At Constellation on March 29, 2014, Chicago string ensemble Spektral Quartet celebrated the launch of a charming and savvy project called Mobile Miniatures, for which the group had commissioned 47 composers to write short pieces intended as cell-phone ringtones. The quartet played in the usual spot on the floor, surrounded on three sides by seating, but they’d set up a lot more than just their chairs and music stands. To the left and right of the performance area, toward the back of the room, the audience could use headphones to audition recordings of the ringtone compositions at iPad listening stations. Tiny tables among the musicians held a half-dozen kitschy, old-fashioned land-line telephones, among them novelty models shaped like lips or a doughnut.
Mobile Miniatures illustrates one of Spektral Quartet’s most appealing and significant qualities. Though violinists Austin Wulliman and Clara Lyon, violist Doyle Armbrust, and cellist Russell Rolen are all adventurous, unimpeachable musicians, that’s basically standard equipment in contemporary classical ensembles today—what sets them apart is their willingness to meet their audience halfway. They don’t water down their repertoire, but they’re happy to share what it is they love about the work they play—and they consistently find new ways to make their concerts fun, engaging, and serious all at once.
And of course humor has been part of classical music for a long time too: Serious Business includes Haydn’s String Quartet Opus 33 no. 2 from 1781, affectionately nicknamed “The Joke” for the false endings in its jaunty final movement. And the new pieces around it on the album are hardly buttoned-down stuff. New York composer Sky Macklay delivers on the promise of her title for “Many Many Cadences” with a giddy pile-on of dizzying descending phrases. The Ancestral Mousetrap by Dave Reminick (leader of Chicago math-rock band Paper Mice and one hell of a composer) requires the group to sing the absurdist Russell Edson poem of the title while playing the jagged, mind-warping music. Hack by Fisher-Lochhead borrows many of its rhythms and pitch relationships from meticulous transcriptions of bits by famous stand-up comedians, including Lenny Bruce, Sarah Silverman, Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, and Tig Notaro; the composer gives the strange shapes that result a dazzling harmonic grandeur. When Spektral premiered the complete piece as part of last May’s Comic Cadences program, they screened videos of the bits before each short movement.
Spektral chose a name and formally launched in 2010, but it took time for the group’s public persona to blossom. “We realized a big part of the mission was to be opening up the process and who we were to the audience, whether it was onstage and talking to people or in how we communicated through the press or through social media,” says Wulliman. “We were trying to make our wacky personality all on the surface and not hidden from people—not put a facade of seriousness in front of the art, but burst out with whatever color there was to ourselves.”
Reminick went to school with Wulliman at Northwestern, but his connection to Spektral has been cemented by more than just long acquaintance. He especially appreciates their willingness to stick with a piece over the long haul. “For many new-music groups, the premiere is the first and last time they play a piece,” he says. “I can’t speak for every composer, but that model just doesn’t work for my music. It’s rare to find a group like Spektral who will take the time to grow with a work, performing it many times over the course of an entire season and beyond. So much of The Ancestral Mousetrap requires precise rhythmic synchronization and hocketing between the four performers, and making that work and feel natural takes a great deal of time.”
Correction: This piece has been amended to add a description of Sky Macklay’s “Many Many Cadences.”
Stravinsky, Reminick, Fisher-Lochhead, Macklay, Haydn, Beethoven. Fri 1/29, 8 PM, Mayne Stage, 1328 W. Morse, $23, 18+. Also Sun 1/31, 3 PM, Performance Penthouse, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th, $10, students free, all ages.
