Spektral Quartet: Experiments in Living

Including older and contemporary works on the same program is nothing new. But two string quartets took such era-spanning perspectives to fresh heights this year.

Brooklyn Rider had the temerity to sequence new pieces between the movements of Beethoven’s Opus 132 on their double-disc set “Healing Modes.” And the Spektral Quartet’s digital-only double album, “Experiments in Living,” invited listeners to hit “shuffle” on their streaming service of choice. (Alternately, one could use the group’s specially designed tarot cards to determine a new sequence during each listen.)

On Brooklyn Rider’s album, the playing of Beethoven’s tender slow movement seemed to gain additional poignancy when coming after detours into the sounds of today’s avant-garde from composers like Du Yun and Matana Roberts.

On one randomized tour through Spektral’s playlist, I was astonished to discover how some of the players’ darting articulations during the first movement of Brahms’s String Quartet No. 1 proved a perfect appetizer for the serrated edges of Sam Pluta’s “binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state.”

You can, of course, go through both albums such that every work proceeds in its correct order. But these scrambled yet crisply played recordings also manage to suggest that different eras and styles might have something useful to offer each other.

— Seth Colter Walls, 12.03.2020

...The Spektral’s major project of the benighted year 2020, though, has been an album titled “Experiments in Living,” which is certain to appear on my year-end list of notable recordings. It is a tour-de-force survey of repertory, classic and modern, demonstrating in almost textbook fashion how nineteenth-century Romanticism evolved into twentieth-century modernism and then into the all-devouring experimentalism of recent decades. If you listen to the album in the given order, you will begin with Brahms’s Quartet in C Minor, from 1873, in which the traditional process of thematic development is pursued with a kind of microscopic intensity that presages the breakdown of conventional harmonic structures. That breakdown is achieved in Schoenberg’s Third String Quartet (1927), even as the exposition and development of musical ideas obey classical rigor. A further breakdown takes place in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet (1931), a monument of American modernism; in its Andante, discrete thematic ideas dissolve into a continuously undulating texture. From there, the path is open to a group of latter-day American composers: Sam Pluta, Anthony Cheung, Charmaine Lee, and George Lewis.

Yet the Spektral players encourage their listeners to break from proceeding in a straight-ahead chronological fashion. They propose that the tracks be shuffled, but not in the sense of the shuffle feature in Apple Music, which randomizes tracks on a playlist. Rather, the physical packing for “Experiments in Living” comes with a deck of tarot-style illustrated cards, one for each track on the album. The listener is invited to shuffle the cards, lay them out on the table, and determine the track order by flipping them. A set of smaller cards are printed with adjectives—“labyrinthine,” “relentless,” “frisky,” “deviant,” and so on—which listeners can use to tease out connections among the various pieces. You choose one to identify continuities on the playlist.

As one who relies too much on adjectives professionally, I made sparing use of the smaller cards, but I enjoyed the physicality of the shuffling. The cards have a lovely touch of the occult about them, as if a fortune-teller were pointing up secret connections. And, indeed, resemblances crop up all over, especially when one of the historical composers butts against a living one. Rapidly skittering figures in Pluta’s “binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state” pick up from Crawford Seeger’s mercurial textures. A delicate interplay of short motives in Cheung’s “The Real Book of Fake Tunes,” for flute and string quartet—Claire Chase joins the Spektral players on the recording—is akin to the contrapuntal games of the Schoenberg. To hear the fractured vocalizations of Lee’s “Spinals” after the Brahms’s vigorous finale risks whiplash, yet the transition from one to the other had the revelatory shock of a masterly cinematic cut.

At the end of the “official” sequence comes Lewis’s “Experiments in Living,” from which the album’s title comes. Lewis found the phrase in John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty,” in a passage discussing the freedom of individuals to express themselves within a harmonious social whole. The composer writes, “I’m looking for listeners to experience the volatility of memory, resistance, and hope.” This is the heftiest of the contemporary pieces, and, in it, various strands from the older works seem to come into play, as if the composer were making a grand synthesis of string-quartet tradition even as he unleashed the devices of the post-1945 avant-garde. I felt a peculiar sense of connection between Lewis and Brahms, although I had difficulty pinpointing just what it was. Eventually, I realized that the players’ application in the Brahms of the seemingly old-fashioned gesture of portamento, sliding lushly from note to note, forms an unexpected link to Lewis’s thoroughgoing use of glissando.

In the end, the Spektral’s ingenious presentation is simply to invite active and repeated listening—to move the music from the background to the foreground, to read it like a book. The album also invites repeat encounters because it is sensationally well played. The account of the Brahms is a feast of rhythmic clarity and lyrical thrust. The Schoenberg, so often cluttered and frantic-sounding in performance, has flow and dance. Extreme precision of intonation and articulation highlights the fact that the Crawford Seeger is an essentially perfect score, every note charged with purpose. The same meticulousness governs the group’s approach to the contemporary pieces, yet fury comes to the fore when called for. The Spektral has accomplished the signal service of obliterating the dividing line between past and present, tradition and avant-garde; chronological barriers collapse, and the sounds roam free.

— Alex Ross, 11.10.2020

Performers have long sprinkled contemporary pieces in classical programs like raisins in a pudding. Proposed affinities provide an often tenuous rationale for inclusion. This project by the Chicago-based Spektrals explodes that formula. Everything about it is anatomized, theorized, and curated to provoke listeners into forming their own connections among musical units. That there are connections is assumed.

Schoenberg, in his essay “Brahms the Progressive,” lauds not only Brahms’ late harmonic daring but also the asymmetry of his phrasing: a composer should be “afraid to offend by repeating over and over what can be understood at one single hearing, even if it is new.” (Such “elitist” mid-century orthodoxy drove Philip Glass to additive rebellion.) The first example Schoenberg cites is Brahms’ C Minor Quartet op. 51, no. 1—which opens the Spektrals’ album. It’s followed by Schoenberg’s Third Quartet, which introduced his 12-tone method (even notes should not be repeated too soon!). I don’t expect to hear more meticulous or penetrating readings of either piece. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Quartet 1931 fully holds its own in this company, with equally dedicated playing.

Part Two of the album features works by living composers, many of which pose technical challenges that are easy to underestimate. Sam Pluta’s binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state asks the quartet to enact the timbres and parallel pitch fluidity of electronic instruments. Anthony Cheung’s Real Book of Fake Tunes adds Claire Chase on flutes to spoof the conventions of jazz fakebooks. Charmaine Lee’s Spinals calls for group improvisation around Lee’s vocalized effects. The whole project takes its name from performer, scholar, and MacArthur “genius” George Lewis’ wide-ranging String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living—a title that quotes in turn from a John Stuart Mill passage proposing that “individuality should assert itself.”

