Prelude (Fragments)” establishes a genteel character immediately through a repeated phrase of four detaché notes followed by a sighing, tenuto chord. An angular, scalar passage breaks up the lilting mood only momentarily, returning to the saunter of the opening material to close the movement and elide with the opening of the next. The “Scherzino” takes the melodic contour and the sighed chordal gesture of the “Prelude” and adds more swing, playful rhythmic asides, and hiccups into its fabric. The quartet moves in and out of textures in which it functions as one unit versus as independent voices skittering around each other. The interrupting scalar passage from movement one is expanded and developed, presented in subtly shifting garb.
The very brief “Joy of Rhythm” revels in pointillistic interjections and disjunct ensemble machines, anchored by the percussive articulation of pizzicato in the cello. “Ribbons (Watercolor)” is immediately contrasting in its opening, creating lush pastels of instrumental color with legato chords that seep into each other. A long limbed melody is supported by lithe repeated notes in the accompaniment; over time, internal accents in the accompaniment assert themselves on the momentum of the section, before the movement toggles back and forth between enveloping chordal phrases and flitting bursts of animated energy. The longest movement in the work, “Scherzone (Night Blues)”, also contains the quartet’s most vigorous and multi-layered music. Squirrely figures connect pizzicato punctuations, and later strident, accented violin chords. Throughout, motivic arguments are made with Haydn-esque concision. A lyrical, shrouded middle section features a slightly halting violin melody in the high register over a gently rocking accompaniment. In a work that is overall quite assured in its thematic presentation, the “Scherzone” is the heart of its glimpse towards ambivalence, expertly placed in the penultimate position structurally to allow the final movement to resolve the newly injected tension. The “Postlude” delivers, opening with a reprise of the initial five note motive from the first movement, now heard integrating expressive elements from the subsequent movements, including the warm voicings of “Ribbons,” the swung figures from “Scherzino,” and the pizzicato texture from “Joy of Rhythm.”
Read More Anthony M. Kelley’s Sidelines is a musical portrait of two of America’s most beloved sports, “Baseball” and “Basketball.” Kelley joyfully evokes a folksy Americana by embedding elements of ragtime, blues, and jazz into the piece. “Baseball (A Ragtime Fugue)” puts a slinky, chromatic theme through its contrapuntal paces, enlivened by sassy accents and smooth ornamental turns. In an extended episodic section, violin and cello play improvisational material in dialogue as a duo based on the fugue theme. The movement features nine entrances for the subject (for the nine innings) and even works in a “stretch” or augmented statement for its seventh entrance (7th inning stretch!). Kelley arrives at a dramatic pedal point in the cello, underscoring the inherent drama and tension built into America’s pastime in its closest games.“Basketball (Variations on the Jump)” draws more explicitly from mid-century jazz, at times sounding like it could be a track off of the classic hard bop album from Oliver Nelson, The Blues and the Abstract Truth. The violin is given a conversational, bluesy solo midway through the movement, and the easy shuffle groove gives way to a final word from the cello, doing its best walking bass impression.
Scott Lindroth’s Schley Road for saxophone and string quartet is a musical portrait of a rural North Carolina intersection, the kind of intersection that is the center of a town made up of one building. Lindroth’s experiences navigating this landscape on a bike inspired the piece, and the picture it paints. The opening movement, “Recollections,” is primarily lyrical and pastoral, with the saxophone line leading the way with elegantly contoured melodies. A restless “presto” section briefly emerges midway through the movement, an episode of velocity before the movement heads towards a gentle close. The title movement is exuberant, capturing an exhilarating navigation of the landscape through agile saxophone passages that fly above a fragmented, moto perpetuo rhythmic accompaniment. Lindroth lets textures evolve sonically as they gradually cover different registral areas. Mellifluous saxophone writing, wide swooping arpeggios, activated mixed meter passagework, and repetition with variation all combine to lend the music a sense of a breathless journey.
The Ciompi Quartet and their composer colleagues are standard bearers for a compositional tradition that is grounded in craft and connection with the chamber music lineage. This long term collaboration is testament to how institutions can be wonderful environments within which to arrive at shared aesthetic values and produce meaningful work that is directly responsive to a local community of listeners and musicians. A Duke Moment is just that, a snapshot of this quartet’s lasting contribution to the musical life at one of the country’s important academic centers.
– Dan Lippel
Recorded May 17-19, 2022 & April 27, 2023 at Baldwin Auditorium, Duke University
Recording producer: Judith Sherman
Sound engineer: Chris Boerner
Editing, mix and mastering: Judith Sherman and Jeanne Velonis
Proofreaders: James Rodgers
Cover image: Baldwin Auditorium at Duke, reimagined
Design & layout: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Ciompi Quartet
Since its founding by Italian violinist Giorgio Ciompi in 1965 the Ciompi Quartet of Duke University has delighted audiences and impressed critics around the world. In a career that spans five continents the Quartet has developed a reputation for performances of real intelligence and musical sophistication, with a warm, unified sound that allows each player’s individual voice to emerge.
