The Rhythm Method: Pastorale

https://www.wruu.org/broadcasts/51372?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2F8Sx-WZFmS3zmnlP9q6TP3_BQoOaiw3_hfw8EtGBgaoJ3yYRnLZWwaVk_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw/

— Dave Lake, 6.19.2024

Where the string quartet goes, so goes music. From its earliest maturity under Haydn, a group of four string players was a fertile innovation. Beethoven added intellectual rigor and harmonic adventure. Schoenberg added a singer as well as atonality, and today the contemporary string quartet is quite often a New Music experimental lab. That’s the dominant purpose behind the three quartets on this release, which commemorates the 10th anniversary of The Rhythm Method, a cheekily named avant-garde quartet (if you know about the natural birth control endorsed by the Catholic Church). The four young women who constitute this New York-based group embrace experimentalism with an attitude fittingly described on their home page as “fierce, fearless, and virtuosic… unapologetically stylistically omnivorous and versatile.”

All three works on the program ask for vocalizations—only Lewis Nielson’s Pastorale, the album’s title track, actually calls for a solo singer—so The Rhythm Method is for all practical purposes a dual ensemble whose members are adept at singing, parlando, whispering, muttering, et al. as required. In Paul Pinto’s String Quartet No. 4, the vocals are a persistent aspect of the idiom. Pinto himself wrote the free-verse text, which begins “I pass’d a church.” The subject is a church being repaired in the interval between two disastrous hurricanes, Irene and Sandy. The poem and its string quartet setting are elegies, not only for an old, wrecked church but for the breakdown of faith and emblematically even contemporary society.

Because Pinto treats his text with fragmented and extended vocal techniques, you have to take it for granted that the poem is actually being recited or half-sung. It is quite remarkable how The Rhythm Method manages to vocalize simultaneously with Pinto’s instrumental use of “microtonality, extended techniques, and alternative structures among many other techniques,” as New Focus’s website describes it. General listeners will not encounter a traditional elegy in any conventional sense of melody and harmony, but amid the eerie, spectral layers of notes and sounds in the score, a recognizable mood of melancholy emerges.

Violinist Marina Kifferstein has founded or joined a number of contemporary ensembles in addition to The Rhythm Method, and her extremely active life in New York, which includes teaching, extends to composition. She succinctly describes her String Quartet No. 2 from 2020 as “a slowed down and amplified unfurling of a collection of overtones,” which serve as an upper layer above “a progression of chords that feature prominently in much of Western music.” That’s a refreshingly straightforward description for New Music and its addiction to jargon. One can clarify matters further by saying that these sustained notes play upon the Western convention of a cadence, which leads to a satisfying harmonic conclusion.

Kifferstein’s cadence, which is implied by the sustained opening notes, doesn’t aim to be resolved. Instead, the focus is shifted to overtones that keep the harmony floating and ambiguous. The players vocalize other sustained notes simultaneously. The static texture features some active interjections almost like ornamentation, a kind of dissonant melisma. Finding musical expression for stasis, which can also stand for contemplation, timelessness, space, and other metaphorical qualities, is common in New Music ever since Morton Feldman thoroughly exploited it. Kifferstein’s personal use of the technique is highly accomplished and evocative, although my appreciation goes mainly to how her piece gives scope for The Rhythm Method’s twofold talents.

Five poems by Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, and St. Francis of Assisi are the setting for Lewis Nielson’s Pastorale .... para los pobres de la tierra, where the soloist, Alice Teyssier, extends the mode of dual roles by being both soprano and flutist. By far this is the most complex and challenging work here, and first off, despite Neilson’s fervent praise of the writers he has chosen, the text is essentially irrelevant and undecipherable. What greets the ear is a richly textured piece that overlays singing and playing from every participant.

It is more than credible for Nielson to declare, “Work is required by all parties,” demanding “many hours of preparation and a great deal of patience; the same can and should be said of the listening experience as well.” This is true, however, only if the listener attempts to unravel Pastorale’s implicate structure. There’s a fruitful alternative in a live performance, where you can witness a remarkable display of continuous playing and vocalizing—I’d love to be present.

Limited to audio only, you can let the music wash over you as a bravura demonstration. Just as the texts are basically irrelevant, Nielson’s Pastorale isn’t remotely pastoral in the conventional usage. I couldn’t find a discernible mood or emotion at all; this is the musical equivalent of Abstract Expressionist painting. A great deal of New Music fits that description, but Nielson’s creation remains fascinating even when you can’t fathom what it means.

There are a handful of traditional chamber works that combine voice and strings, not all of them as advanced as Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 or Berg’s Lyric Suite, but I imagine both composers would be pleased at where their idioms led. This intriguing and beautifully played release, which introduced me to a remarkably gifted ensemble, is evidence that the string quartet still has new horizons to explore.