That’s the playlist—if you begin and just keep going. But the Spektrals want you to choose your own adventure. University of Chicago professor Patrick Jagoda helped them “gamify” the experience for the era of Spotify and sampling. In the spirit of Fluxus, and of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, they commissioned Natalie Bontumasi to design a striking deck of 20 cards backed with collages by øjeRum. Each card identifies a track; shuffling and drawing determines playback order. From a pack of 60 smaller “bridge” cards, bearing a wild assortment of words, the listener chooses one that suggests a conceptual link between each musical unit and the one last
heard. (For those forgoing the card set and hi-res files, Romanian firm Critique Gaming has produced a free online emulator with mp3-quality audio at eil.spektralquartet.com.) While this tarot-tracking can be whimsical, its serious purpose is to prompt close listening and new discoveries with each hearing.

Since the pieces couldn’t all be recorded in the same venue, Grammy-winning engineer Dan Nichols, a self-confessed “maximalist,” built a multi-armed “Lovecraft array” for four pairs of spot mikes so the players could see each other—and so a single virtual space could be conjured independently of physical location. The perfectionist Spektrals chose the best phrases from many takes to assemble Nichols’ “ransom note that doesn’t sound like one.” Even at 176.4kHz/24-bits, the seamless result is the most intimate, musically adventurous simulacrum imaginable. Baudrillard would be proud.

— Randall Couch, 1.22.2021

One of the reasons Spektral Quartet have remained favorites of Chicago’s new music scene is their holistic interest in the trajectory of classical music and how it connects with contemporary repertoire. This superb new double album expands the way the group often programs its concerts. Yes, it’s strange to include a performance of Brahms’ String Quartet in C Minor in this column, but the group features the piece because the composer’s harmonic sense was celebrated by Arnold Schoenberg, the 20th century paradigm-shifter whose String Quartet No. 3 is also performed here. Also included is Ruth Crawford Seeger’s brilliant and perennially overlooked 1931 String Quartet. The second half of the collection zooms in on the present; the slashing intensity and radical dynamics of Sam Pluta’s “binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state;” the transplanted harmonic language of jazz within a formal classical structure behind the splintered melodies of guest flutist Claire Chase on Anthony Cheung’s “Real Book of Fake Tunes;” the purely spontaneous electricity of the quartet’s splattery yet cogent collaboration with improvising vocalist Charmaine Lee on “Spinals;” and the, by turns, eerie, violent, serene, and percussive George Lewis work “String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living.” The second disc provides a potent sampler of some crucial threads in 21st century composition. In typically inventive Spektral Quartet fashion, the physical release includes a set of custom tarot cards to chart random track sequences in order to discover new connections.

— Peter Margasak, 8.21.2020

We knew this was something special from the moment it was announced. After years of gracing album covers (and recording dozens of his own), collage artist øjeRum created a series of art cards for this project. They arrive in a keepsake box, accompanied by two decks of word cards and the suggestion to pair words with images and images with songs, producing an endless supply of listening experiences and interpretations.

— Richard Allen, 12.06.2020

I want to highlight one special album that is one of the best of the year and belongs on both lists, Experiments in Living from the Spektral Quartet. This puts together superb performances of string quartets from Brahms, Schoenberg, and Ruth Crawford Seeger with new music from Sam Pluta, Anthony Cheung, Charmaine Lee, and George Lewis. I particularly love the Brahms and Lee’s and Lewis’ new pieces. This is a digital recording but there is a nice piece of physical media, a set of Tarot-style cards that you can use to reorder the track list (one of the advantages of digital media). The whole package is as lovely as the music making is excellent.

— George Grella, 12.23.2020

For a release whose individual pieces seem intentionally not to belong together (there’s even an online, tarot-style app to select tracks in apparently random order), this wide-ranging, sometimes breathtakingly audacious offering from the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet makes a lot of sense. What holds it together, in fact, are the Spektral players’ incisive, compelling performances, which quite miraculously feel as if the players are discovering their repertoire for the first time, with all the joy and wonder that entails, yet also conveying works they’ve known for a lifetime.

Accordingly they offer a nimble, transparent account of the Brahms C minor Quartet, expertly shaped and with a good balance of elegance and gruffness, but they really come into their own in a Schoenberg Third Quartet full of nervy energy and crisp articulation, and just as deeply lyrical as the preceding Brahms. Their enormously characterful account of Ruth Crawford (Seeger)’s 1931 Quartet makes you wonder why the piece isn’t more widely known: it’s a jagged, uncompromising work, with the musicians often jostling for attention in their strongly contrasted musical personalities, and the Spektral players give it a brilliant, dashing performance, superbly controlled but full of volatile passion.

They complement the three ‘established’ works with a quartet of recent pieces commissioned for them and premiered by them – and their enthusiasm for these new works is evident. While Charmaine Lee’s semi-improvised Spinals veers towards self-indulgence, Anthony Cheung’s exquisite The Real Book of Fake Tunes combines Claire Chase’s flute with filigree quartet writing to bewitching effect, while George Lewis’s acerbic String Quartet 1.5, which provides the disc’s overall title, gets the serious-minded insights it deserves. Best, however, is Sam Pluta’s extraordinary binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state, a helter-skelter succession of 25 micro-movements of hyperactive sonic invention, which the Spektral players mine for all their exuberant musicality.

Recorded sound is surprisingly tightly focused, but this is a remarkable, deeply rewarding offering from a quartet showing its abundant skills across a joyfully bewildering range of repertoire.

— David Kettle, 10.23.2020

Equally distinguished playing is to be found on Experiments in Living, the new double CD by the Spektral Quartet, another tight-as-a-drum Chicago-based ensemble. A mix of old and new, the program includes Brahms, Schoenberg, and Ruth Crawford (Seeger), as well as works by four contemporary composers. Sinewy and urgent, their account of Schoenberg’s Third String Quartet holds up a wonderful mirror to Crawford’s thorny String Quartet of 1931, a work that surely deserves as much attention as works by her more commonly programmed male contemporaries.

Among the new works, Sam Pluta’s sputtering binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state is a mercurial riot and receives a reading of breathtaking technical assuredness. Flautist Claire Chase joins for Anthony Cheung’s The Real Book of Fake Tunes, a skillful work if ironically a little short on tunes. The improvised collaboration with Australian-born vocalist Charmaine Lee is a deep dive into the sounds that bows are capable of making on strings and wood and an equally subterranean dive into the nether regions of Lee’s larynx. George Lewis’s explosive String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living concludes matters, a skittering, slashing quarter of an hour of musical invention.

