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Posts tagged 'Spektral Quartet'

New Music from Wollschleger, Hearne, and Balter

Scott Wollschleger's long-anticipated album, Soft Aberration, has just been released on New Focus Recordings. Featuring Brontal Symmetry, Soft Aberration, Bring Something Incomprehensible Into This World, and String Quartet No. 2 "White Wall", Wollschleger's new album features performances by soprano Corrine Byrne, trumpeter Andy Kozar, violist Anne Lanzilotti, cellist John Popham, pianist Karl Larson, the Mivos Quartet, and the Longleash trio. In a series of informative blog posts, Lanzilotti has written extensively on Wollschleger's concept of "brontal": 

a made up word that longtime collaborator Kevin Sims coined after making a series of pencil drawings on orange paper. The word now embodies Wollschleger’s aesthetic: the idea that we can create something very basic and human by discovering the sensation of an object. In doing this, we are making something unfamiliar very immediate. This process of discovery can be very focused and also, at times, very funny.

Check out Wollschleger's new album below. 

On October 21st at 7.30pm, the New World Symphony will premiere a new work by Ted Hearne entitled Miami in Movements. But while this piece was composed by Hearne, the musical material that Hearne had composed is made up of over 1,050 videos and audio recordings, made by the people of Miami, that record the feelings, impressions, and emotions they associate with their city. Working with videographer Jonathan David Kane, Hearne has created Miami in Movements for Project 305, a concert program by the NWS that features Hearne's new work in a free, public "wallcast" performance

Just as Miami in Movements was created specificly for the city of Miami, the Jack Quartet has put together a touring program of American string quartets from the 20th and 21st centuries, which they have titled "Soundscape America". Their program, which premieres on October 21 at Columbia University's Miller Theatre, includes classics such as Ruth Crawford Seeger's String Quartet 1931, as well as more contemporary works such as Marcos Balter'sChambers. This work, which was commissioned and premiered in 2011 by the Spektral Quartet, offers three movements that condense the different aspects of Balter's musical identity into a single work. Check out Spektral's recording, released on Parlour Tapes, below. 

Anthony Cheung's "The Real Book of Fake Tunes" in Chicago and New York

Players, students, and enthusiasts of jazz will be familiar with the many iterations of the "fake book"—a collection of lead sheets that has seen many versions throughout the 20th century, even an "official" edition as The Real Book in the 1970s. Anthony Cheung, no stranger to the long stylistic and compositional traditions of jazz, takes the "real book" as a starting point for his The Real Book of Fake Tunes, written for fellow Chicagoans Claire Chase and the Spektral Quartet. Cheung takes the architecture of a "Real Book" and designs his own plans for the classical instrumentation of string quartet and flute, recalling the dance or compositional suites of the 18th century while catapulting the listener into the 21st. 

On Thursday, April 13th, Claire Chase and the Spektral Quartet will perform The Real Book of Fake Tunes at Northwestern University, as a part of Chase's "Density" project, alongside a new commission by fellow PSNY compoer Marcos Balter. Later in the month, the ensemble will travel to New York to present The Real Book of Fake Tunes at National Sawdust, in a program that features a new quartet by George Lewis and Katherine Young's arrangement of Arthur Russell's Hiding Your Present From You

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