San Francisco–born Gabriella Smith describes herself as a “composer and environmentalist” focused on “connecting listeners with the natural world.” Her musical environmentalism has taken many forms: a Latin Requiem set to a litany of names of extinct species; a wake-up call to the effects of climate change titled Lost Coast; and various works incorporating field recordings of marine and terrestrial ecosystems. In the case of Carrot Revolution, composed in 2015 for the Aizuri Quartet, the ecosystem was not natural but artistic—specifically, the famously eclectic collection housed at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Smith was asked to write a piece responding to “Dr. Barnes’ distinctive ‘ensembles,’ the unique ways in which he arranged his acquired paintings along with metal objects, furniture, and pottery, juxtaposing them in ways that bring out their similarities and differences in shape, color, and texture.” A quote erroneously attributed to one of the collector’s favorite artists, Cézanne, suggested the title of her quartet: “The day will come when a single, freshly observed carrot will start a revolution.”

Smith writes that she envisioned Carrot Revolution “as a celebration of that spirit of fresh observation and of new ways of looking at old things, such as the string quartet—a two-hundred-year-old genre—as well as some of my even older musical influences (Bach, Perotin, Gregorian chant, Georgian folk songs, and Celtic fiddle tunes). The piece is a patchwork of my wildly contrasting influences and full of weird, unexpected juxtapositions and intersecting planes of sound, inspired by the way the Barnes’ ensembles show old works in new contexts and draw connections between things we don’t think of as being related.” Smith’s highly energized music reflects the ecological diversity of the contemporary musical soundscape. Chugging ostinato rhythms reminiscent of 20th-century minimalism (one of Smith’s teachers was the “post-minimalist” composer John Adams) consort with wildly shifting accents, woozy glissandos, scratchy nasal effects, whining drones, and bluegrass-style fiddling. At one point, just as the music threatens to disintegrate into sheer cacophony, the players break into a tightly synchronized simulation of 12th-century polyphony, which Smith describes as “ecstatic, raucous, off-kilter Perotin sung by rough, nasal folk voices.”

© Harry Haskell, 2022

Dozens of artists have covered tracks from the Beatles’ iconic Abbey Road album since its much-heralded release in 1969. This resourceful arrangement by violist Alexander Vittal has the distinction of translating the Fab Four’s last studio recording into a medium utterly different from, and in many respects foreign to, the original. In adapting the Beatles’ highly engineered rock-band music for a foursome of acoustic string instruments, Vittal uses a panoply of unconventional “extended” instrumental techniques to simulate─rather than imitate─the vocal crooning, synthesized sounds, percussion effects, and electronically enhanced guitar on the legendary recording. The result is all the more enjoyable for being taken out of its original context, both sonic and cultural. Like Gabriella Smith in Carrot Revolution, Vittal invites us to look at old things in a new way.

Abbey Road Medley closely tracks the Beatles’ own 16-minute-long medley of eight short, unfinished songs that filled most of the album’s second side. (A fragmentary ninth song, “Her Majesty,” was belatedly tacked on as an afterthought and wasn’t even listed on the original album jacket.) Although in later years John Lennon was quoted as saying that there was no unifying theme to the medley and that “none of the songs had anything to do with each other,” a recent commentator characterizes it more generously as “a grand, gorgeously played suite that culminates in a hymn to love.” That hymn, prosaically titled “The End,” featured a foot-tapping drum solo by Ringo Starr that’s evoked in the string quartet version by the players percussively striking the bodies of their instruments.

© Harry Haskell, 2022

Rosa Parks has been celebrated by a small galaxy of musicians, from the Neville Brothers and the hip-hop duo Outkast to classical composers Mark Camphouse (A Movement for Rosa) and Michael Daugherty (MotorCity Triptych). In 2005, the year Parks died, Daniel Bernard Roumain (known by his initials, DBR) joined the chorus with his String Quartet No. 5, the last in a series of “musical portraits” inspired by major figures in the civil rights movement. (His first four quartets bear the names of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Adam Clayton Powell, and Maya Angelou.) Roumain’s longstanding commitment to social justice and racial healing is further reflected in works like his chamber opera We Shall Not Be Moved, about the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia; “They Still Want to Kill Us,” a mezzo-soprano aria marking the centenary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre; and the score for a recent documentary film about a community in Denver plagued by gun violence.