Over ten years, the Spektrals have built a reputation for drawing on the past to inform the present, providing audiences with access points to new music. This time they go one further by encouraging the listener to approach the works out of order, the choice of which track follows which determined randomly by a specially designed deck of cards (available as an add-on purchase) with one movement written on the back of each. As you listen to your chosen sequence, you are invited to peruse a second deck of cards with associative words on them and decide which word best links each of the two tracks. I was genuinely surprised at the unexpected synergy as I went from Movement III of the Cheung to Movement IV of the Crawford and was torn between the connective words “labyrinthine” and “frisky”. I then travelled on to Movement IV of the Schoenberg where I found myself toying with “architectural” and “relentless”. An intriguing game, though the recording can definitely stand alone.

— Clive Paget, 10.14.2020

When this release was presented to me for review, I politely declined Spektral Quartet’s invitation to determine my own playlist using a deck of cards, à la John Cage making composing choices via the I Ching. I can do the same thing with my computer’s random play button, and no one will be any the wiser. The point is that you don’t need a gimmick to realize that the range, the diversity, and the eclecticism of the selections speak for themselves. More importantly, the Spektral Quartet manages to lock into each composer’s sound world.

To be sure, more expansive and genial readings of Brahms’ C minor Quartet can be had (for example, the Alban Berg Quartett, the Quartetto Italiano), yet Spektral’s lean textured, contrapuntally clear outer movements and deliberately held-back Allegretto hold comparable validity. Shapely nuance and intelligent use of portamento and vibrato enliven Schoenberg’s still-foreboding syntax: compare Spektral’s conversational bounce in the Allegretto to the relatively stiff and clipped New Vienna String Quartet recording, or the specificity of their melodic pointing in the Adagio next to the Leipziger Streichquartett’s more generalized though impeccable execution.

Their interpretation of Ruth Crawford’s astonishing 1931 Quartet easily matches the Pacifica Quartet’s reference recording, especially in the finale’s nimbly phrased unison lines. By contrast, the Sam Pluta composition is all about percussive attacks and releases. It often evokes DJs employing scratching techniques at super speed. The music demands and receives as vivacious and hard-hitting a performance as one is likely to hear.

Anthony Cheung’s The Real Book of Fake Tunes amounts to a textural tour-de-force, where flutist Claire Chase’s amazing command of extended techniques assiduously integrate within the composer’s boundless gestural arsenal. The fourth movement in particular stands out for Cheung’s blending of pizzicato punctuations and sustained chording, and for the climactic cascading runs with instruments in all registers.

I’m not sold on Spinals, an improvised collaboration with Charmaine Lee; I find that the electronic component and wordless vocal effects abound with clichés that we’ve heard millions of times from thousands of electro-acoustic improvisors. On the other hand, George Lewis masterfully recreates the language of his highly original electronic aesthetic through the string quartet medium, where his fresh and constantly inventive writing always keeps you guessing. What is more, Lewis is not afraid to use silence to make a dramatic impact and to help prepare the ear for the next timbral onslaught. “Spektral Stimulation” is guaranteed for all listeners, and this release certainly does the ensemble proud on the cusp of its 10th anniversary.

— Jed Distler, 8.28.2020

This week Spektral Quartet, Chicago’s multi-grammy nominated ensemble, releases their fourth full length studio album: Experiments in Living. Taking its namesake from a quote by utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill the album is meant to be “an interactive, deep-listening excursion through Spektral’s expansive repertoire.” The conceptual cornerstone of this project is Spektral’s philosophy that pairing classic standards with new contributions can alter our perception of both.

This album, unlike most, is not meant to be listened to from start to finish. The music is paired with a collection of Tarot-style cards from Copenhagen-based artist øjeRum. These strikingly colored cards are meant to guide the listener through an aleatoric process. Spektral Quartet has devised a system wherein the album can last fifteen minutes, fifty minutes, or longer (depending on how you choose to draw your cards.) Featuring the work of seven composers and roughly two hours of audio this collection is a bold attempt to offer art music consumers a new experience in the age of streaming. The A side features the works of Brahms, Schoenberg, and Crawford (Seeger) while the B side showcases the newer talents of Sam Pluta, Anthony Cheung, Charmaine Lee, and George Lewis. In the following sections I will address each work separately before circling back to discuss the experience that the album offers.

Johannes Brahms: String Quartet in C minor, Op. 51 No. 1

The first four tracks on this album (if you were to listen chronologically) are composed of Brahms’ String Quartet #1 in C minor. This work serves as an interesting study in the personality and creative habits of the great German Composer. So infamously indecisive was Brahms that, to this day, composers remark that they have a case of “Brahms Syndrome” when they feel the need to continuously revise an otherwise completed project. Op. 51 is no exception. In typical Brahmsian style the creation of this work took place slowly over the course of eight painstaking years. There is evidence that he started writing this piece as early as 1869 and destroyed upwards of 20 different manuscripts on his way to finally publishing the work in the Summer of 1873 (at the age of 40). Brahms’ contribution to the Western canon cannot be overstated, but it certainly seems that if one were tasked with finding a composer to choose a restaurant with that Brahms might not be the wisest choice.

Brahms’ fickle nature is on full display in this recording. The first movement opens with a fast-paced, angsty, a full-bodied phrase which soon gives way to thin and impish recantation. These two, seemingly opposed, dispositions unceasingly oscillate throughout this movement with a mastery so refined that it makes Kanye seem emotionally stable in comparison. The second movement is careful and elegant. Brahms takes 7 and a half minutes to patiently walk the listener through a satisfying series of gentle motivic developments and perfectly curated counterpoint. The third movement is a wandering, almost improvisatory, exploration. It is ambiguous in character. Motion never ceases, but it never seems to have a precise destination. In the final movement Brahms reestablishes the confidence with which the first movement began, but this time he is less willing to recant. There are intermittent moments of intimacy, but they come few and far between as Brahms demonstrates exactly how he earned his moniker as the third “B” of classical music.

We tend to talk about Brahms as two separate people. On one hand we have the arbiter of Brahms syndrome. The sad sack who was chronically crippled by self-doubt. The man who, by all indications, erased far more music than he ever published. On the other hand we have the fiery German master. The heir apparent to the First Viennese School. The man who, although he most assuredly second guessed himself along the way, had the wherewithal to continue the legacy of the Symphony in a world void of Beethoven. And when told, at his favorite bar in Vienna, that his first symphony sounded like Beethoven’s 10th replied curtly, “Do you think you are the first jackass to tell me that?” Perhaps what makes Op. 51 No. 1 so compelling is that both dualities of Brahms are so prominently depicted in the music.

Arnold Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30

54 years after the premier of the aforementioned Brahms, but in the same town, Arnold Schoenberg premiered his String Quartet no. 3. Nearly two decades had passed since Vienna had witnessed a work in this medium from the thorny and often temperamental composer. His String Quartet no. 2 had been remarkably unusual in that, in addition to a typical four players, it also called for a solo Soprano. Op. 30, however, carries a uniqueness of its own. Schoenberg had previously utilized his 12-tone system in a handful of solo works and chamber pieces, but this work marks the first use of this invention for string quartet. Schoenberg traded late stage romantic harmony and unconventional structure for the dodecaphonic system and a return to strict classical form. This addition to Schoenberg’s discography follows the typical four movement structure that we might see in Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, or Brahms.

