Readers may recall that the highly inventive trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith celebrated his 80th birthday this past December. This occasion was celebrated by a series of releases on his “house label,” the Helsinki-based TUM Records. Two of those releases were discussed on this site on the occasion of his birthday, but there have been subsequent “anniversary” projects.
One of these involved recordings of Smith’s first twelve string quartets. TUM releases these as a seven-CD set around the middle of this past month. The description of the release suggests that this is not a “complete” collection. Indeed, there are currently three quartets that have not yet been recorded. Their sequence numbers are significant, since the quartets were inspired, respectively, by the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the United States Constitution, all proposed and enacted in reaction to the Civil War.
Many of the preceding quartets have similar semantic connotations. These involve titles attached to either entire quartets or individual movements. However, it would be fair to say than none of the labels or associations conceived by Smith are referentially transparent. The same can be said of the many sources that Smith acknowledges in his “Reflections on the String Quartets” essay included in the accompanying booklet. Indeed, those reflections cite influences that reach as far back as Ludwig van Beethoven (no surprise) all the way up to currently living composers such as Tania León.
That said, the attentive listener will probably be hard-pressed to identify any of those sources for reflection. This is because Smith’s approach to composing these quartets has its own radically unique method. The composer elaborates on his technique in the final paragraph of his booklet essay:
Most of the pitched music events in the score have been reduced to long, short sonic relationships and are not metered or time-based events, and speed and mobility are an individual and collective act. A notion of invisible evolutionary forms and inspiration permeate the ritualized space.
One might almost say that the foundation for each of these quartets is one of expository verbal declamation, even if words themselves are absent.
Ashley Walters, Andrew McIntosh, Wadada Leo Smith, Shalini Vijayan, and Mona Thian (photograph by Kat Nockels)
The twelve quartets in this collection were all recorded by the RedKoral Quartet. The members of the ensemble are violinists Shalini Vijayan and Mona Tian, violist Andrew McIntosh, and cellist Ashley Walters. However, in performing the twelfth of the quartets, all of them play viola. Also, in the performance of the sixth quartet, entitled “Taif: Prayer in the Garden of the Hijaz,” Lorenz Gamma replaces Thian as second violinist. That performance also includes Smith on trumpet, Anthony Davis on piano, and Lynn Vartan on percussion. The fourth, seventh, and eighth quartets also include additional instrumentation.
All of the performers seem to be keenly aware of Smith’s composition techniques as described above. Nevertheless, it is likely that the attentive listener will require some time in adjusting to those techniques. My guess is that such adjustment would be just as challenging when listening to a performance in recital than it would be in listening to these recordings. This should come as no great surprise.
I am sure that I am far from the only one to have adjusted my listening skills to the six string quartets of Béla Bartók by listening to recordings made by the Juilliard String Quartet. For that matter, recordings are just as valuable an asset in getting to know the late Beethoven quartets. Personally, I hope that these RedKoral recordings will be just as valuable in preparing me for yet-to-be-experienced concert performances of this repertoire.
No comments:
Post a Comment