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Saturday, November 10, 2007

Chiara String Quartet & Jefferson Friedman: Creative Symbiosis

The Chiara String Quartet gave a nice reprise tonight of their March appearance at TheBrick in Kansas City. As before, the house was packed during both sets.

Let’s set the record ‘straight’: club venues can be excellent for chamber music performances. An expert sound engineer and excellent gear can make the club nearly the acoustic equal of a recording studio or a fine small concert hall. And the audience who shows up is often more engaged and appreciative than most conventional classical music presenters are accustomed to. No rustling paper programs, no premeditated conditioning to a familiar, comodified repertoire. Just attentive immersion in the music. (Note to presenters: to keep your chamber music audience from coughing, just serve them cocktails.)

The Chiaras’ set-list included movements from Brahms’ Quartet in A Minor Op. 51 No. 2; selections from their CD of Gabriela Lena Frank compositions, ‘Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout’; plus movements from Beethoven’s Quartet in E-flat Major Op. 127 and Jefferson Friedman’s String Quartet No. 2. (The Chiara Quartet’s previous appearance here had included parts of Friedman’s Quartet No. 3.)

The Chiaras’ interpretive skills and aesthetic intuition find perfect application in rendering the music of composer Jefferson Friedman. Friedman’s Quartets Nos. 2 and 3 have been acclaimed by various critics, but some reviewers have also opined about certain shortcomings and problematic sections. Some commenters, such as David Salvage of Sequenza21, have impugned some aspects of the Quartets’ craftsmanship while simultaneously praising other aspects.

Be that as it may, the expressive language in the No. 2 and No. 3 Quartets is reasonably forgiving, and the Chiaras are empathetic and insightful executants. This situation is, I think, not too different from an author having a skillful translator to render the original work into another language.

Without a doubt, the concept of expressive fidelity and authenticity operates on many levels—in musical texts as well as literary ones. One level is vocabulary—mapped as precisely as possible, even in cases where this requires using unfamiliar expressions or inventing new words in the target language: ‘neologisms’ that somehow convey the intent of the original text. In music, this can entail unusual articulation to get unfamiliar timbres; unusual orchestration; unusual voice-leading.

Ultimately, the most important question regarding translatorly fidelity is ‘meaning’. If the words (notes) and syntax and rhythm and style are carried through to the target language (musical performance), the meaning will follow. Even if the original is ambiguous, or even if it has multiple meanings, a skillful translation will replicate that ambiguity/multiplicity of meanings.

There are times, though, when circumstances force the translator—here, the Chiaras—into a particular interpretation. In that case, it’s important to take full advantage of every available clue, including syntactic details, motif usage, and the relationship to preceding and succeeding sections—i.e., the flow. What shouldn’t factor into the interpretation is the translator’s preconceived notions of what the author/composer “must have been talking about.” [Considering David Salvage’s criticisms of Friedman’s work, it seems that Salvage was taking issue with what Friedman was “saying”, not with the Chiaras’ interpretation of Friedman.]

Language is central to any discussion about translation. But there are elements involved in the process of translation that go beyond this conventional area. Literary translation involves a good deal of interpretation about intent and effect. Likewise in music performance practice. On the other hand, a good literary translator is often not as much interested in explicit transliteration as in finding an accurate mood, tone, voice, sound, response, and so forth. Music, the same. Once upon a time, Petrarch said the goal is similarity but not sameness:

A n imitator must see to it that what he writes is similar, but not the very same; and the similarity, moreover, should not be like that of a painting or statue to the person represented, but rather like that of a son to a father, where there is often a great difference in the features and body shape, yet after all there is a shadowy something—akin to what the painters call one’s ‘air’—hovering about the face, and especially the eyes, out of which there grows a likeness ... We writers, too, must see to it that along with the similarity there is a large measure of dissimilarity; and furthermore such likeness as there is must be elusive—something that it is impossible to seize except by a sort of hunt, a quality to be felt rather than defined.”
— Petrarch, Familiar Letters, The Young Humanist of Ravenna, to Boccaccio, 287-293.

So, contrary to some critics’ contention that poetry ‘loses’ in translation or that poetry is deeply ‘untranslatable’, there are others who hold that it must be illustrated and illuminated—who hold that the essence that matters most does transcend culture- and linguistic- and generational localizations. To them, poetry is always ‘found again’ and re-created by the translator—even in successive generations of people in the language and culture in which the work originated. Everything is hermeneutics! Of course, the original poetics can’t be ‘transcribed’!—they must be ‘arranged’! The new ‘arrangements’ may be even more fully realize the composer’s aspirations than the original score with its instructions and annotations.