Movement one “Moderato” follows a par for the course sonata form. This first section, from start to finish, is unified with energetic pulsing eight notes and boasts soaring high violins. In regards to this movement Schoenberg had this to say: “As a little boy I was tormented by a picture of a scene of a fairytale “Das Gespensterschiff”, (The Ghostship) whose captain had been nailed through the head to the topmast by his rebellious crew. I am sure that this was not the program of the first movement of the third string quartet. But it might have been, subconsciously, a very gruesome premonition which caused me to write this work, because as often as I thought about this movement, that picture came to my mind.” With that comforting thought we will move on to following movements.

A Theme and Variations was chosen as the blueprint for the second movement. This decision was no doubt a tip of the hat to his city’s musical past. Next is the bouncing third movement, which hints towards a Viennese Waltz, and the finale comprised of a Sonata-Rondo. Schoenberg’s music seems tame and conservative to us today, but at its time it was the greatest musical experiment that had ever been conducted (sans Leonin and Perotin). The inclusion of this piece fits wonderfully into the spirit of the album.

Ruth Crawford (Seeger): String Quartet 1931

The final piece of this album’s A side is Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet 1931. In 1930 Ruth Crawford (as she was known at the time) was the first woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. In private letters to her future husband she goes into detail on the origins of this work. For six months she had set her sights towards composing her first symphony, but this vision never manifested. Instead, she completed a handful of significant chamber pieces, one of which being, this seminal work of string quartet literature.

The often sparse and understated first movement demonstrates Crawford’s keen ability to develop phrases and thematic material in the absence of conventional harmony. The second, fast paced and furiou, features quick pass-offs and extended figures which descend seamlessly between voices. Seeger’s ability, through orchestration, to make for four players sound like one is possibly the most captivating aspect of this movement. The third movement, clocking in at just under four minutes, is the longest and perhaps most innovative. Two-thirds of this section is spent in a long and steady crescendo. Voices enter, diseapper, layer, and mingle as the music slowly boils over. Once the peak has been reached it quickly tapers off to end where it began. The final portion of this work is composed entirely of dialogue between the first violin and the rest of the ensemble. Seeger utilized shocking sonorities by writing the second violin, viola, and cello in unison motion and octaves throughout; and in doing so brazenly broke some of the most regarded rules of counterpoint. The speed and precision with which Spektral Quartet plays – the entire piece, but particularly – this final movement set it apart from previous recordings.

Sam Pluta: binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state

Fellow Chicagoan composer Sam Pluta opens up the B side of this album. His piece, binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state was commissioned by Spektral Quartet and premiCharaminered in June of 2016 at Constellation in Chicago. Pluta explained the work thusly, “This piece explores the joy of opening up the mind to improvisatory exploration. It is also an attempt at orchestrating for acoustic instruments with my electronic improvisational language.” Pluta paints with a diverse pallet of sound, texture, and timbre. He uses, what appears to be, virtually every technique that a string instrument can achieve – standard or extended – to great effect. Twenty-five separate, but continuous, movements take place in just under nine minutes. Some of the titles are as descriptive as “loose cannon”, “slide”, and “double duo” while others are as esoteric as “professor dr. squiggly, dma” and “universal consciousness”. The album’s overarching theme of experimentation is omnipresent in this piece which makes it a perfect and welcomed addition to the tracklist.

Anthony Cheung: The Real Book of Fake Tunes

Lovers of Jazz, or people who have paid large sums of money to have people talk at them about Jazz, will undoubtedly be familiar with “The Real Book”. It is a collection of lead sheets, for different instruments, containing Jazz standards. The idea is that the musician can quickly familiarize himself with a chart when it is called at a gig. This piece by Anthony Cheung pays satirical homage to the famous tome in five movements.

Cheung describes each movement as having a distinct character. The first as a “floating, weightless introduction that turns capricious,” the second as “a somewhat sorrowful ballad with interruptions,” the third as “a semi-serious scherzo that swells and subsides in wave-like motions,” the fourth as a “resonance study that turns into a free-flowing, improvisatory rhapsody,” and the finale as “the closest one gets to a “tune” in the familiar sense, with repeated and expanding yet irregularly timed chord progressions that might remind some of John Coltrane’s “Countdown.”

In these tracks Spektral is joined by Brooklyn-based flautist Clarie Chase. As stated, each movement of this piece has its own character, but the character revealed most is that of Anthony Cheung as a talented, inventive, and supremely original composer full of wit and charm.

Charmaine Lee: Spinals

From a style standpoint Charmaine Lee’s Spinals track is where this quartet delivers on its promise of experimentation the most. This piece was devised as a collaboration between Spektral and New York based vocalist and improviser Charmaine Lee. The piece is composed of an assortment of vocal sounds over noisy electronics and an ever-changing base of strings. As a fan of music – and new music in particular – I am not incredibly shocked when I listen to a piece like this. It is, however, shocking to hear it done so right. Spinals is an example of the latter. This piece offers what many in its genre do not; the sense that it was carefully constructed in some way. There are moments of extreme chaos, but also silence. There are peaks and valleys. Intensity and reprieve. Many pieces of this persuasion intentionally bombard you, but Spinals lures you in with a feeling of true sincerity. That one group can play Brahms as precisely as they do while convincingly playing this piece is a testament to the superior command of style possessed by the members of Spektral Quartet.

George Lewis: String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living

The final track of this album is the “title track” String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living by George Lewis. Lewis has a reputation as a creative renaissance man. He is well known for his contributions to computer music, his illustrious scholarly career, and his efforts as an installation artist. He is also objectively and unequivocally a Composer (with a capital C). The piece starts with a section of sultry harmonics, pointed plucks, and harsh rhythmic interjections. This is followed by an extended series of smooth glissandos and ambient lows. The third section, which begins near the halfway mark, is more rhythmic in nature. Pizzicatos play a supporting role throughout the piece, but are given their closeup here in a full ensemble section that sounds more like a kalimba than a string quartet. The fourth section is marked by extreme use of range for all parties. Swelteringly high violins soar as the cello delivers gutural tremolos. The finale is a series of chaotic pass off and blistering runs that showcase the ensemble’s virtuosity, Lewis’ compositional prowess, and his ability to build a sound structure.

The Experience

First and foremost I will say this: the album is performed, recorded, and produced beautifully. It delivers – and exceeds – the promise of quality that you would expect from a group of this caliber. The dazzling performances of Claire Chase (flute) and Charmaine Lee (composition, voice, and electronics) add variety and push this project beyond a “par for the course” String record. The music speaks for itself, but the selling point of the album is the interactive experience.

