Vivian Fung’s Quartets on Sono Luminus

Cover of the album being discussed (from the Amazon.com Web page)

This coming Friday Sono Luminus will release Insects and Machines. The album title is also the title of Vivian Fung’s fourth string quartet, and the album presents performances of all four of her quartets by the Jasper String Quartet. The members of that quartet are violinists J Freivogel and Karen Kim, Andrew Gonzalez on viola, and cellist Rachel Henderson Freivogel. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

Where listening experiences are concerned, Fung is no stranger to me. At the last Chapel of the Chimes concert this past June, Sarah Cahill played the “Kotekan” movement from Fung’s Glimpses suite, which was a reflection on Balinese gamelan music. Two years earlier, I was able to view a video stream of a performance of her flute concerto performed by members of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, featuring Principal Flute, Christie Reside. Looking to the future, the next Chamber Music Tuesday program presented by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music will present her piano trio, which was given the title “Ominous Machine.”

Nevertheless, the dirty little secret is that none of my past encounters left much of an impression, meaning that the previous paragraph could not have been written without the assistance of a search engine. I fear that Fung’s string quartets will suffer the same fate. There are any number of technical qualities that can be appreciated, but these may reflect more on the musicianship of the Jasper players than on Fung’s qualities as a composer. Nevertheless, when the album is taken as a whole, I come away feeling that the journey reminds me of past listening experiences from the second half of the last century.

Should not the listening experience involve a stronger impact of personal identity?