JACK Quartet II

Christopher Otto, violin
Austin Wulliman, violin
John Richards, viola
Jay Campbell, violoncello
 

Thursday, February 06, 2025 at 7:30p, Concert Hall

Program

JACK Quartet Bio 

Hailed by The New York Times as “our leading new-music foursome”, the JACK Quartet is one of the most acclaimed, renowned, and respected groups performing today. JACK has maintained an unwavering commitment to their mission of performing and commissioning new works, giving voice to underheard composers, and cultivating an ever-greater sense of openness toward contemporary classical music. The quartet was selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year”, named to WQXR’s “19 for 19 Artists to Watch”, and awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. 

Through intimate relationships with today’s most creative voices, JACK embraces close collaboration with the composers they perform, leading to a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. The quartet has worked with artists such as Julia Wolfe, George Lewis, Chaya Czernowin, Helmut Lachenmann, Caroline Shaw, and Simon Steen-Andersen. JACK’s all-access initiative, JACK Studio, commissions a selection of artists each year, who will receive money, workshop time, mentorship, and resources to develop new work to be performed and recorded by the quartet. 

Committed to education, JACK is the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music, who host the JACK Frontiers Festival, a multi-faceted festival of contemporary music for string quartet. They also teach each summer at New Music on the Point, a contemporary chamber music festival in Vermont, and at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. JACK has long-standing relationships with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall and spring, as well as with the Lucerne Festival Academy, of which the four members are all alumni. Additionally, the quartet collaborates with young composers at schools including Columbia University, Harvard University, New York University, Princeton University, and Stanford University. 

Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of new string quartet music. 

Program Notes & Composer Bios

In the past two or three years I have primarily composed instrumental music using the names of the performers for whom a given piece is written. In the Summer of 2024, however, I decided that it was time to try a new approach, and I composed a piece using the Sierpinski triangle as a means of generating material. Spiraling (Just, Like Archimedes), a string that explores the famous Archimedean spiral in sound, is my second piece using this new method based on geometric patterns. Yet while the means of composing are new for me, I have not changed my values as a composer. Like the names, composing with geometric patterns is a means of removing myself from the early stages of writing and finding material that surprises and challenges me in the crafting of the work.
     This is essentially what the parenthetical part of the title is meant to suggest: in my view, the material of the piece is fundamentally just or justifiable because it is based on an abstract form. For example, the piece’s main theme, first heard as a violin solo at the very beginning, was algorithmically derived from a rendering of the Archimedean spiral. I mapped the y-axis value of each point in the spiral to pitch and the slope between adjacent points to duration such that the spatial contour of the spiral is imprinted onto the sonic contour of the theme. Is such a rigorous approach necessary to compose “just” music? Probably not. But it is intellectually satisfying, and, what’s more, it gets the job done.

Kevin Swenson is a composer and performer from Yuba City, California. His recent work explores computer assisted composition techniques influenced by Pythagorean numerology and fractal geometry, interactive live electronics, and just intonation tuning. His music has been performed in the US and Europe at events such as the KlexosLab New Music Festival, the Napoleon Electronic Music Festival, and the Splice Institute. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Music Composition at the University of Iowa. In addition to his studies, he is the Audio Lab teaching assistant in the Department of Dance.

I dreamt I was made of gossamer takes place in sleep. I wanted to explore the weaving of fibers: sometimes crisscrossing, snagging, pulling, or packing together in symmetry, making textures in the shape of a dream that one can’t quite remember.
     Recent research on the makeup of the human body has posited the discovery of a new organ: the interstitium, as it’s named, is a network of compartments throughout our bodies, surrounded by a dense interweaving of spindle-like collagen. I began thinking, what if bodies are just folds of a beautiful, complex fabric of fascia, and we might pull apart or plait together tighter at any time?
     As I was writing the piece, I imagined whisper-light pinpricks of sound threading over and under into a pattern, the shuttle of an old fairy loom carrying spiderweb threads of gossamer thread back and forth, back and forth, faster and faster until a blurry image emerges. The fibers cross, snag, pull, and wind back together, until the music settles once more into neat rows of warp and weft. But, as all things, the threads of the melody eventually fray apart and float away into the ether of the dream. From dust to dust.

Composer Lucy Shirley’s works are polystylistic and playful, often focusing on language and aspects of the human voice. Shirley’s earliest musical influences were gleaned from long car rides listening to her mom’s mixtapes of showtunes and classic Americana, and she often finds herself still incorporating aspects of theatricality and folk melody into her current music-making. Shirley’s awards include winning IAWM’s 2024 Call for Scores, selection in SOLI Chamber Ensemble’s 2024 30x30x30 Project, a 2022 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and selection as a Finalist in 2021, and 2nd place in the 2021 UMKC Chamber Music Composition Competition. She has attended festivals such as the Norfolk New Music Workshop, June in Buffalo, HighSCORE, Fresh Inc., Nief-Norf, Zodiac Music Festival, and the Napoleon Electronic Media Festival, and has worked with artists such as the JACK Quartet, the Imani Winds, the mdi ensemble, the Mammoth Trio, Carrie Koffman, and Don-Paul Kahl. Shirley is currently a PhD student at the University of Iowa where she studies with David Gompper.

Wandering on the Border of Infinities III is the third part under the same title. Each separate part explores the same idea but varies in instrumentation and length. As stated in the program notes of the first part---This composition is inspired by the construction of a string instrument itself. I imagine the bridge as a metaphorical border, a place that cannot be confined within time or space, filled with mysterious air. As you are wandering around it (above or below the bridge), unknown and strange fields start to emerge and disappear. Sometimes you just look at them from afar, sometimes you find one that is very tempting, and you walk into it….