When I first downloaded the album and sorted through the promotional material I was torn. The angel on my right shoulder was saying that it was an interesting idea; that I should give it a chance. The devil on my left was saying the only innovative thing they’ve managed to achieve is complicating a handy little invention commonly referred to as “the shuffle feature”. The premise is that you can listen to this album in a different order each time. Instead of going through the tracks numerically you can skip around and choose your own adventure. That idea, in itself, is not at all novel. As a matter of fact, you can already do that with any album you choose. Blood on the Tracks is around fifty-two minutes long, but sometimes I just want to listen to “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Shelter from the Storm”. The question that I kept coming back to was this: how is that any different than creating a playlist on Spotify?

We are all so used to streaming our music. That ease of access is a catch 22. Any song we want is at the touch of our finger, but that ease sometimes makes us lose the reverence we should have. Igor Stravisnky said, “For one can listen without hearing, just as one can look without seeing. The absence of active effort and the liking acquired for this facility make for laziness.” He was talking about radio and the phonograph, but it is shocking how much more accurate this statement becomes when applied to streaming.

I used to buy CDs. I would spend every cent of my Christmas money at Best Buy as a teenager. There was a ritual to unboxing the disk, looking at the album art, reading the liner notes, and intently following along with the lyrics for the duration of the album. That ritual has been replaced – and I hate to admit it, but I feel that I am not alone here – with absently listening to one movement I like from a Mozart Symphony, two or three Drake songs, and half of a podcast episode; all while cleaning my house, eating dinner, scrolling on Instagram, and texting. That is what makes this album so remarkable. The act of receiving those Tarot cards in the mail, opening the box, reading about the album, picking the order of tracks. The experience forced me to take a minute and be actively involved.

Will this revolutionize how we consume art music in the 21st century? No, probably not. Is it meant to? I don’t think so. I think it was meant to be an experiment, but it is an experiment with value that we should all take a part in. The experience is a truly beautiful thing.

— Jeremy Smith, 8.28.2020

Given the easy accessibility of recorded music of virtually every type and era, at times it seems that musically, all time collapses into the present time. It’s a strangely ahistorical contemporaneity we seem to inhabit—is the internet eternity’s jukebox?–but even if it makes for a certain uneasiness, the random-shuffle possibilities it opens up may provide opportunities for musical illumination.

Realizing some of those possibilities is something Chicago’s Spektral String Quartet sets out to do with its ambitious double album Experiments in Living. The group selected seven string quartets written between 1873 and 2018 and, inventing a randomizing process to be realized with a deck of cards, offer the listener the chance to order and reorder the pieces for playback.

The works the group chose are Brahms’ 1873 String Quartet in C Minor; Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 3 (1927); Ruth Crawford’s String Quartet of 1931; Anthony Cheung’s Real Book of Fake Tunes for string quartet and flute (2015); George Lewis’ 2016 String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living; Sam Pluta’s binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state (2016); and Charmaine Lee’s 2018 Spinals for string quartet, voice and electronics.

The eighty year lacuna between Crawford’s work and Cheung’s represents a conceptual as well as a chronological discontinuity. A developmental continuity binds the earlier three works: the Schoenberg quartet conserves something of the romanticism of the Brahms, while the dissonant counterpoint of the Crawford quartet plays peculiarly American variations on Schoenberg’s serialism. As distinct as these three pieces are, all are fully composed and squarely within the elastic but still recognizable tradition of Western art music. The pieces on the other side of the great divide, by contrast, break out of that tradition as much as they take their bearings from it. They sound different, to begin with—their vocabularies draw as a matter of course on extended performance techniques that at times push their surface textures to extremes of noise and fragmentation.

One other significant break lies with the newer works’ engagement with improvisation as something major to do, emulate, or draw inspiration from. Lee’s relatively short, single-movement work, which was created in collaboration with the ensemble, is completely improvised. Lee, who joins the quartet in their performance, is an improvising vocalist who augments her voice with electronic amplification; the piece is an abstract blend of wordless vocals and largely unpitched sounds. Pluta describes his rapidly moving, twenty-five movement quartet as being about the “joy of opening up the mind to improvisatory exploration;” what’s explored is an electronically inspired collection of quick-cutting, scratchy, oscillating sounds that the quartet convincingly translates onto acoustic string instruments. Cheung’s lyrical, five-movement piece layers a flute line played by Claire Chase in an improvisational spirit over compact, song-length settings. Although improvisation plays a significant role in Lewis’ musical poetics, his exuberant quartet, which like Lee’s, Pluta’s, and Cheung’s was commissioned by the ensemble, is a fully notated work that weaves together various extended techniques into an episodic, but audibly cohesive, tissue of sound.

In its willingness to disrupt ordinary ways of listening to music within a highly diverse tradition, The Spektral Quartet’s Experiments in Living is certainly a challenging recording, and a stimulating one as well.

— Daniel Barbiero, 9.01.2020

The Spektral Quartet takes advantage of the open-ended playing time of a digital release to create effectively a double album for their latest recording, Experiments in Living. While double albums often suffer from a bit of flab, this one doesn’t have an extraneous moment. It is a well curated release that attends to meaning making in contemporary music with a spirit that is both historically informed and deeply of this moment.

A clever extra-musical addition to the project is a group of Tarot cards that allow the listener to ‘choose their own adventure,’ making their way through the various pieces in different orderings. These are made by the artist/musician øjeRum. The tarot cards may be seen on the album’s site.

It might seem strange to begin an album of 20/21 music with Johannes Brahms’s String Quartet Op. 51, no. 1 in C-minor (1873). However, Arnold Schoenberg’s article “Brahms as Progressive” makes the connection between the two composers clear. It also demonstrates Spektral’s comfort in the standard repertoire. They give an energetic reading of the quartet with clear delineation of its thematic transformations, a Brahms hallmark.

Schoenberg is represented by his Third String Quartet (1927). His first quartet to use 12-tone procedures, it gets less love in the literature than the oft-analyzed combinatorics of the composer’s Fourth String Quartet, but its expressive bite still retains vitality over ninety years later. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet (1931), an under-heralded masterpiece of the 20th century, receives one of the best recordings yet on disc, its expressive dissonant counterpoint rendered with biting vividness.

Sam Pluta’s Flow State/Joy State is filled with flurries of glissandos, microtones, and harmonics to create a thoroughly contemporary sound world punctuated by dissonant verticals. One of Pluta’s most memorable gestures employs multiple glissandos to gradually make a chord cohere, only to have subsequent music skitter away. Charmaine Lee’s Spinals incorporates her own voice, replete with lip trills and sprechstimme that are imitated by string pizzicato and, again, glissandos.