Born in Chicago to Haitian parents, Roumain earned a doctorate in classical composition while deepening his immersion in popular idioms rooted in the Black tradition. His Hip-Hop Studies and Etudes, for example, represent an attempt to “speak to and legitimize Black folk music in the same way that Bartók tried to legitimize Hungarian folk music, and Stravinsky tried to legitimize Russian folk music.” Yet Roumain says he’s not “setting out to create a hybrid form of hip-hop and classical music. I am simply, as a proud product of the iPod generation, emulating all the music that I’m listening to and have listened to. It’s classical music forms and the totality of Black music expression: rock, soul, hip-hop, jazz.” This stylistic fusion is reflected in the roster of his collaborators, which includes composer Philip Glass, choreographer Bill T. Jones, jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson, and actress-playwright Anna Deveare Smith (with whom he’s currently working on a commission for the Chicago Lyric Opera). 

Roumain describes his Fifth Quartet a “portrait of Rosa Parks’ struggle, survival, and legacy,” and “a direct reflection of a dignified resistance.” The first of the three movements, “I made up my mind not to move,” features kaleidoscopically shifting layers of rhythmic and melodic patterns that are as unyieldingly anchored to the underlying C-minor tonality. “Klap Ur Handz” evokes a jubilant collective spirit with invigorating, intricately syncopated music. Resistance is the theme of the subdued finale, which references a musical technique known as isorhythm based on a stubbornly repeating rhythmic figure. From beginning to end, the “Parks” Quartet fulfills Roumain’s description of his music as “direct in its musical language and complex in its political meaning.”

© Harry Haskell, 2022

A comparatively late bloomer, Dvořák was already in his early thirties when he first made his mark as a composer in his native Bohemia. He lost no time in turning out a string of highly accomplished works in sundry genres that were not only technically masterful but enormously popular. By the mid-1880s his international reputation was spreading by leaps and bounds, with major publishers bidding for the privilege of advertising his newest works in their catalogues. The period during and after Dvořák’s three-year residency in the United States, from 1892 to 1895, was especially happy and productive. The popular success of his two “American” chamber works--the String Quartet, Op. 96, and the String Quintet, Op. 97, both dating from 1893—inspired him to write two more string quartets in quick succession after returning to Prague in 1895.

As director of the newly founded National Conservatory of Music, Dvořák devoted much of his first year in New York to composing his “New World” Symphony and advocating for the development of an indigenously American classical music. In the summer of 1893, he took his family on vacation to the Midwest, in part so that they could attend “Bohemian Day” at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. They spent several weeks among the small community of Czech immigrants in Spillville, Iowa, and it was there that Dvořák composed the F-major Quartet in a burst of concentrated inspiration over a period of 15 days in June. “Thanks be to God,” he wrote on the manuscript. “I am satisfied; it went quickly.” Dvořák himself played the first violin in a run-through of the quartet with local musicians at the family home of his secretary, J. J. Kovařík. The celebrated Kneisel Quartet gave the first public performance in Boston on New Year's Day 1894 and repeated it 11 days later in New York’s Carnegie Hall.

The shortest of Dvořák’s 14 string quartets, the “American” is among his most accessible works, despite its formal and thematic compression. “I wanted for once to write something very melodious and simple, and I always kept Papa Haydn before my eyes,” the composer told a friend back home in Bohemia. The germ of the quartet seems to have been the song of a scarlet tanager that Dvořák heard while walking one day along the banks of the Turkey River in Spillville. Its distinctive U-shaped contour, coupling a rising second with a rising third, is embedded in the themes of three of the quartet’s four movements, most transparently in the crisp, brightly chirping melody that opens the scherzo-like Molto vivace. Only the plangent and darkly expressive slow movement lacks its bright splash of sonic color. Dvořák’s bottomless fund of melody is matched by the variety of his textures; throughout the work the instruments weave a rich tapestry, often playing four different rhythmic patterns simultaneously. 

© Harry Haskell, 2022