Williamsburg Coup: The Third Annual Jürg Frey String Quartets Evening

WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN – In recent years, live contemporary music in New York has dispersed and now inhabits a host of new venues. In a nod to changing times, earlier this year the proprietors of Spectrum, a fairly recent and welcome addition to downtown Manhattan with inspiring curation, made the decision to move to Fort Greene in Brooklyn. They join several other spaces, notably Issue Project Room, National Sawdust, Bargemusic, and Shapeshifter Lab, which have also found the borough more conducive to their continued survival. While the rent is marginally better, the adventurousness of their programming also helps to keep them in the public eye, making the schlepp worthwhile for those who don’t call Brooklyn home.

Another notable adventurer, the Scholes Street Studio has been operating in Williamsburg since 2013 as a multipurpose venue: recording studio, art gallery, and small performance space—its function on December 2 when it hosted the Third Annual Jürg Frey String Quartets Evening with violinists Erik Carlson and Leah Asher, violist Wendy Richman, and cellist T.J. Borden. With the grand piano tucked in a corner, rows of folding chairs were set up in front of the studio office, which doubled as a snack bar. Acoustic ceiling tiles and a beautiful display of abstract, colorful paintings by Cecilia Suhr adorning every wall made for a cozy yet vibrant arts space. 

The program consisted of two string quartets by Jürg Frey (b. 1953), a Swiss composer who is a member of the Wandelweiser composers’ collective, a geographically diverse group whose members share aesthetic affinities. Among them, there are actually a variety of approaches, including drones, aleatory, alternate methods of notation, text scores, and improvisation. They are unified by a predominant interest in creating slowly moving, quiet pieces; ones that explore silence and noise as well as pitch. Late John Cage and Morton Feldman are obvious touchstones, but Wandelweiser music extends rather than copies the innovations of the New York School. The collective’s distribution arm, Editions Wandelweiser, supplies performers and listeners their scores, writings, and recordings. Another Timbre, a UK-based label, and Erstwhile Recordings, which calls New Jersey home, have also released a number of Wandelweiser recordings.

Along with founder Antoine Beuger (from the Netherlands), Michael Pisaro (the U.S.), and Eva-Marie Houben (Germany), Frey is one of the most prominent composers in the group. Critics Alex Ross (The New Yorker) and Steve Smith (National Sawdust) routinely mention his work in their articles and playlists: Ross has included Frey’s new recording on Another Timbre, a double-CD of music based on the poetry of Gustave Roud, on his “Best of 2017” list. Last week on social media, Smith called out the performance at Scholes Street as a “must-hear.” Jennie Gottschalk’s recent book, Experimental Music Since 1970 (Bloomsbury, 2016), which one could characterize as a “must-read” for new music aficionados, spends a great deal of time explicating the works of the Wandelweiser group.

Smith wasn’t wrong in his assessment. Both of the quartets, numbers Two and Three respectively in Frey’s catalog, are recorded, but hearing them live in an intimate setting is the best way to experience their delicate sound world. Each is about a half-hour in duration, hardly rivalling the daunting lengths of some Feldman works, such as his Second String Quartet, which clocks in at some five-and-a-half hours. Still, they do mirror the slowly evolving, starkly limited material and prevailing pianissimo dynamic of Feldman’s music, providing a clear kinship with the New York School.

String Quartet Two (2000) features a narrowly spaced two-chord pattern followed by a brief pause. This is repeated quietly throughout with subtle glissandos between each the two sonorities. The chords don’t cadence, but they contain enough thirds to supply a measure of consonance alongside the blurred pitch bends and brittle sound of bowing close to the bridge. The changing of pitches is incremental and the piece’s tempo very slow: the score mostly indicates the eighth note at 52 beats per minute with lots of dotted half notes to play. Partway through, the quartet hums along. Towards the end, a few pizzicato notes are added to the texture. From this significantly restricted palette of sounds, Frey evokes a host of timbres and subtle shifts.

By comparison, even though it adopts the same relentlessly slow pace, String Quartet Three (2014) is much more harmonically active, supplying an entirely different side of Frey’s music. Many of the passages are, once again, chords played together. This time, they are widely spaced, covering several octaves from bottom to top. At one point, the piece comes close to a Mahlerian cadence, only to veer away into a passage of new material that is aglow with harmonics. Gradually, the players each get a chance to depart from playing the chords together, with single sustained pitches occurring in slow counterpoint. Even after its brief flirtation with tonality, the piece still finishes enigmatically, with chordal ambiguity restored in place of conclusive closure.

As a recording studio, Scholes Street is reasonably well insulated, but in the midst of Quartet Two, an idling truck with blaring bass sat out in front of the building, moving on after what seemed like a minute. The players didn’t bat an eye and stayed in the zone, as did the audience. Indeed, this was one of the quietest settings in which I have ever listened to music, an ideal situation in which to attend to the tiny changes that make these pieces work. The musicians, though not a “named” or set ensemble, do collaborate in several new music ensembles together. Given this, it was all the more astonishing how attuned they were to each other and to the details of the score. When I later asked one if the truck had distracted them, she sincerely replied, “What truck?” They were mesmerized by their own performance and we with them.

Pictured: Jürg Frey