Spektral is joined by flutist Claire Chase on Anthony Cheung’s Real Book of Fake Tunes, which combines all manner of effects for Chase with jazzy snips of melody and writing for quartet that is somewhat reminiscent of the techniques found in the Schoenberg, but with a less pervasively dissonant palette. Cheung’s writing for instruments is always elegantly wrought, and Chase and Spektral undertake an excellent collaboration. One could imagine an entire album for this quintet being an engaging listen.

The recording’s title track is George Lewis’s String Quartet 1.5; he wrote a prior piece utilizing quartet but considers this his first large-scale work in the genre. Many of the techniques on display in Pluta’s piece play a role here as well. Lewis adds to these skittering gestures, glissandos, and microtones the frequent use of various levels of bow pressure, including extreme bow pressure in which noise is more present than pitch. The latter crunchy sounds provide rhythmic weight and accentuation that offsets the sliding tones. Dovetailing glissandos create a blurring effect in which harmonic fields morph seamlessly. The formal design of the piece is intricate yet well-balanced. More string quartets, labeled 2.5 and 3.5, are further contributions by Lewis to the genre. One hopes that Spektral will take them up as well – their playing of 1.5 is most persuasive.

— Christian Carey, 9.02.2020

We’ve traveled so deep into the digital age that we’ve almost forgotten the awe that can accompany a physical release. The irony is that the musical portion of Experiments in Living is digital while the accoutrements are physical. Unwrapping the box ~ about the size of a vintage paperback book ~ produces a sense of anticipation, followed by curiosity, chased by excitement. And now, let the music play.

We’re starting with Brahms, specifically “String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 51 No. 1” (1873). As to its quality, we rely on Tchaikovsky, who called Brahms “a giftless bastard” whose music lacked emotion (he hated Debussy too); Wagner, who said he plagiarized Beethoven’s style; Edward Hanslick, who labeled his music “leathery;” and the crowds who jeered the composer early in his career. Today, everyone knows how terrible Brahms is, which is why no one has listened to him for over a hundred years ~ until this past weekend, when Spektral Quartet rescued him from the scrapheap of forgotten composers.

So which art card best represents Brahms? Four are offered; could it be the person with a moon in the chest, or the disjointed Ophelia floating down the river, or the woman with woods exploding from her arms? We’ll go with the image reminiscent of the Bride of Frankenstein, in which the streaks of white hair are replaced by rivers, as if intellect is exploding from a head too small to hold it in. Now let’s pick a pair of words: let’s try earthy and fertile. These word cards are a music reviewer’s dream; in search of the proper adjective, simply shuffle and peruse.

The connections you choose are the right ones, writes the Quartet. There are no improper links; these are Experiments in Living, a proper pareidolia. The Quartet sees connections between old music and new, art and sound, sound and word. They are aided by prolific collage artist øjeRum, a composer who has been known to release multiple albums in a single month. This is a generous way to showcase his art, which has already graced dozens of albums. Perhaps the best comparison is to Dave McKean, cover artist of The Sandman, whose tarot deck relays a similar mood. A free pairing / playlist option is offered on the Quartet’s website, along with copious details, all of which, amusingly, may be ignored.

What is good music? Who gets to decide? We do, of course! Just kidding, all we do is chime in. While it’s safe to say that Arnold Schoenberg’s “String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30” (1873) and Ruth Crawford (Seeger)’s “String Quartet” (1931) have been accepted as canonical, it’s also fair to call Spektral Quartet’s renditions exquisite; and for some modern listeners, a revelation. These compositions fill what would under other circumstances be the first of two discs, the difference being that these works are not meant to have a designated batting order. One may approach them from a Cageian perspective, tossing the cards like an I Ching; one may pick and choose; one may even limit the playing time to a suggested 15 to 55 minute session. Their presence on vinyl or disc would be limiting. If Spektral Quartet does have a rule, it is that there are no rules.

So let’s get to that new music! As a member of the Wet Ink Ensemble, Sam Pluta is already an established name, and “binary / momentary logics: flow state / joy state” allows him to show off his playful side. Spektral Quartet apologizes for the fact that there will be “no hit singles” from this album, but why not? And what is a hit single anyway? It’s a hit if we say it is, and this one has Top of the Pops written all over it. Everyone loves dissonance, sudden timbre changes, abrupt strokes of the bow and the vast borderland between electronic and organic. Once one has listened to all the great 19th and 20th century auteurs, Pluta fits right in. And as Brahms has proven, accessibility and simplicity need not be barriers to (eventual) popularity. Looking at the cards, we choose skittering, glitchy and gutsy. Who’s having fun now? We are.

Wow, we would not want to fall off that bookcase. Okay, now back to the music! Anthony Cheung‘s “The Real Book of Fake Tunes” is highlighted by the sublime flautist Claire Chase. These five brief movements, each short enough to be a single (okay, we’ll let it go) continue the sense of experimentalism with humor and verve. The zesty trills and somber strings flirt with one another, suggesting that they are not so easily pigeonholed. Methinks the violin doth protest too much. The lines blur between past and present, an advantage of composition untethered to populist preferences. The music is brash and bold; for an image, we need something confrontational. The giant eye and dark coats of Card #7 fit the bill, although they are tagged Schoenberg. Now we seek a link between the two, not difficult to find, especially between Schoenberg’s fourth movement and Cheung’s third.

Born in 1991, the youngest composer on the set is a testament to the fact that brilliance determines its own schedule. Offering the album’s only vocal piece, Charmaine Lee leads the quartet with trills, pops, growls, gargles, breath and other onomatopoeia, sounding like a cross between Minions, a Coke can and a balloon. The “hi”s at the end are charming. For this, we need a 21st card; why not draw our own? The Quartet “closes” the album with George Lewis‘ “String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living,” ostensibly the title piece, although also ~ should one choose to play it first ~ an overture. If sounds had words (and thanks to the smaller cards in the deck, they do!), these notes might correspond to the utterances of Lee, the garbled tragedy of 19th century reviews, or the reactions of your friends, who really, really want you to choose something else to play. That is, until you break out the cards, play the game, compare notes, and establish the case that accessible and inaccessible, popular and unpopular, durable and disposable are all functions of perception. By (literally) shuffling the deck, Spectral Quartet calls the assumptions of listeners to task while providing multiple access points for appreciation. (Richard Allen)

— Richard Allen, 9.01.2020

The Spektral Quartet, the Chicago-based avant-garde string quartet celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, generally specializes in modern music, thus I was rather startled to see that this new CD opens with, of all people, Brahms. But this is Brahms as you’ve never heard him before: fast, edgy, played in almost a percussive style..even edgier, in fact, than the Belcea Quartet’s recording. It may startle and shock you, but it will not leave you complacent. That I can guarantee.

