Aug. 28: Spektral Quartet Announces New Double-Album - Experiments in Living - an interactive, deep-listening excursion guided by Tarot-style cards wi

Spektral Quartet Announces New Double-Album Experiments in Living 

An interactive, deep-listening excursion through Spektral’s expansive repertoire, guided by Tarot-style cards with original artwork by øjeRum

Release Date: August 28, 2020 (New Focus Recordings) | Pre-Order on Bandcamp 

“they have everything: a supreme technical command that seems to come easily, a capacity to make complicated music clear, and, most notably... an ability to cast a magic spell” – The New York Times 

Downloads available for press upon request | www.spektralquartet.com/experiments-in-living 

Chicago, IL – Spektral Quartet, praised by The Strad for its “ear-tickling precision,” announces the August 28, 2020 release of Experiments in Living on New Focus Recordings. This double album, featuring two hours of music, celebrates the quartet’s 10^th anniversary season in 2020-2021 and is the first all-Spektral album since their GRAMMY-nominated Serious Business (Sono Luminus, 2016). The concept of the programming represents a core tenet of the quartet’s philosophy as an ensemble – that divergent styles of music spanning centuries speak to one another in unexpected and captivating ways, and that the unfamiliar can rapidly become familiar in the right context.. Part One pursues three historic innovators and singular voices circumventing the entrenched rules of their time – Johannes Brahms, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ruth Crawford (Seeger) – while Part Two pitches through passageways of music motivated by improvisation, experimentation, and jazz by way of composers Anthony Cheung, Sam Pluta, Charmaine Lee, and George Lewis.

While the album can certainly be enjoyed in order from start to finish, the quartet believes that listeners, regardless of experience or expertise, are best suited to discover their own links between these tracks, and that this is most stimulating in user-generated “shuffle” mode of sorts. Having developed Tarot-style cards designed by Copenhagen-based collage artist and musician øjeRum (http://instagram.com/oejerum), the quartet has created an innovative, self-guided, “choose your own adventure” approach to experiencing the album. For each of the 20 tracks there is a corresponding card. The cards can be shuffled and turned over in a random order to reveal a unique playlist, inviting the listener to listen deeply, reflect on connections, and then choose descriptive, text-based “bridge” cards to link the tracks in their playlist. 

The quartet collectively states, “Like the concept proffered by John Stuart Mill from which the album takes its title, the ‘freedom’ found within these ‘experiments in living’ is a result of making choices without blind acceptance for the way things are or have been.” More information about the album is available here: www.spektralquartet.com/experiments-in-living 

Leading up to the August 28 release date, Spektral Quartet will host five online events associated with the album, including three editions of The Floating Lounge with guests Sam Pluta (July 29); Anthony Cheung and flutist Claire Chase (August 12); and soprano Lucy Shelton featuring works of Arnold Schoenberg (August 23). The Floating Lounge is a community-focused, online listening series produced by Spektral Quartet to bring curious listeners together during a time of isolation. Events feature high-quality streaming audio, special guests, and an interactive format that invites listeners to join in on the conversation.  

For a behind-the-scenes look at the album, on August 5 Spektral Quartet presents audio engineer Dan Nichols in “From Raw to Refined: How a Recording Comes to Life in Real Time” and on August 28, the quartet will host an album release listening party event in which they will unveil and demonstrate the produced card decks. Complete event schedule and registration links are available at www.spektralquartet.com/concerts 

Experiments in Living program notes by Spektral Quartet violist Doyle Armbrust:

What awaits you is the first quartet of Johannes Brahms, a composer that Schoenberg considered as harmonically adventurous as Wagner, and one whose voice held out against a hurricane of criticism. Then there’s Schoenberg’s own third quartet, a piece inseparable from Schubert (and Mozart and Beethoven), but that also jail-breaks the entirety of classical music composition. 

And what about Ruth Crawford (Seeger)’s String Quartet (1931)? Here we have a composer cutting through the patriarchy to write one of the only quartets of its kind till, maybe, Elliott Carter 20 years later.

Or maybe you’ve leapt right to George Lewis’s ecstatic String Quartet No. 1.5, “Experiments in Living.” There is an extemporaneous flare and even a seeming chaos at times within this music, but on further reflection, an architecture emerges from the mist – not unlike the sometimes bewildering experience of hearing Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 3 for the first time. Amidst all its energizing spontaneity, clear and bracing alliances are formed in twos, threes, and fours.

The exuberance popping off within the Lewis finds a parallel in Sam Pluta’s binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state, which whips the players through breakneck character changes with titles as sober as “Professor Dr. Squiggly, DMA.” As both composers prove, the most challenging music on the page can also be absurd, and hilarious, and fun.

Composer Anthony Cheung provides a genre bridge with his cheekily-titled Real Book of Fake Tunes, in which whiffs of jazz harmonies infuse spontaneous-sounding licks from flutist Claire Chase and our foursome. And finally, Spinals, our fully improvised collaboration with vocalist Charmaine Lee, offers the most interstellar departure from traditional classical music, fusing other-worldly reverberations of the human voice with the kaleidoscopic palette of the string quartet.

Spektral Quartet: Experiments in Living

New Focus Recordings | Released August 28, 2020

[1-4] Johannes Brahms (1833–1897): String Quartet in C minor, Op. 51 No. 1 (1873)

[5-8] Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951): String Quartet No. 3, Op. 30 (1927)

[9-12] Ruth Crawford (Seeger) (1901–1953): String Quartet (1931)

[13] Sam Pluta (b.1979): binary/momentary logics: flow state/joy state (2016)

[14–18] Anthony Cheung (b.1982): The Real Book of Fake Tunes for flute and string quartet (2015)

Featuring Claire Chase, flutes 

[19] Charmaine Lee (b.1991): Spinals (2018)

Featuring Charmaine Lee, voice and electronics

Devised in collaboration with Spektral Quartet

[20] George Lewis (b.1952): String Quartet 1.5: Experiments in Living (2016)

Experiments in Living Tarot-style cards with original artwork by øjeRum:

About the Spektral Quartet: Multi-Grammy nominees, the Spektral Quartet actively pursues a vivid conversation between exhilarating works of the traditional repertoire and those written this decade, this year, or this week. Since its inception in 2010, Spektral is known for creating seamless connections across centuries, drawing in the listener with charismatic deliveries, interactive concert formats, an up-close atmosphere, and bold, inquisitive programming. With a tour schedule including some of the country’s most notable concert venues such as the Kennedy Center, Miller Theater, Library of Congress, and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, the quartet also takes great pride in its home city of Chicago: championing the work of local composers, bridging social and aesthetic partitions, and cultivating its ongoing residency at the University of Chicago. Named “Chicagoans of the Year” by the Chicago Tribune in 2017, Spektral Quartet is most highly regarded for its creative and stylistic versatility: presenting seasons in which, for instance, a thematic program circling Beethoven seamlessly coexists with an improvised sonic meditation at sunrise, a talent show featuring Spektral fans, and the co-release of a jazz album traversing the folk traditions of Puerto Rico.