Common Sense Composers' Collective: Spark
Innova

Juri Seo: Respiri
Innova

Many a reason could be given to explain the ongoing vitality of the string quartet and the significant number of related recordings that continue to appear. In being a four-member model, it's more economically sustainable than a symphony or even chamber orchestra; its ease of mobility and adaptability also makes it a logistically attractive proposition. It has appeal for the composer, too, in allowing for seemingly limitless musical possibilities, despite the modest number of resources in play, plus a rich, centuries-spanning tradition is available for the composer to draw upon for inspiration. In notes accompanying Respiri, Juri Seo's Innova follow-up to 2017's Mostly Piano, the New Jersey-based composer and Princeton University instructor cites another reason, specifically the vocal-like potential of the string instrument (“Their up and down bow strokes are like the inhalations and exhalations of breath”) and their capacity for expressing the full spectrum of human emotion.

Respiri, the result of a two-year collaboration with the Argus Quartet (violinists Clara Kim and Jason Issokson, violist Dana Kelley, cellist Joann Whang) benefits greatly from its sequencing and compositional choices: after the quartet plays the single-movement title piece, Whang is featured in a five-movement solo suite, after which the full group performs the four-part String Quartet-Infinite Season. With the title work paying homage to the late British composer Jonathan Harvey and the concluding piece focusing on seasonal change, Respiri could be described in thematic terms as a meditation on life, death, change, and rebirth.

True to its title, the opening piece uses Harvey's signature gesture, an evocation of breathing, as an origin from which long breaths and cross-patterns bloom. While not quite a lament, Respiri nonetheless reveals a melancholy strain in its contemplative unfolding, with death intimated by the gradual quiet that sets in as the piece moves towards the end. The central suite's comprised of five short movements, the first of which evokes Bach in the to-and-fro movement of its bowed patterns, even if a disruptive turn puts distance between Seo and her precursor. The gentler second exudes an elegant stateliness characteristic of Bach, too, Whang's deployment of double-stops enhancing the solo line, while the third's aggressiveness, the fourth's crepuscular hush, and the fifth's dissonant slashes emphasize the strong dynamic contrasts between the movements.

At thirty-three minutes, String Quartet-Infinite Season arguably offers the album's optimal opportunity to appreciate Seo's gifts as a composer. In tracing nature's sounds as they progress through the seasons, the work exudes a strong Impressionistic air, never more powerfully than during “Winter-Spring” in evoking the dramatic transition from the coldest season into one signifying growth and rebirth; one's thoughts occasionally stray to Debussy's own string quartet when the Argus Quartet tackles Seo's material with such fervour. Intensifying the nature connection, ornithological field recordings are woven subtly into the work's fabric, the strings suggesting in their expressions birdsong and the rustlings of the natural world (cicadas also surface at the end of “Spring-Summer”). With “Summer-Fall” marked by a roller-coaster ride of furious bowing, the work reaches its zenith of activity in the third movement, after which folk melodies lend the otherwise playful “Fall-Winter” a touching plaintive quality.

The fifty-four-minute Respiri presents a flattering portrait, even if the three pieces provide more a primer than comprehensive account. That said, the recording is certainly rewarding enough to leave one eager to hear more of Seo's work.

In light of that assessment, it would be reasonable to expect a compilation featuring works by eight composers would provide an even hazier impression of each individual voice. Yet while that's true, a memorable cumulative impression forms of the outfit to which they belong, the Common Sense Composers' Collective. Founded in 1993 and rooted in values of community and collaboration, the group, composed of Dan Becker, John Halle, Ed Harsh, Melissa Hui, Marc Mellits, Randall Woolf, Belinda Reynolds, and Carolyn Yarnell, has created more than seventy works and produced five New Music Marathons in the San Francisco Bay area. Certainly one reason why its fifth release, Spark, is so cohesive is because its material, all of it originally developed in 2010 and premiered at the Banff Centre, is performed by one unit, the Oakland-based Friction Quartet (violinists Kevin Rogers & Otis Harriel, violist Taija Warbelow, cellist Doug Machiz). Enhancing the performances is the fact that the quartet's familiarity with the material preceded the studio sessions, the group having first performed the eight pieces at a March 2017 concert before entering Skywalker Sound for four days of recording.

All but two of the pieces (Hui's and Yarnell's) are standalones. Excerpted from his String Quartet No. 3: Tapas, Mellits's “Five” opens the set arrestingly, with a haunting three-note motif and its variations driving the lullaby-toned setting and deepening its entrancement. As per its title, Becker's Lockdown alludes to the prison setting, the work's urgency a sharp left turn from the slow tenderness of “Five” and Becker perhaps intending to evoke the speed with which a lockdown is effected during a violent uprising or other equally disruptive incident. The Friction's players skillfully coordinate stabbing string phrases into a thrusting, high-velocity whole until the pace slows for a decompressing coda. Complementary to Becker's contribution, Harsh's Trill, while not as ferocious, is animated by a comparative kinetic drive, the quartet again tearing into the material's obsessively repeating phrases like rabid dogs.

In its action-packed five minutes, Halle's remarkable Sphere(‘s) references “Straight No Chaser” and “Brilliant Corners,” two of the better-known compositions by jazz great Thelonious Sphere Monk. After a bluesy treatment of the first tune's melody appears, parabolic reshapings and repetitions of the figure occur, the vertiginous swirl of the more furious passages alleviated by moments of breath-catching serenity. Arriving as it does after Sphere(‘s), Reynolds's Open provides a welcome seven minutes of calm in weaving elegant phrases into an expressive mini-Master Class in minimalistic design. Every note has purpose in Reynolds's creation, which alternates fluidly between moments of delicacy and passion.

August 2019