Ziang Han, (b.1995) is a composer and pianist who completed his Bachelor of Arts Degree at Capital Normal University in China, studying music composition and piano performance. In 2018, he came to the United States to purse his Mater of Music in Music Composition at University of Hartford, during which he was awarded the Edward Clemente Prize for music creativity and contribution to the community. Under the Pelzer Prize fellowship, he started his PhD in Composition at the University of Iowa in 2021.
     He has composed with various conventional instrumentations and gradually cultivated his personal voice through more adventurous settings. One of his recent projects, In the Abyss… Sheening… Weathering, is scored for two tubas, one prepared piano and one mezzo-soprano. His K•Y√.£..¶∆R•Ï…?Ë™ is for the UI Klais organ and 12 spatialized speakers, premiered in the Concert Hall at the University of Iowa. His trio switch featuring alumni Will Yager (double bass) and Kenken Gorder (trumpet) along with Sarah Hetrick (saxophone) will be released in album NÜTOOTS in 2025.
     Ziang has worked with Duo Yumeno (shamisen/cello), Loadbang (baritone voice/trumpet/trombone/bass clarinet), the New Zealand String Quartet, and the New Zealand String Trio.

The immediate inspiration for my Fragment 16 (Xenogothic Triple Canon) was a piece by the composer Matt Barber titled Prelude and Canon for Wind Quintet. The title belies his piece's compositional virtuosity: the canon is in five different superimposed speeds, and uses late romantic tonal language. It caused quite a stir at Eastman when it was first played there, despite its short length. Matt's musicianship has been inspirational to me since I was 18 years old, and in some ways I feel like I am always several steps behind him. So I also wanted to write a polytempic canon in a historical contrapuntal style, and Avignon around 1370 was my target.
     I failed, quickly: my piece is not strictly in three different consistent speeds (much too difficult), but the melodies in each voice, otherwise all direct copies of one another, do get pervasively pushed and pulled like taffy into and out of shifting speeds. I partly attribute my failure to my beloved teacher, Jean-François Charles, who suggested “Why not write a canon at the [melodic distance of a] 7th? ”, suggesting that canons at the 5th and octave were rather passé. I took him up on this, but it made life harder. For example, for technical reasons, descending scales were now basically off limits, and descending sixths become sort-of necessary as an escape hatch, both features which were uncommon in the melodic style of the medieval period. Nevertheless, it was great fun getting the piece to sound as 'medieval' as possible given these constraints. I can't take credit for the coinage 'Xenogothic'; that honor belongs to microtonal theorist and composer Margo Schulter. Please look up her and Matt's music if you get the chance.

Kyle Quarles is currently a PhD candidate in music composition at the University of Iowa. He received his bachelor degrees in composition and guitar performance from the Eastman School of Music in 2012, and his master's in composition from New England Conservatory in 2021. His compositional work uses techniques from mathematics and computer science, often to ingest and re-cast musical languages of the ancient past. As a theorist, his work has appeared in Perspectives of New Music, as well as in lectures delivered at the University of New Hampshire and the New England Conservatory. Also a professional chorister, he sang for two years as a choral scholar at Christ Church in Rochester New York, and recorded with the Schola Cantorum there for several years. He currently sings with Trinity Episcopal Church in Iowa City.

Rondo is my interpretation of the form popularized in the classical era. The form in its entirety is ABACADA. A main theme will return after three contrasting episodes, with each return being a different style and energy. I often do not put much thought or planning into my formal structures, so I took this opportunity to create great contrast between the sections in my composition.

Jason Wise (b. 2001) is a composer from Pinehurst, North Carolina who enjoys storytelling through music. This passion comes from his love for movies, taking inspiration from John Williams, Don Davis, and Benjamin Wallfisch. Wise’s music has reached groups such as Canadian Brass, the International Trombone Festival, and the Brevard Music Center. Brass instruments (including his primary instrument, the trombone) have been a great source of creativity for him, composing works for trombone quartet, brass quintet, and wind band. Wise is currently a masters student at the University of Iowa for composition.

The Fortune Teller’s Tent - From 22 possible movements, which will you get to hear? Step into the tent, take a seat, and open your mind; the cards have the answers that you seek. No two journeys are the same, past always shaping the future, the present but a liminal fleeting moment, and the future only known by the hands of fate. When our story ends, how will we interpret what we've seen and what we've heard? What will we remember? Will we be left wanting for that which we did not experience, or will we be resolute in that which we did? The fortune teller's tent contains a magic that turns our questions into a certainty of what the future may bring.

Blake Cordell (b. 1995) received his undergraduate degrees from Kansas State University, one in music composition and the other in theatrical design. Prior to starting his master's degree in music composition, he worked as a theatre practitioner in Chicago for the better part of a decade. There, he contracted as a sound designer, audio engineer, lighting designer, and master electrician for numerous theatres. Additionally, he worked as a technician for several premier productions, such as Chicago Shakespeare Theatre's debut of Six. A large part of his composition portfolio is similarly found within the theatrical world: he has composed and directed at venues in Kansas, Wyoming, Illinois, and New York. His full-length musical Inn-Dependent won the Kennedy Center American Collegiate Theatre Festival National New Play Award for Region V in 2015 and received a world premiere at Kansas State University in 2018. His theatrical background greatly influences his instrumental compositions, and he continually strives to present motivic narratives through the use of unique performance elements.