Momenta Quartet presents its annual Momenta Festival June 14-17, 2022. All four concerts will be at the Broadway Presbyterian Church (601 W 114th St. New York, NY), and admission is free.The seventh edition of the festival features four diverse chamber music programs each curated by a different member of the quartet. In this insider interview, we spoke with each member of the quartet about their unique programs.
Note: Moments Festival VII has been re-scheduled for September 15-18, 2022. The section about the June 17th program (which happened as scheduled) is below. For info on the forthcoming programs click here.
Momenta Festival VII closes out on June 17 with a “Juneteenth Celebration” curated by violist Stephanie Griffin. Her program includes a world premiere by Jazz bassist and compsoer HIlliard Greene, alongside works by Alvin Singleton (whose complete string quartets were just recorded by Momenta) and Yusef Lateef.
Momenta Quartet just released a recording of Singleton’s complete String Quartets. What compositional style through-lines do you see in these works, and what makes them stand apart?
It was quite a journey to learn, perform and eventually record all four string quartets by the esteemed African American composer Alvin Singleton. Delving into his complete works (so far!) for this medium gave us all deeper insights into the development of his musical language.
Interestingly, the last quartet we learned was his first, which he composed in 1967, which we are featuring on our Momenta Festival Juneteenth celebration concert on June 17th. Cast as a Passacaglia and Fugue, it is the most “traditional” of the four pieces on its surface. It opens with a lyrical cello solo in a somewhat expressionist vein. The viola joins – followed by second and first violins, engendering soulful free atonal counterpoint. Variations ensue – building up to the whirlwind of activity, which will be the fugue. I introduce the fugue subject on the viola – and what a subject it is! It is unusually long for a fugue subject and it abounds in jagged rhythms and wild turns of phrase. Not your mother’s fugue – or maybe it is – depending on who your mother is! This quartet seems so different from the other three, but if you isolate the solo lines, Alvin’s distinctive melodic style is already apparent.
I think the main way in which he changed stylistically between this first quartet and the other three was adopting his own distinctive brand of “minimalism.” I hesitate to even use that word, since it has the connotations of Philip Glass and Steve Reich – or even Feldman, on the other side of the minimalist spectrum. Getting past those conceptions of what “minimalism” is – I think it applies to Alvin’s music in his use of repetition, large-scale sections of rhythmic and even pitch unisons (especially apparent in String Quartet no. 4 “Hallelujah Anyhow”) and his signature use of silence.
You will not hear this in String Quartet no. 1, but a hallmark of Alvin’s compositional style is the way he juxtaposes wildly different sections with long silences in between. It’s as if, after String Quartet no. 1, he replaced the traditional idea of “development” with an almost Zen-like approach of letting the listener experience sections of music with wildly different expressions and giving them the silences in between to draw their own connections.
One of the quartets was written for Momenta. How does this work stand out, and is there any particular traits the group has that the composer incorporated into the work?
String Quartet no. 4 “Hallelujah Anyhow” was commissioned for Momenta by Chamber Music America, and we had the joy of premiering it on our last in-person Momenta Festival before the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2019.
It stands out in its bold and uncompromising use of unisons. Like his string quartets Nos. 2 and 3, it shows Alvin using his signature technique of juxtaposing contrasting sections with dramatic silences in between. But while those pieces have extended sections in rhythmic unison, “Hallelujah Anyhow” starts with a long and arresting passage with all four of us in pitch and rhythmic unison – and that material keeps recurring throughout the piece. It’s brash, bright and rhythmic. To me it evokes the feeling of a big band at times. The unisons are broken up by glimmers of slow, dark harmonies, which will later take more prominence in the piece.
One would have to ask Alvin himself (but he probably won’t tell you!) if he factored in the personality of Momenta itself in this commission. If I may blow Momenta’s horn for a moment, though, I think this kind of writing shows that, based on his extensive experience with us in our performances of his second and third quartets, he knew he could trust us to be able to play this! It is no small feat to pull off a performance with all the pitch unisons and jagged rhythms. Out of all of his pieces, this was by far the most challenging in the recording session. (Alvin Singleton: Four String Quartets available for purchase here)
How did you get to know Alvin Singleton and what attracts you to his music?
We first met Alvin Singleton when Tom Buckner invited us to play his second and third quartets on Alvin’s 75th birthday concert on the Interpretations series at Roulette. On that same concert I played his solo viola piece “Argoru” and his graphic score piece “Be Natural” (1974), which I will be playing with Michael and guest bassist Hilliard Greene on the June 17th Momenta Festival program.
We immediately loved Alvin both as a human being and a composer. Many things attract me to his music - above all its freshness, originality and sense of spontaneity. As an improviser myself, I feel a kinship between Alvin’s aesthetic and the world of avant-garde jazz. And it turns out that Alvin is not directly trying to mimic jazz in any way, but he had tried his hand at it on the piano many years ago and has deep friendships with some of today’s leading figures in avant-garde jazz, including Wadada Leo Smith and Henry Threadgill. We will honor that by including the great jazz bassist Hilliard Greene in our interpretation of “Be Natural.”