The Bell Museum, Schubert Club Mix, and Walker Art Center present
Spektral Quartet:
Enigma
A 360° Experience
Friday and Saturday, November 4 & 5, 2022
7 & 9 pm
Whitney and Elizabeth MacMillan Planetarium at the Bell Museum
SPEKTRAL QUARTET is
Theo Espy (violin)
Clara Lyon (violin)
Doyle Armbrust (viola)
Russell Rolen (cello)
PROGRAM
O Magnum Mysterium
TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA (1548 - 1611)
String Quartet No. 1
ELIZA BROWN (b. 1985)
String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10
III. Andantino, doucement expressif
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862 - 1918)
Enigma (2019)
ANNA ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR, composer (b. 1977)
&
SIGURÐUR GUÐJÓNSSON, video artist (b. 1975)
Pre- and post-show music: A nostalgia fore the light by Daniel Dehaan
Tonight's program runs approximately 60 minutes with no intermission.
About the works
O Magnum Mysterium
TOMAS LUIS DE VICTORIA (1548 - 1611)
Tomás Luis de Victoria grew up immersed in the Catholic fervor surrounding the Carmelite nun, St. Teresa of Ávila, who claimed to have miraculous visions of God lovingly lancing her guts with a golden spear. This may or may not have tempted him into the priesthood, and he may or may not have been a student of the great Palenstrina in Rome, but what is certain is that his “O magnum mysterium” was an indisputable hit by a rookie publishing his first collection of vocal music.
What really takes our breath away in this motet—now a Christmas standard—is the sheer awe Victoria manages to bottle up and pour out at the outset. While you will be hearing the music without lyrics, so to speak, there is simply no denying the awe evident in the opening, descending and then ascending fifth: a “perfect” interval heralding the arrival of perfection in human form. But that’s just the beginning. This may be a good time to consider the last time you were struck dumb: hiking the Grand Canyon, turning the corner onto La Sagrada Familia, or a child’s first wobbly step, maybe?
—Doyle Armbrust
String Quartet No. 1 (2011, rev. 2013)
ELIZA BROWN (b. 1985)
Commissioned by Spektral Quartet
Premiered by Spektral Quartet, Dec 5, 2011, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
In the chamber music of the high Romantic era, a dynamic tension exists between the abstract logic of the functional harmony that underpins the music and the highly expressive, individuated gestures that make up its surface. I find this tension both appealing as a listener and fascinating as a composer. String Quartet No. 1 seeks to create a similar tension between an underlying harmonic progression and a detailed, individuated surface, but through a musical language that largely eschews the surface rhetoric of the Romantic era.
The elements of an original, functional chord progression are taken apart and brought in and out of focus, as though one is hearing the progression through the constantly adjusting lens of an aural microscope. A ghostly cadential trill or expressive vibrato emerges for an instant and dissolves, as the musical lens refocuses and the implications of the moment are changed, distorted, or forgotten.
—Eliza Brown
String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10, No. III
Andantino, doucement expressif
CLAUDE DEBUSSY (1862 - 1918)
If a shortlist were created of string quartets with which a western classical ensemble might discover (or recover) its bearings, surely Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 would make the cut. Like a weather-beaten guidepost bearing faint but familiar markings, this score is an irresistible invitation in an unfamiliar direction – at least the dominant direction of string quartet writing at the time. As a music critic, Debussy was not discreet about his desire for a less rules-heavy (translation: less Germanic) trajectory for contemporary music. The cycle had become claustrophobically predictable. It is, perhaps, an astonishing claim about a piece that is near-ubiquitous on string quartet repertoire lists, but Debussy’s sole foray into the genre remains regenerative to both players and audiences. It seems to provide new, freshly-gessoed canvases for each ensemble that studies it, and offers space for Spektral to tell a story of our own.
—Doyle Armbrust
Enigma (2019)
ANNA ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR (composer, b. 1977)
& SIGURÐUR GUÐJÓNSSON (video artist)
Sound design by Grace Heatherington-Tilka
Commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Washington Performing Arts, and Spektral Quartet. World premiere on October 27, 2019 at Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The 360 video version premiered at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago in April of 2022.
About Enigma
Spektral Quartet brings light and darkness – and the mysterious space in between –into orbit through Enigma, a new multimedia work by composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir and video artist Sigurdur Gudjonsson. Inspired by the 2017 solar eclipse and created for an immersive, full-dome theater experience, Thorvaldsdottir’s enchanting and beautifully disorienting sounds take on an even more vivid hue through Gudjonsson’s evocative imagery, together producing an absolutely unforgettable live experience.
Enigma marks a major milestone for the string quartet repertoire, written by one of the most distinctive composers of her generation. Winner of The New York Philharmonic’s prestigious Kravis Emerging Composer award, Anna Thorvaldsdottir is heralded for music that “conjures unseen worlds” and creates “shimmering, harmonically ambiguous, thoroughly enveloping texture” (New York Times). Elemental power and an expansive scope are signatures of her music – soundscapes in which the natural world collides with colossal, fantastical forces. In Enigma, Thorvaldsdottir maneuvers through the dualities of friction and flow, expansion and contraction, and tenderness and tension to unmask the universality of these vital alliances.
A longtime artistic partner of Ms. Thorvaldsdottir, Sigurdur Gudjonsson developed the video art that immerses the audience in a synesthetic experience, linking – or deliberately deviating – visual and aural elements to enhance the concertgoer’s perceptual field and produce new sensations in both body and mind. A piece of profound artistic collaboration, Enigma encompasses both blinding light and inky dark – and the fascinating vistas that lie in between.
It might be said that we enter the planetarium for the same reason we enter the concert hall: to be brought in touch with the sublime and the unknown. In both places we make contact with tangible reality and imagined panoramas, and in both places our sense of perspective is expanded.
—Doyle Armbrust
Enigma was made possible with support provided by The National Endowment for the Arts, The Paul M. Angell Family Foundation, Music Academy of the West, and MediaThe Foundation.
A note from Anna Thorvaldsdottir
The music of Enigma is inspired by the notion of the “in-between”, juxtaposing flow and fragmentation. Pulsating stasis—the “whole”, an expanding and contracting fundament—is contrasted with fragmented materials—shadows of things that live as part of the whole. Harmonies emerge and evaporate or break into pieces in various ways, leaving traces of materials that project through different kinds of textures and nuances and gradually take on their own shape. Some return to the core, some remain apart. Throughout the piece, the perspective continuously moves between the two, the fundament and the fragmented shadows, but the focus is always their relationship—the “in-between”.
As with my music generally, the inspiration behind Enigma is not something I am trying to describe through the piece—to me, the qualities of the music are first and foremost musical. When I am inspired by a particular element or quality, it is because I perceive it as musically interesting, and the qualities I tend to be inspired by are often structural, like proportion and flow, as well as relationships of balance between details within a larger structure, and how to move in perspective between the two—the details and the unity of the whole.
About the Artists
ELIZA BROWN’s music is motivated by sound and its potential for meaning, an engagement with the broader arts and humanities, and fundamental questions about the nature of human existence, social relationships and responsibilities, and sensory experience. Eliza’s compositions have been performed by leading interpreters of new music, including Ensemble Dal Niente, Spektral Quartet, ensemble recherche, International Contemporary Ensemble, Network for New Music, Ensemble SurPlus, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and Wild Rumpus New Music Collective. Her works have been heard on stages throughout the USA and in Mexico, Colombia, Germany, Hungary, Spain, Canada, and the UAE, and have been recorded on multiple labels.
Eliza’s work is frequently intertextual, opening dialogues with existing pieces of music, historical styles, and other cultural artifacts. Her work is also frequently interdisciplinary, with a particular focus on music-theater and opera. Recent projects include The Body of the State (2017), a music-theater work about the life of Juana of Castile written in collaboration with six women who were at the time of writing incarcerated at Indiana Women’s Prison. Commissioned and premiered by Ensemble Dal Niente, this work incorporates the instrumentalists into its staging as a representation of the oppressive, hierarchical family and society that shaped Juana’s life. Prospect and Refuge (2015), for four female voices, explores how public spaces shape social experience and was created in collaboration with architect Hannah Marzynski, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, and stage director Emmi Hilger. The piece is designed to be re-staged at each new performance site, with reference to the social history of that particular space.
Eliza’s artistic interests give rise to questions about the interpretation and meaning of music that drive her scholarship. Her dissertation, A Narratological Analysis of ‘Pnima…ins innere’ by Chaya Czernowin, used methods drawn from the interdisciplinary field of narratology (the study of narrative) to examine how Czernowin’s opera tells its story by means of music alone, as the singers in Pnima sing phonemes and vocal sounds rather than words.
Eliza is a dedicated teacher who enjoys helping students strengthen their creative voices and engage complex ideas with rigor and enthusiasm. She is currently Assistant Professor of Music at DePauw University, where she teaches composition and music theory. Eliza has also had a long-time affiliation with the Walden School Young Musicians Program, where she spent many summers as a faculty member and Academic Dean. Eliza holds a B.Mus. summa cum laude in composition from the University of Michigan and a D.M.A. in composition from Northwestern University.
Recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and the New York Philharmonic Kravis Emerging Composer Award, ANNA ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR is a composer who frequently works with large sonic structures that tend to reveal the presence of a vast variety of sustained sound materials, reflecting her sense of imaginative listening to landscapes and nature. Her music tends to portray a flowing world of sounds with an enigmatic lyrical atmosphere.
Anna’s music is frequently performed internationally, and has been featured at several major venues and music festivals such as Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival in NYC, the Composer Portraits Series at NYC's Miller Theatre, ISCM World Music Days, Nordic Music Days, Ultima Festival, Klangspuren Festival, Beijing Modern Music Festival, Reykjavik Arts Festival, Tectonics, and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Her works have been nominated and awarded on many occasions - most notably, Anna is the recipient of the prestigious Nordic Council Music Prize 2012 for her work Dreaming. "Ms. Thorvaldsdottir's music has a natural beauty to it in the way it reveals itself patiently, and in its unpredictable but organic-seeming instances of rhythmic quickening."(New York Times) annathorvalds.com
SIGURÐUR GUÐJÓNSSON (b. 1975) studied in Vienna, Reykjavík, and Copenhagen, starting his exhibition career at the turn of the century in the artist-run experimental scene in Reykjavík that has fostered new art in temporary venues all over the old city.
His dark and moody videos immediately set him apart and attracted attention not only in Iceland but also in Berlin, New York, London, Beijing, Seoul, and wherever they were exhibited. He mostly uses video but in many ways his work could as easily be classed as music. He exploits the potential of time-based media to produce pieces that rhythmically engage the viewer in a synesthetic experience, linking vision and hearing in ways that seem to extend one’s perceptual field and produce sensations never felt before. Usually slow and often repetitive, his pieces draw you in and gradually start to expand, creating complex loops and rhythmic schemes that can almost overwhelm the senses.
His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, in such institutions as the National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik Art Museum, Hafnarborg, Iceland, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany, Arario Gallery, Beijing, Liverpool Biennial, Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway, Safn Reykjavík, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Kling & Bang Gallery and Bergen Kunsthall Norway. sigurdurgudjonsson.net
DR. DANIEL R. DEHAAN is a composer, performer, and educator currently based in Chicago who regularly creates and performs music that is designed to be site or system-specific. The experiences of each performance are crafted by Dr. Dehaan to emphasize the physical or virtual presence of the audience. Each performance relies upon specially designed systems to fully immerse his audiences in the sonic experience.
Remaining engaged with Chicago's music communities for more than a decade has afforded Dr. Dehaan numerous opportunities to work with some truly inspiring people and organizations from around the world on a range of musical and artistic projects. Some of his more recent collaborations have included an hour-long electronic improvisation to the sights and sounds of 30 cellos being submerged in a swimming pool, collaborating with astrophysicist to bring sound to the formation of distant galaxies, programming custom electronics for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNow series, live streaming an audio/visual performance from Chicago to the Audio Art Festival in Kraków, Poland, and developing original musical works for virtual realities.
From the KROME Gallery in Berlin, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to the Centro Cultural de España in Costa Rica, Dr. Dehaan's music has been performed at a variety of venues all over of the world. He has had the privilege of collaborating with many talented musicians, ensembles, and artists such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, Dal Niente, GPS-Trans, Fonema Consort, and The Industry of the Ordinary. His work has been discussed in many publications including TIME Magazine, New Music Box, the Chicago Reader, BuzzFeed, and Business Insider.
Dr. Dehaan holds a doctorate in Music Composition and Technology from Northwestern University and is currently Practitioner-in-Residence of Digital Music Technology at Columbia College Chicago where he teaches graduate and undergraduate classes and private lessons in digital music composition, production, and performance. danielrdehaan.com
GRACE HEATHERINGTON-TILKA is a Minneapolis based Cellist and Sound Engineer. Previously the Technical Operations Director for the Chicago new music ensemble Dal Niente, Grace has had the honor of working with composers and musicians Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, George Lewis, Murat Colak, Ah Young Hong and many others. Notable productions include Piece Her Together, a staged performance of The Body of the State by Eliza Brown and When Stranger Things Happen by Katherine Young; On the Threshold of Winter by Michael Hersch presented at The Corcoran New Music Festival in Washington, DC; and Proa a collaboration between Ensemble Dal Niente and Delfos Danza in Mexico City, Mexico. Working as the Assistant Sound Engineer at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, Grace engineered performances for the Minnesota Opera, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Schubert Club. Grace currently is Production Sound Engineer at the Guthrie Theater.
SPEKTRAL QUARTET is Clara Lyon (violin), Theo Espy (violin), Doyle Armbrust (viola), and Russell Rolen (cello).
Multi-Grammy nominees, the Spektral Quartet actively pursues a vivid conversation between exhilarating works of the traditional repertoire and those written this decade, this year, or this week. Since its inception in 2010, Spektral is known for creating seamless connections across centuries, drawing in the listener with charismatic deliveries, interactive concert formats, an up-close atmosphere, and bold, inquisitive programming.
With a tour schedule including some of the country’s most notable concert venues such as the Kennedy Center, Miller Theater, Library of Congress, and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, the quartet also takes great pride in its home city of Chicago: championing the work of local composers, bridging social and aesthetic partitions, and cultivating its ongoing collaborations and residencies in the Chicago region.
Named “Chicagoans of the Year” by the Chicago Tribune in 2017, Spektral Quartet is most highly regarded for its creative and stylistic versatility: presenting seasons in which, for instance, a thematic program circling Beethoven seamlessly coexists with an improvised sonic meditation at sunrise, a talent show featuring Spektral fans, and the co-release of a jazz album traversing the folk traditions of Puerto Rico.
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