Next up is the Schoenberg Third String Quartet, but although this is a very peppy and energetic reading, I didn’t feel that it got under the skin of the music as well as the recording by the Schoenberg String Quartet on Chandos. Following this is the String Quartet by Ruth Crawford Seeger, certainly one of the most advanced modern composers of her day; interestingly, the first movement of her 1931 String Quartet sounds so much like Schoenberg that you’d have a hard time believing it was not written by him. One difference in her writing, at least to judge by this performance, is a more lyrical feel to the melodic line. The music is just a bit less angular, particularly in the first movement which has several legato passages for the strings, but both the construction and the harmonic language are atonal. Another difference is that it is not consistently 12-tone or serial. Since I have no other recording of this in my collection, I can’t make any A/B comparisons with others, but it seems to me a very well-phrased and –interpreted performance. The second movement is particularly interesting, consisting of a series of long-held overlapping notes that create an eerie drone effect. Here, one can tell that this is not music by Schoenberg.

The piece binary/momentary logics by Sam Pluta (b. 1979) is even weirder, music that literally flies all over the place, sometimes with distorted playing by the strings. This piece sounds like electronic music without the electronics, but because it was NOT played by electronics I enjoyed it for what it was. Despite its odd, edgy character, if one has good ears one can easily follow what Pluta is doing, since the piece stays in one essential harmonic range. The most arresting and interesting aspect of this piece is its use of rhythms, which are constantly shifting and changing at the speed of light. I can imagine that this was one hard piece to rehearse! I’ll bet that each quartet member practiced his or her solo part until they were blue in the face, then worked just as diligently to put the pieces together. To characterize it in one phrase, the music literally bounces all over the place, yet it has a forward progression that, distortions aside, make musical sense. At the seven-minute mark the rapid pace slows down a bit as the cello and viola (playing in its low range) have long-held notes while the violins, in their extreme upper register, scream at them in protest. A very interesting work; it almost sounds like people screaming at each other on Twitter.

Anthony Cheung (b. 1982) contributes The Real Book of Fake Tunes for flute and string quartet, but the manner in which Cheung uses the flute almost makes it sound like a third violin fluttering along in the stratosphere. The liner notes suggest “whiffs of jazz harmony,” but whiffs are all we get; this music is not jazz influenced in any appreciable manner, but it is interesting in its own way. Oddly, however, I found myself feeling bored by the fifth piece, which to my ears really didn’t go anywhere.

But if you think that any of the preceding music was strange, wait until you hear Charmaine Lee’s ultra-bizarre Spirals for string quartet, electronics and spoken voice. This one sounds like a computer eating itself alive or perhaps even imploding. Definitely not my cup of tea, but fascinating in the same sort of way that watching a bad car wreck can be.

We end with String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living by George Lewis (b. 1952). This also sounds very electronics-like, in fact a bit too much for my taste as the music really doesn’t seem to have any direction until around the five-minute mark, when things change and we get was sounds to me like variations on the strange figures that had come before.

So there you have it. Definitely not your mother’s string quartet album!

— Lynn Bayley, 9.04.2020

One unexpectedly entertaining feature of the Spektral Quartet’s lavish double album Experiments in Living is an “online card deck emulator” that facilitates very strange, quirky yet also insightful ways to create playlists from its vast range of material. Modeled after a tarot deck, it’s meant to defamiliarize the listener and, one suspects, lure them into hearing something they might not otherwise choose. Plenty of diehards will see the Ruth Crawford Seeger quartet here and immediately dial up all four movements, in order. But the card deck is a cool idea: it never hurts to listen outside the box. And if you just want to listen to the album inside the box, literally, it’s streaming at Bandcamp.

The material ranges from the well-worn to the once-and-still-radical to the more recent, adventurous sounds the group are best known for. How do they approach the Brahms String Quartet No. 1? The first movement seems fast, a little skittish, very acerbically rhythmic: they’re keeping their ears wide open. Even if you find the music impossibly dated, this version definitely isn’t boring. Those echo effects really come into sharp focus!

By contrast, the nocturnal second and third movements come across as careful, pastoral tableaux, the changes very proto-ELO. The group – violinists Clara Lyon and Maeve Feinberg, violist Doyle Armbrust and cellist Russell Rolen – cut loose on the intertwining finale. The close-miked clarity of the individual instruments in the mix is superior: Rolen’s quasi-basslines have a welcome presence.

Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 3 is right up their alley, from the first movement’s icepick exchanges to its hypnotic yet restlessly acidic counterpoint and a paint-peeling ending. Dynamic contrasts are subtle but striking, particularly in the more muted second movement. Balletesque precision alternates with sullen sustain and soaring highs in the third; the quartet’s unexpectedly slinky groove in the fourth is a revelation. Defiance has seldom been more resolute than this.

It’s a hard act to follow, but the Seeger quartet is every bit as gripping and a brilliantly contemporaneous segue (1931 for her, 1927 for him). In a word, wow. The ensemble attack it with a light-fingered, sometimes almost fleeting pointillism, an endess thicket of echo effects and sudden tradeoffs in the first couple of movements. The griptite resonance of the third seems almost backward-masked as phrases or single notes pass around the sonic frame; the group, particularly Rolen, really dig in vigorously up to a sudden end that’s just as coy as Schoenberg’s.

The first of the 21st century pieces is a Sam Pluta diptych, a shivery, punchy round-robin punctuated with droll, often cartoonish extended technique: harmonics, white noise, things that go bump in general, all of it amusing to hear and brutally hard to play.

Flutist Claire Chase joins the quartet for Anthony Cheung‘s 2015 suite The Real Book of Fake Tunes. Her assertive, rhythmic swells balance with the strings’ pizzicato bounce, then a microtonal haze sets in, punctuated by wry echoes and leaps. The third segment, with its stark microtonal chords and flute scurrying amid them, is edgy fun, as is the alternatingly whirling and grittily suspenseful fourth part. The conclusion bristles with good jokes and peek-a-boo riffage: it stands up amidst some very formidable material here.

Singer Charmaine Lee, who writes and improvises in phonetic language, teams up with the group for her surrealistically playful 2018 piece Spinals. This is what the word “sillypants” on the tarot card generator will get you, complete with what sounds like turntable scratching, whether acoustic or electronically generated.

The quartet close with George Lewis’ String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living, from two years earlier. Keening glissandos and flickers dance and swing over chugging, sputtering, often ridiculous riffage, with circular, microtonal clusters punctuated by droll flicks and punches. Definitely sillypants – with daunting extended technique and a little horror movie ambience to keep you (and the band) on your toes.

— Delarue, 1.07.2021

The Spektral Quartet have released a beguiling, wide-spanning and multilayered double album, Experiments in Living as not only a (linear, or not) program for listening, but as a kind of gaming experience with a variety of adjunct cards: one a Tarot-style deck designed by øjeRum (Copenhagen-based musician and collage artist Paw Grabowski) as well as several smaller cards with a mild non-tropical storm of disconnected words, to invite the listener(s) to form their own connections to the music. The gaming aspect of the project strikes me, personally, as more interesting as an idea than as an activity, mais chacun à son goût. Certainly there is no denying the superb production values of øjeRum’s cards, and this reviewer delights to find another ensemble collaborating with a visual artist.

