Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett’s last message in prose, completed in 1987, and first published the following year. More monologue than story, it comes from a narrator on the edge between life and what lies beyond, which might be a vast wheatfield seen in black-and-white, or might be a swirl of stumbling memories. Beckett cherished music, in particular the songs and string quartets of Franz Schubert. His writing is musical, in its meticulous phrasing, its use of repetition, and often its form. Stirrings Still is an example: a composition of interweavings and developments.
The music, created for this release by composer Trevor Bača, is no accompaniment but rather a parallel stream, heard in alternation with the words, reflecting and contemplating what they…
Tag Archive: JACK Quartet
Terry Riley has always had a propensity for cosmic whimsy. As such, and given the fluidity of his work over the last decades, it comes as no surprise that his contribution to flautist Claire Chase’s multi-decade Density 2036 project arrived not in the form of Sibelius-drafted PDFs but as a colourful sketchbook of caricatures, flying creatures, and doodled marginalia.
Expectedly, Riley’s non-conformist approach resonated deeply with Chase’s vision of a future flute repertoire – one that lives outside the rigid boundaries of classical music academia.
Fittingly, The Holy Liftoff spends most of its time in breezy motion and joyous buoyancy, where the eight-part flute chorus, multi-tracked by Chase, and JACK Quartet’s strings generate…
Travis Laplante is quite the polymath — a composer, improviser, and saxophonist — he has led the acclaimed tenor saxophone quartet Battle Trance, as well as Subtle Degrees, his duo with drummer Gerald Cleaver, and is recognized as a composer of meticulous, long-form pieces.
His compositional skills are on full display in his latest release, a recording of two string quartets performed by the JACK Quartet, one of the most celebrated interpreters of modern classical music today.
With these string quartets, Laplante‘s role as composer is bolstered by his fascination with resonance. While reading W. A. Mathieu’s music theory book, The Harmonic Experience, Laplante was taken by a section at…
American composer Austin Wulliman is a violinist of the avant-garde-oriented JACK Quartet, and this is his second album of music where he is the composer as well as a player. All the works here are by Wulliman himself, except for the finale, John Cage’s Totem Ancestor, which he originally wrote for prepared piano. Cage is one ancestor for the music here, for some of his music, even before he entered the sphere of total randomness, explored a sense of unpredictability lurking in the essence of musical materials, and this is what Wulliman’s music is about. Wulliman provides notes himself, referring not to technical procedures but rather partly to impressions from a view of the sea. The music is wavelike, regular yet shifting constantly as it goes along, with unexpected…