Five stars: Fascinating performances that require simultaneous singing and playing

— Huntley Dent, 6.25.2024

The main choice to be made by the members of the string quartet called The Rhythm Method for a New Focus Recordings CD likely involved the disc’s sequence. The three works offered here were all written for the ensemble, and one was composed by a member of the quartet. So everything is contemporary in sound, everything is recently created, and everything is intended to be played by the performers for whom the music was written. Furthermore, everything uses such now-standard sound-and instrument-extension techniques as microtonality, vocalization, and performance approaches outside the long-established norms for strings. This means that the CD is self-limited by choice: it is for audiences already familiar and comfortable with the approach of these composers and these performers, and already well-attuned (so to speak) to the expectations and communicative methods of contemporary music. Such audiences will be ready to engage with Paul Pinto’s String Quartet No. 4, which bears the title “I pass’d a church.” Pinto’s idea is to use the strings to represent the sounds that could be made by a church – that is, by the building itself – as it attempts to recover from damage caused by hurricanes. The scale here is very broad, the pacing very slow, and the sounds frequently unlike anything one would expect strings to produce: sighs, groans, wavelike emissions, wind that sounds like words and actually blends into vocalizations, and more. Scarcely designed to be musical in any traditional sense, the quartet – like many avant-garde compositions – sounds like a performance piece, designed with theatricality that is intended to evoke visual rather than auditory scenes in listeners’ minds. The performers follow this with String Quartet No. 2 by the ensemble’s second violinist, Marina Kifferstein. This piece does open with string sounds, albeit long-drawn-out ones that form the athematic, non-rhythmic “sound clouds” of which so many contemporary composers and performers are fond. Once again in this work there are blendings of string sounds into vocalizations, and vocal sounds back to those of strings. The primary effect here is of an extended and repetitive fade-in and fade-out. The piece does not seem to be trying to communicate anything in particular – instead, it presents an aural experience from which listeners can select what meaning they like and respond to it in any way they wish. Placed third and last on the disc is its longest work by far: Pastorale para los pobres de la tierra by Lewis Nielson. Like the other pieces here, this involves vocalizing blending and contrasting with instrumental sounds – but this piece is actually a quintet, incorporating Alice Teyssier’s flute and adding her voice to those of the string players. Indeed, the vocal element here is in one sense paramount: there are actual words spoken, drawn from works by Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, and St. Francis of Assisi. The dissonant opening pizzicato emphasis and the percussive elements with which the piece begins soon expand into a sound world in which verbiage (by no means always easy to hear or decipher) blends into and contrasts repeatedly with otherworldly instrumental lines that are often very busy but rarely for any specific discernible purpose. Like many other avant-garde works, including the other two on this CD, Nielson’s appears to exist mainly to create a world of sound from which listeners can pick and choose what to hear and what meaning to assign to whatever they choose to experience. Again, this is a theatrical experience as much as an aural one, and quite deliberately goes beyond the bounds of what audiences will expect of music – unless those audiences are already conversant with and appreciative of this form of expressiveness. There is nothing on this disc that will reach out beyond a core group of enthusiasts, but for those who are advocates and supporters of this sort of engagement and entertainment, the recording will be effective in providing a particular kind of soundscape to which those with suitable musical convictions will gravitate.

— Mark Estren, 6.25.2024

This New York string quartet has regularly distinguished itself by complementing its playing with simultaneous singing—for better or worse, depending on the piece. I’ve never heard them pull it off with such ease before. The ensemble has programmed three disparate works, all of which embrace different kinds of abstraction. On Paul Pinto’s “String Quartet No. 4,” both string sounds and voices are radically slowed down to the point of incomprehensibility, symbolizing the incremental rebuilding process in New York between Hurricanes Sandy and Irene and infusing the performance with the paranoia that all of that progress could be trashed again, as climate change increasingly hovers over everyday existence. Ensemble violinist Marina Kifferstein wrote String Quartet No. 2, an evocative excursion into just intonation in which chords rise and fall in overlapping patterns, further enhanced by wordless vocal shapes that help conjure a thick, almost three-dimensional attack that’s meditative and visceral in equal measure. The Rhythm Method are joined by singer-flutist Alice Teyssier of International Contemporary Ensemble on a reading of Lewis Nielsen’s “Pastorale …. para los pobres de la tierra,” in which she moves seamlessly between voice and instrument, flanked by the ensemble’s tender harmony singing, navigating texts drawn from Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, and Saint Francis of Assisi. The multi-faceted gem feels both maximal in how the composer extracts so much range and possibility from the players, and abstract in its clangorous harmony and gestural abstraction.

— Peter Margasak, 6.27.2024