JACK Quartet: JACK Quartet plays áltaVoz composers

Lara pointed out that many prominent Latin American composers of the early 20th century became known for incorporating the folk idioms of their respective countries into their music. To judge from the works on the new recording, though, the composers of áltaVoz take their bearings from abstract, less figurative sources. Lara’s “Tran(slate)” is a reworking of a piece for quartet and electronics, in which the processes that control the studio-generated sounds have been translated into colorful and energetic textures for the strings.

Hurtado’s “L'ardito e quasi stridente gesto” moves from breathless, eruptive gestures to an uneasy stillness, while Pauly’s “Every New Volition a Mercurial Swerve,” has tough, wiry sounds that build and subside in irregularly shaped peaks and valleys. Next to these, Grossmann’s Third Quartet is contemplative and, in its pizzicato middle movement, almost playful, with subtle tonal inflections. The occasional sonic similarity aside, these are four composers with resolutely distinct voices and strategies.

So what, if anything, links them today? What might underlie a Latin American avant-garde? Lara avoids easy answers, though he does think of the idiom as being “inherently cosmopolitan. For us, the entire career was kind of outside our native birthplace.” That’s because many of those countries lack not only a tradition of new music, but also the performers anxious to tackle it.

“At least in Brazil, I can say, there’s really not a lot of new music ensembles, or even players, who are interested or willing to play more challenging new music,” he explained. “There’s a lot of people doing electroacoustic music in Latin America, but it’s very hard to write acoustic music and have it performed, like you see in Boston or New York — they have young groups of phenomenal musicians very hungry to play and present all kinds of new music.”

Like, for example, the JACK Quartet, which Lara praises highly and compares to the Arditti Quartet, a group that premiered “Tran(slate)” and, more broadly, set the standard for a contemporary-music string quartet years ago. “If you think of the Arditti Quartet, whom I’m crazy about, they have that explosive, fiery sound that is kind of a trademark. And the JACK can have that sound if you want them to, but they also have this really refined, classical controlled sound that I love.”

- David Weininger, 9.4.14

The áltaVoz Composers‘ consortium is made up of contemporary Latin American composers who were schooled in the States. By bringing together the work of four of them on this CD, the JACK creates a kind of chamber-tight demonstration of the rich divergence of voice and vocabulary their work manifests.

By the end of the album, for example, they’re wringing a pensive, deeply reflective sadness out of Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann’s 3rd String Quartet, musica fúnebre y nocturna. 

Schoenberg, himself, would have been proud to evoke a night so transfigured by the gentle but trenchant motif that resolves the strings’ lovely distress in the third movement, Passacaglia spezzata. It means a “broken” passacaglia. And it sounds heartbroken. This music sobs itself into a wistful silence too soon, you want much more of it.

As violist Doyle Ambrust writes at Q2 Music, the Grossmann “finds its voice in the midpoint of the last century,” giving it what Ambrust identifies as an “historical” sound.

That’s not unwelcome, either, quite the contrary. While even the most staid traditionalist might find good comfort in the darkening sighs of the Grossmann, the gorgeously named Every new volition a mercurial swerve from Maricio Pauly actually means more business with that title more than you might think.

‘Our Minds Kind Of Get Torn In Two’

“Pauly’s quartet,” Richard says, “is mind-stretching” for the JACK. “It has a whole extra staff of graphic notation — in addition to the specific traditional notation. Our minds kind of get torn in two.”

Having your mind torn in two might not sound like a good time in a recording studio to you, but the JACK guys love it, Richards says. And he’s sent me the Pauly score so I can show you what he’s talking about.

In the image below, you’re looking at a page with the usual staves for the first and second violins, the viola and the cello (properly, a “violoncello,” hence the “VLA” [sic] abbreviation for its line). What you see above each staff in the green and blue is a form of what’s called tablature, musical notation that’s outside the standard.

“There’s an element of improvisation” to playing this, Richards says. “The staff for the bow has a line that goes up and down and there’s the color involved, as well. And it indicates the articulation and the speed of the bow rhythm. So while the left hand has very specific rhythms, the bow might be speeding up and slowing down in a way that’s somewhat up to the performer — and designated by this graphic notation.

“So there’s an element of performer input, a little bit more than most pieces.”

As long as the bows are in the hands of the JACK, Pauly’s in good shape. They work with a precision, a discipline that can sort out and handle the intricacies of such layered notation.

The score arrives with instructions on how to handle the “re-articulation clef” in performance. They explain that the blue line’s lower reaches indicate slow action rising to fast. An abrupt vertical line means the performer is to “stop re-articulating,” and once resumed, that re-articulation of the bow can be “interrupted by a once-occurring note.”

“There’s an element of precision, for sure,” Richards says. “I’d be interested to hear another group play it. The subtlety” of the effects this kind of notation — not quite musical, more tactile — “could really change from group to group.

“We work so much with each other that we read each other very quickly. We work as an organism, you know?”

You can hear the sheer physical agility going on in the JACK’s handling of Pauly’s Swerve — full, indeed, of musical swerves — long, eerie glissandi lifting those bows in what Ambrust calls “a self-regulating confederacy of tone-crunchers.” Lines rise and fall, the players suddenly and briefly unified in pizzicato, then dashing off again to their own corners of the score’s sharp angles.

No, it’s not music you’ll be humming an hour after you near it. But Pauly unsettles you in a delicious way, not least because he can use those rhythmic notations to suddenly slow the group into a quaint ensemble-wide bounce, then send a violin soaring to wail like a carnivale whistle.

I ask Richards if it can be a hindrance as well as a help at times. among musicians so close to each other, to be able, as they are, to anticipate what will come from each other’s work?

Richards thinks about it for a moment, then comes out with a diplomatic swerve of his own and a laugh: “It’s definitely efficient.”

The new album — with a busy, worried pressure behind an engaged performance of José Luis-Hurtado: L’ardito e quasi stridente gesto and a buzz-and-rip opener from Felipe Lara, Tran(slate) — is the JACK Quartet’s 15th, by my count. Unlike some ensembles, the group doesn’t tour based on specific recordings but has amassed a remarkable breadth in that “ride of our repertoire.”

-Porter Anderson