Dave's Hocket: for Guillaume and Arvo by Austin Wulliman - performed by @jackquartet at Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
About the Composer
A member of the JACK Quartet since 2016, Austin Wulliman made his debut as a composer last year with the release of an album titled The News from Utopia, which documents his fascination with number games, complex polyrhythms, tone colors, and various more or less arcane acoustic phenomena. Dave’s Hocket is the latest in a series of “reimaginings” of medieval music created by Wulliman and his colleagues. The title refers to the centuries-old technique of dividing a melody between different voices in polyphonic music. In his note on the piece, Wulliman draws a further analogy between sound and light: “In an old cathedral, each painstakingly crafted piece of colored artistic material that creates a stained-glass window has transmuted the light of centuries of days. As it modulates the sun's energetic waves, allowing them to enter and pass through its viewer, these geometric shapes tell powerful tales that echo tropes passed down through generations.
Note from the Composer
“Musically, the form and feeling of the Hoquetus David by Guillaume de Machaut is suggestive of some of these beautifully rich artistic methods. Each rhythmic cell tiles together to form a beautifully crystalline structure over a familiar melodic phrase. In Dave’s Hocket, I use Machaut’s own source material (the melisma on David from an ‘Alleluia’), number games, rhythmic motif, and harmonic language as a jumping-off point. I also tie his world together with the sounds of my own time by mashing it up with Fratres by Arvo Pärt, a ubiquitous presence in my younger years. The rich conflict of these two harmonic languages, combined with my own interests in continuously unfolding polyrhythmic formal construction and microtonal harmony, led me to create this dance at the door to the cathedral. It is the morning, and light passes through the stained glass onto my face as I look up at the great sculptures that stand sentry at its entrance. I imagine myself as the young monk Adso in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, observing the sculptural forms ecstatically twisting toward the one seated in judgment: ‘…as David must have danced before the Ark….’”
About the Concert
Art of Elan and ArtPower’s first-ever collaboration brought the renowned JACK Quartet to San Diego for an evening of music titled “Modern Medieval,” where connections of musicality and thought between European composers of the past and the voices of American music today were explored in this one-hour program that included music by Caroline Shaw as well as Gabriella Smith.
Ensemble:
JACK Quartet
Christopher Otto, violin
Austin Wulliman, violin
John Pickford Richards, viola
Jay Campbell, cello
Video Production: Kyle Johnson, DEFINITE Media
Audio Engineer: Daniel Rumley, Rumley Music and Audio Production
About JACK Quartet
GRAMMY-nominated JACK Quartet’s “stylistic range, precision and passion have made the group one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles” (The New York Times). Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK was founded in 2005 and operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of 20th and 21st century string quartet music. Through intimate, longstanding relationships with many of today’s most creative voices, the quartet has a prolific commissioning and recording catalog and has been nominated for three GRAMMY Awards and is the 2024 recipient of CMA’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award.
JACK has a prolific commissioning and recording catalog and has been nominated for three GRAMMY Awards. This season, the quartet is featured in the ongoing celebrations of John Zorn’s 70th birthday, a three-concert day at Wigmore Hall, a premiere by Natacha Diels in Philadelphia, an Australian tour, and the 5th edition of JACK Studio. JACK’s all-access initiative JACK Studio funds collaborations with a selection of artists each year to develop new works for string quartet. Through its successful nonprofit model, the quartet has created hundreds of new works, and the world’s top composers choose JACK because of its dedication to innovation.
JACK’s albums of music by John Luther Adams were nominated for GRAMMY Awards in both 2022 and 2023. Previous include Helmut Lachenmann, Catherine Lamb, Du Yun, Elliott Sharp, Zosha di Castri, Iannis Xenakis.
The JACK Quartet makes its home in NYC, where it is the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music. All four members are alumni of the Lucerne Festival Academy. Learn more at [ Ссылка ].