In other words, the translator is not merely a special sort of ‘reader’. She/he is that, yes—but she/he is also vicariously a writer and performer. The translator needs to project herself/himself into these roles and consider translation from the perspective of the culture and linguistic heritage of the readers and audience. In this sense, the Chiaras are especially deeply “invested” in their roles as active musical translators/arrangers/readers/writers, not “only” performers. (Their investment style? High-risk musical growth equities! High-volatility, large alpha stocks, like Friedman!)

Good translators discover the dynamics of the work, and don’t allow its literal mechanics to trump every other card. This is what the Chiaras do so well. They take what Friedman wrote and add value to it. They make it their own. But they are also like specialists on the trading floor of a stock exchange—they “make a market” in Friedman.

A bout two-thirds of the way through, something special happens: the instruments climb into their highest registers, start playing quick glissandos and unisons of varying vibrato widths, and, for a few breathless moments, break into birdsong. When the music returns to Earth again, the resolution is beautiful, and one realizes one has just heard something a little amazing.”
— David Salvage, Sequenza21, 27-APR-2005, on String Quartet No. 3.

Friedman’s writing is full of non-standard things. ‘Non-standard’ language may be used by an author/composer for other reasons than simply to make character speak in a more realistic way. Non-standard language is incorrect not only from a grammatical point of view, but also from an ethical stance. This sets non-standard language in stark contrast with standard language, which can be seen as representing the Establishment. Great move for a Young Turk composer like Friedman!

‘Non-standard’ language can be a sort of symbolic protest against the prevailing culture and society. For example, it can describe an underprivileged/overprivileged social context from the inside, through the language it uses. Non-standard language may in fact constitute ‘profanity’ against standard forms/norms even if it isn’t inherently profane. As a result, the use of non-standard language may help to make a musical, novelistic, or cinematic work more accessible to a target audience, in a provocative way. [And this Friedman Quartet No. 2 is positively cinematic, by the way.] Translating non-standard expressive language is therefore a hard task—harder than translating ordinary texts. Even when a skilled translator has understood the author’s original motives, the cultural background, the social level(s) referenced, and the intended effect, the problem remains of how to emulate the peculiar flavor and intent in another language.

There’s no easy solution. In theory the reader/hearer of the translated version should be able to intuit the same information the reader/hearer of the native text acquired. But this is tough. Shades of meaning do get lost in translation. So a really good translation is, and must be, a balance between what gets ‘lost’ and what can be ‘found’. The translation of non-standard language, even if it’s a difficult task, can be extremely fascinating and rewarding. Here’s where the Chiaras excel. They muster a hefty dose of creativity, and find ways of making sure that as little as possible is lost and as much as possible is found in their ‘translation’ or ‘arrangement’. Friedman wins; the Chiaras win; we win!

The No. 3 Quartet’s brief movements (first and third) enclose a longer central movement entitled ‘Act’. Both the first and third movements open with long, insistent, crescendo phrases. But while the first movement is “in your face” with aggressive ostinatos, the third movement is quiet, eventually settling on a major triad.

T he content of the middle movement is more varied. Ranging from close Ligeti-like chromatic counterpoint to spacious Copland-esque chorales, ‘Act’ doesn’t quite reconcile its contrasting materials satisfactorily. Particularly disappointing is the easy major resolution that concludes the movement.”
— David Salvage, [Sequenza21, 27-APR-2005]

T his No. 3 Quartet is uneven. The first movement never quite emerges. There are passages of ostinato that feel like un-melodied accompaniments. There are too many broad crescendos that terminate in sudden pianos.”
— David Salvage, [Sequenza21, 27-APR-2005]

T his young wine may have a lot of tannins now, but in five or 10 years it is going to be spectacular. You know this is how it is supposed to taste at this stage of development.”
— Itzhak Perlman.

Is Friedman’s C major resolution in this movement of the No. 3 quartet a ‘mistake’? Why does Salvage think it is ‘too easy’? Does Friedman regret the decision to resolve in this way? Should we accept Salvage’s assessment and feel embarrassment at preferring the C major choice that has been deprecated? Is Salvage a ‘pump-and-dump’ day-trader in Friedman? I, for one, do not think it is ‘easy’ or a ‘mistake’ any more than I think the major-key resolutions in much baroque music were ‘easy’ or ‘mistakes’. Think of Bach’s Concerto in D minor (BWV 974) –the nuances of Glenn Gould’s rendering of it, for example. There’s a poignancy in the major-key resolution that coheres with every minor-key thing that has gone before. There’s a restraint, there’s a backing-off of key attack velocity—many cues in the composition that add depth and complexity to an ‘easy’ major triad.

