Victoria Bond Presents the Jack Quartet
A Cutting Edge Anniversary Celebration
By: Susan Hall - Mar 15, 2025
Victoria Bond, composer and conductor, presents what she calls cutting edge music. Cutting edge it is. Yet, Bond brings this famously inaccessible music to the ear and gives pleasure.
At the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater in Symphony Space in New York, the JACK Quartet performed parts of a composition by Pierre Boulez. Livre pour Quatuor has never been finished, but hearing the JACK Quartet play, the notes in lines are sometimes beautiful, often arresting and even amusing. The group, celebrating their 20th anniversary. brings us contemporary music, not noise or the absence thereof.
John Cage wanted to experiment with silence, but not without sound. Hearing his work in Paris shortly after the Second World War ended inspired Boulez whose early work started the evening’s program. Cage was performed after the intermission. The evening concluded with a work by Boulez's student.Heinz Holliger.
The JACK brought rhythmic charm and dynamic variety to Boulez' Livre. Almost inaudible notes ixed with the intermittent scratches, cackles and cries the composer also wrote. The performance feels completely musical.
Anton Webern’s six short Bagtaelles zipped across the instruments and ended in lovely tones.
No. 5 is a favorite Glass Quartet, and the JACK gave full expression to its beauty and its wide-ranging styles, from lyrical to pulsating, subdued to exuberant, all well-balanced.
John Cage’s take on the four seasons formed each movement of his string quartet. Cage began writing the quartet in 1949 in Paris. Prior to beginning to work on the piece, he told his parents that he wanted to compose a work to praise silence without actually using it. After completing the first movement he was so fascinated with the new way to work, he noted: "This piece is like the opening of another door; the possibilities implied are unlimited."
The String Quartet in Four Parts is based partly on the Indian view of the seasons, in which the four seasons—spring, summer, autumn and winter—are associated each with a particular force–those of creation, preservation, destruction and quiescence. Quietly Flowing Along – Summer. Slowly Rocking – Autumn, Nearly Stationary – Winter, Quodlibet – Spring.
The general quietness and flatness of sound in the quartet may be an expression of tranquility, the uniting emotion of the nine permanent emotions of the Rasa.
To compose the quartet, Cage used a new technique which consisted of chords he called 'gamuts'. Each gamut was created independently of the others. After producing a fixed amount of gamuts, scored for each player in an unchanging way, a succession of them could be used to create a melody with harmonic background. We could hear these in the JACK’s performance. Lyricism is ever present as anxiety and rapture mix.
The program concluded with Heinz Holliger's String Quartet No. 2, a piece that blends complexity with expressive depth. The JACK Quartet's performance illuminated the work's intricate structures, showcasing their technical prowess and deep understanding of contemporary repertoire.
The concert exemplified a commitment to bringing contemporary music to life, transforming challenging compositions into accessible and enjoyable experiences for the audience.
It’s often said that chamber musicians talk to each other on their instruments. This foursome not only can be heard communicating among themselves, but also to us.
Spring concerts by Cutting Edge continue: April 16, 2025: Rudersdahl Chamber Players · May 28, 2025: Min Kwon, piano · November 28, 2025: Jose Lopez, piano.