In recent years, the Ciompi Quartet has performed across the United States and abroad, showing a commitment to creative programming which mixes the old and the brand new. Its extensive catalog of commissions includes many that the group continues to perform on tour. Close ties to composers such as Paul Schoenfield, Stephen Jaffe, Scott Lindroth, and Melinda Wagner have produced important contributions to the repertoire; the quartet premiered Stephen Jaffe’s Third String Quartet and two new quintets by Lindroth: Schley Road for quartet and saxophone, and his Cello Quintet.
Ciompi’s members are all Professors at Duke University, where they lead the string studios and chamber music program. Another core part of their contribution to the community of Durham, NC, is performances on campus and beyond in both traditional and non-traditional chamber music settings.
Stephen Jaffe
Composer Stephen Jaffe’s music has been featured at major concerts and festivals including the Nottingham, Tanglewood, and Oregon Bach Festivals and performed internationally by ensembles including the R.A.I. of Rome, Slovenska Filharmonija, the National Symphony, the San Francisco, North Carolina and New Jersey Symphonies, Berlin’s Spectrum Concerts, London’s Lontano, and many others. Bridge’s four discs of the composer’s music most recently showcased Jaffe’s collaborators including the Borromeo Quartet, the Da Capo Chamber Players, David Hardy, cello and Lambert Orkis, piano in premiere recordings of Light Dances (Chamber Concerto No. 2) and other new chamber music.
Notable recent works include A Forest Unfolding, a collaborative cantata composed with Eric Moe, Melinda Wagner and David Kirkland Garner, writers Richard Powers, Anne LaBastille and others. The 35-minute work is inspired by recent scientific work into the rich communication and subterranean connectivity between trees—evoked also in Richard Power’s novel The Overstory. Jaffe’s three string quartets, six chamber concertos and works for orchestra include the well-received Concerto for Cello and Orchestra and Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. In these works, Jaffe’s musical language ranges from the lyrical, singing voices of the cello and violin to an orchestral world filled with the sounds of contemporary percussion, from steel drums in the Concerto for Violin to sampled songs of Black-Capped Chickadees in Poetry of the Piedmont. Stephen Jaffe is Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Professor of Music at Duke University where he has taught since 1981.
Anthony M. Kelley
Before joining the Duke University music faculty in 2000, Anthony M. Kelley served as Composer-in-Residence with the Richmond Symphony for three years under a grant from Meet the Composer, Inc. He received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from Duke, and a doctorate in musical composition from the University of California at Berkeley.
Kelley was appointed as Composer in Residence for the North Carolina Symphony 2021-2025. His major commissions for symphony orchestra include: Spirituals of Liberation (premiered in 2022 by the North Carolina Symphony); Africamerica (premiered in 1999 by the Richmond Symphony with piano soloist Donal Fox); and The Breaks (premiered in 1998 by The American Composers Orchestra). The Baltimore, Detroit, Atlanta, Oakland East Bay, Marin (CA) and San Antonio symphony orchestras have also performed Kelley’s works.
Kelley served, with colleague Prof. Thomas Brothers, as the co-convener of the Duke Humanities Lab, “Black Music and the Soul of America,” dedicated to the study, pedagogy, and promotion of ideas around the performance and rhetoric of Black American music. In 2023-24, Kelley worked to reconstruct and recompose portions of Mary Lou Williams’s final work for wind symphony History... with double-premieres of the work by the New World Symphony (Miami, FL) and the Duke University Wind Symphony.
Kelley’s newest original work for orchestra, Constitutional: A Concerto Grosso in Blue, commissioned by and for the North Carolina Symphony, will receive its premiere in their 2025 season. Kelley co-directs, with clarinetist Nicholas Lewis, and performs in the improvisational postmodern new-blues quartet, the BLAK New Blues Ensemble.
Scott Lindroth
Scott Lindroth has taught music at Duke since 1990. His work has been performed world-wide by major orchestras and chamber ensembles, including the Chicago Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, the Netherlands Wind Ensemble, the Marine Band, and dozens of soloists who teach and study at the finest conservatories in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Lindroth has received fellowships and awards from the Fromm Music Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Revson Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Howard Foundation, the Aaron Copland Foundation, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, among others. In 1984 he was privileged to be a resident composer with the New York Philharmonic, a relationship that culminated in the performance of his first orchestral work, A Fire’s Bright Song, in 1987. Since then he has gone on to compose more music for orchestra, wind ensemble, string quartet, mixed chamber ensembles, voice, and electronic media. At Duke, Lindroth teaches courses on composition related topics, and served as Duke’s first Vice Provost for the Arts (2007 – 2020).