The Chiaras’ performance of parts of the No. 2 quartet at The Brick tonight was also illuminating—thoughtful without being self-conscious, erudite-but-never-scholastic. Mr. Friedman composed his String Quartet No. 2 for the Chiara String Quartet in 1999 while under the guidance of John Corigliano at Juilliard. The first movement opens with strident rhythms that deliberately shift in and out of sync. The lyrical second movement is a déjà vu view of someone’s secret reveries—either Friedman’s, or your own. In the dance-like third movement, rippling trills lead to a passage of muted longing and a revivified finale.

Quartet No. 2 does not have the first violin or any other part predominating unduly. No part merely ‘fills in’. The string writing deals far less in outlines than in harmonic blocks. The effect is exhilarating and gripping.

Friedman’s writing is contrapuntal and closely-packed—there’s far more texture in it than many ‘new music’ compositions. The excellent sound engineering at TheBrick did justice to the Chiaras’ rendering of this.

Born in 1974, Jefferson Friedman is American, the winner of the 2004 Rome Prize Fellowship in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Rome. His commissions include two orchestral pieces for Leonard Slatkin and the National Symphony Orchestra, works for the Yesaroun’ Duo, two string quartets for the Chiaras, and a chamber piece for the Utah Arts Festival. His music has been performed at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and Avery Fisher Hall, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, and the American Academy in Rome. Mr. Friedman received his M.M. degree in music composition from The Juilliard School where he studied with John Corigliano. He lives and composes in Long Island City, NY.

W e know it’s great music. We also know that people who have never heard it before have very strong, visceral feelings and connections with the music. But barriers (have to be) broken down for them. I think a lot of our generation is working to take down those barriers that say classical music is elitist, or only for old people or only for rich people. We play all over the place - in schools, in nursing homes, in urban settings, in rural settings. We’ve really played for any audience that you can imagine. That really has to be an m.o. for any group starting out now.”
— Jonah Sirota, Chiara String Quartet, 2006.

S uits and tuxedos are designed explicitly to prevent blood from reaching the brain and to prevent audience members from feeling comfortable. We’ve done our best within the conventions of the concert hall to relax this feeling, but in the concert hall there is no easy way to duplicate the freedom of just being yourself you have when playing in a club.”
— Greg Beaver, Chiara String Quartet, 2007.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Chiara String Quartet: Club Scene at ‘The Brick’

N o holds barred! Chamber music in ANY chamber! The Chiara Quartet is forging a new path for the string quartet. The Chiara transforms the audience experience from mere listening to active engagement with the music.”
— poster for Chiara String Quartet gig at The Brick, KCMO music bar

CMT: Look at this SRO crowd, 120 people in this 1,600 square-foot downtown bar! The Chiaras are packing them in!

DSM: [ . . . listens; . . . orders another drink; looks at wrist watch: it’s 10:15 p.m. ] Okay, let’s examine this first set. How was it put together? Here’s some of the playlist that the Chiara just did.

JEFFERSON FRIEDMAN, String Quartet No. 3, First Movement (rhythmic)
BÉLA BARTÓK, String Quartet No. 4, Last Movement (aggressive, fast)
PIERRE JALBERT, “Icefield Sonnets,” Second Movement (austere, cold, slow)
GABRIELA LENA FRANK, “Leyendas” and “Tarqueada” (South American folk)
W. A. MOZART, Quartet K. 590, Fourth Movement (joyous and syncopated)
PAUL HINDEMITH, Quartet No. 3, Slow Movement (mesmerized, detached)
JOHANNES BRAHMS, Adagio in B-flat (romantic, warm, reverent)
ZHOU LONG, Song of the Ch'in (emphatic, plucked, wavered, scooped emulation of Pipa-like/Sanxian-like sounds on normal viols)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, Große Fuge (edgy, huge, 200 years later still feels avant-garde)
PRINCE, “Let’s Go Crazy”

CMT: This is lyrical, really inspired playing. And Chiara members were “feeding” on the excitement they transmitted into this packed club, which comes back 10X bigger from the crowd to the tiny stage. No inhibitions. And yet nice control. It’s not common to see artists this physical, so palpably enthusiastic in conventional classical music performance settings. The flow of energy from the ensemble to the audience is like a “Noreaster” or a tropical depression—it picks up more energy as the storm moves out over the warm sea of people, and moves back onto the stage even stronger, a “Category 5”!

DSM: Yes, the Chiara Quartet members are very responsive. And the club audience here is very appreciative. The publicity in advance of the Chiara’s gig had been good: local music critic, