Unbound

How about a wonderful adventure with music of contemporary composers who are still walking amongst us!?! Yes, I love it. I love hearing excellent contemporary music that is clearly "classical" music, no matter how edgy and "way out there" it may be. What is the saying? "All music was modern once..."—Peter Warlock, English composer.

...This is truly a remarkable collection of contemporary music for string quartet. It enlivens me to know that such wonderful music is being composed and performed. And here, each piece stretches the string quartet in new and inventive ways. It is a program of immense originality, innovation and challenge. Highly recommended!

The Jasper Quartet select seven pieces written since 2005 for their third Sono Luminus album. Five begin with a pulse that sets the music’s course; two move in irregular fits and starts. And despite lengths varying from four to 18 minutes, each has a personal core.

Annie Gosfield’s The Blue Horse Walks on the Horizon was written for the Jaspers. Inspired by the surreal radio broadcasts and codes used by European resistance groups in the Second World War, Gosfield’s complex 16-minute narrative opens like the Allegretto vivace e sempre scherzando in Beethoven’s first ‘Rasumovsky’ Quartet, then moves into territory as wild as a string quartet can get without actually tearing its strings out.

Wonderful moments and dramatic tours de force abound, whether suggestive string glissandos tracing sensuous curves in Caroline Shaw’s Valencia or the luxurious cello solo in Missy Mazzoli’s Death Valley Junction. Judd Greenstein’s finely judged Four on the Floor is consumed in frantic motor energy before breaking out into a superb Bartókian jog-trot and climax. The disjointed 18-minute skein of sound that David Lang’s almost all the time creates is a response to the question ‘can a piece begin as identical microscopic cells that then differentiate into other functions across time?’ Donnacha Dennehy’s Pushpulling, an exercise in increasingly ominous, skittling anxiety, is the only moderately disturbing music on the album. The collection closes with Ted Hearne’s Excerpts from the middle of something, an intoxicating romp that is interrupted throughout like Haydn at the end of his Joke Quartet.

Among the top young string quartets now working the chamber-music circuit worldwide, Philadelphia’s award-winning Jasper String Quartet has made a habit of mixing canonical classics and freshly created fare. For its newest album, Unbound, the group opted try something novel, and to make a statement in the process. Using Judd Greenstein’s Four on the Floor as the centerpiece, the quartet – violinists J Freivogel and Sae Chonabayashi, violist Sam Quintal, and cellist Rachel Henderson Freivogel – surrounded that work with six additional pieces, all by living composers: three men and three women.

In addition to the Greenstein piece, Unbound, includes music by Caroline Shaw, Missy Mazzoli, Annie Gosfield, David Lang, Donnacha Dennehy, and Ted Hearne.

Over the course of their decade-long career, the Jasper String Quartet has become pretty familiar with the famous quartets of historic masters like Haydn, Beethoven, and even Bartók—so when it came time to record a new album, they decided to look for new musical inspiration a little closer to home.

Unbound is a collection of 21st century works that burst through the boundaries of traditional Western musical styles and forms. The Jaspers—comprised of violinists J Freivogel and Sae Chonabayashi, violist Sam Quintal, and cellist Rachel Henderson Freivogel—explore the furthest reaches of the string quartet repertoire with new works by seven of today’s most dynamic composers.

Featuring compositions by Caroline Shaw, Missy Mazzoli, Annie Gosfield, Judd Greenstein, David Lang, Donnacha Dennehy, and Ted Hearne, the album unfolds as a survey of today’s spectacularly diverse and dynamic string music landscape, each piece stretching the string quartet tradition in new and inventive ways.

The album begins with Caroline Shaw’s tangy and succulent “Valencia,” the video for which we premiered just last week on Second Inversion. The Jaspers bring precision and playfulness to Shaw’s billowing harmonics and bold bow strokes, evoking the brilliant colors and juicy texture of the fresh, flavorful fruit.

Missy Mazzoli’s contribution to the album, by contrast, is a bit more narrative-driven. “Death Valley Junction” is inspired by a small American town of the same name, where a woman named Marta Becket resurrected a crumbling opera house in the late 1960s and went on to perform weekly one-woman shows there for over 40 years. An airy, sparse, desert-inspired soundscape gradually gives way to a wild and exuberant dance, evoking Becket’s colorful imagination and unshakable optimism.

It’s followed by Annie Gosfield’s “The Blue Horse Walks on the Horizon,” a piece she wrote specifically for the Jaspers. Inspired by the surreal radio broadcasts and codes used by European resistance groups during World War II, the piece unfolds through shifting, repetitive figures that evoke the abstract coded messages.

Group dynamics are the key theme behind Judd Greenstein’s contribution to the album. “Four on the Floor” is an energetic, fast-paced work which explores different instrument pairings working with and against one another in constantly changing teams.

Photo by Dario Acosta.

David Lang’s “almost all the time” explores a different type of evolution. The piece begins with a simple cell of a musical idea—what he calls “a little 10 note strand of musical DNA”—but across 18 minutes expands and evolves into a beautiful genetic mutation, each detail carefully crafted under the Jaspers’ fingers.

Donnacha Dennehy’s “Pushpulling” is more elastic in its movements. Frenetic bow strokes speed ever-forward, but are slowly and patiently pulled back to silence each time—pushing and pulling the listener along for the ride.

The album closes with Ted Hearne’s circular “Excerpts from the middle of something,” the first movement of his Law of Mosaics. Unusual in its form, the piece consists of a climactic build-up that, instead of resolving, is simply repeated and revised several times. And yet, each time it is convincing: the Jaspers play each rendition with the explosive energy and enthusiasm of a grand finale.

It’s an exclamation point at the end of the album but also a metaphor, perhaps, for the album’s overarching theme: the string quartet repertoire did not die with Haydn or Beethoven, but is still alive and still evolving to this day.