As to the optional linearity, let me begin where the liner notes end:

There are many paths through this album, but this is your adventure, friend. We wish you good fortune…

Earlier, one reads:

Listeners may encounter this record in whatever way they are inspired. Moving sequentially will create a compelling journey from Romanticism to Modernism to Jazz to the Uncategorizable. But for those feeling adventurous we’ve also fashioned a tarot deck of sorts that will bring chance into the experience, and rely on your deep listening to build bridges — literally — between these polychromatic sound worlds.

In Elysium, John Cage gently smiles.

Since the whole of this fascinating and undeniably engaging project is an invitation to interactive participation, I’m going to object mildly to one assertion in these notes: “Some large percentage of the classical-music community may argue that the pieces on this album don’t belong together. We beg to differ.” — Why prejudge and strike such a pose? To paraphrase Alan Arkin in The In-Laws: Don’t underestimate the classical-music lover in the street. Give more of the world credit for an open mind.

My first listen to the album was, as invited, a user-initiated shuffle, a practice not new to me, as the music loaded onto my phone’s micro SD card ranges from Zappa’s Broadway the Hard Way to Richard Egarr playing Louis Couperin. I like the mental jugglery of the music player turning on its heels from a Prokofiev piano sonata to a single by Devo, and the pleasurable jangling (inaudible, of course) of brain cells fancying a connection between the two. For our purpose here, however, let me do the reader the courtesy of a somewhat orderly survey.

Part Two of the album consists of the collaborations with breathing composers/performers.

The Cliff Dwellers Club of Chicago commissioned Chicago-based composer, laptop improviser, electronics performer, and sound artist Sam Pluta to write (what may be my favorite coyly impenetrable title of the year) binary /momentary logics: flow state/joy state for Spektral Quartet in 2016. Happily the music itself is less obfuscatory. Its play of colors and gestures suggests the kind of piece Anton Webern might have written later in his career, if his scale were less determinedly concentrative. Not to say that Pluta’s piece is at all diffuse, only that it has something of a Webernian character, but possessing greater breadth. I like it.

The Fromm Foundation at Harvard University commissioned Anthony Cheung (an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Chicago) to write The Real Book of Fake Tunes (2015) for Spektral Quartet and flutist Claire Chase.

The liner notes speak of “whiffs of jazz harmonies,” but I think this a little orthogonal to the effect of the music. To cite perhaps the most commonplace example: a dominant seventh chord is a “Mozartean harmony” and it is a “jazz harmony.” What makes it one or the other is context. I think the Cheung a fine piece, but I do hear a piece of modern chamber music with harmonies one also hears in (say) Stravinsky or Bartók. That the composer found jazz one of his elements of inspiration is indeed a point of interest, but not a particularly effective guide to hearing the piece.

Spinals (2018) featuring New York-based, but New England Conservatory-trained Charmaine Lee (voice and electronics) was “devised in collaboration with Spektral Quartet” and is fully improvised.

Given the inherent contradiction that, once recorded, what was in its time of creation, spontaneous improvisation becomes, in fact, a document, the acid test is, “Is it unflaggingly engaging?” And I can assure you that Spinals is a strikingly original and seminal success.

The Fromm Foundation at Harvard University also commissioned Chicago trombonist/composer George Lewis to write the avant-whole-number String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living (2016) for the Spektral Quartet. The titular piece stands out among the contemporary collaborations on the album, both in its generally lesser density of surface activity and, what is related, in articulating into a broad two-part form, a kind of reverse Introduction and Allegro … an Allegro and Outroduction/Recessional? The quartet is good-humored and conversational, as if (perhaps) Haydn had been transposed to our epoch. The clarity of Lewis’s conclusion of the piece reinforces this impression for me.

With technical excellence and intense sensitivity as an ensemble (among themselves, or with Clare Chase and Charmaine Lee) the Spektral Quartet communicate these new scores with warmth and commitment. All the collaborative ventures of the album’s Part 2 are a shining success, and a delight to the ear.

My first listen to this album was (as the group invites us to) a random shuffle, and I agree that such is a stimulating and illuming experience. But now let us focus on some select items, as this too makes for rewarding listening.

To revert at last, Part One of the album consists of traditional literature.

Before ever I listened to the Spektral Quartet, ample ink had already been spilt on the Brahms, Op. 51 № 1 in c minor from 1873, on Arnold Schoenberg’s third quartet, Op. 30, written in 1927, although less perhaps (unfairly) on Ruth Crawford Seeger’s 1931 quartet. Brief, then let me be.

Doyle Armbrust’s cantabile viola in the “Romanze” (the second movement of the Brahms, poco adagio) is sublime.

Perhaps I am in the minority, in being practically always ready to listen to a Schoenberg string quartet. The first theme of the “Moderato” first movement of Schoenberg’s Op. 30 opens with serene sustained tones floating over something of a skittish accompaniment. That accompaniment figure then develops into a kind of hocket interplay which the Spektrals carry off with a fine balance of playfully frisky and earnest. For the close of the first movement, the texture relaxes into a hesitant tenderness, a tone set by cellist Russell Rolen.

The entirety of the Ruth Crawford Seeger quartet is a solid, accomplished instant classic and its center of gravity is the poignant, otherworldly Andante, in which we hear the Spektrals’ expert balance of voicing and perfectly tuned dissonances. It is all color, and the color gleams pure.

I am alive to having seemed to give these three traditional pieces short shrift, but all the performances are excellent, as indeed is the entire album.

— Karl Henning, 11.25.2020

The Spektral Quartet's Experiments in Living takes its title from the final work on the album, George Lewis' String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living (2016), and ultimately, from a concept originated by philosopher John Stuart Mill. The "experimental" aspect consists of two factors. First, the program contains various innovative contemporary works in its second half: there are pieces influenced by jazz, broader types of improvisation, and the electronic atomization of sound in Charmaine Lee's Spinals. Second, listeners can approach the compositions on the album in any order. Of course, this is possible with any album, especially in digital media, but here, there is a new wrinkle. Album buyers may purchase a tarot deck, custom-designed by artist øjeRum, that will enable them to "bring chance into the experience, and rely on your deep listening to build bridges -- literally -- between these polychromatic sound worlds." The more experimental works are balanced by three quartets at the beginning that provide a clear trajectory from the deeply Classical ethos of Brahms through the Schoenberg String Quartet No. 3, and the rather rare String Quartet of Ruth Crawford Seeger, following in Schoenberg's footsteps.

— James Mannheim, 9.21.2020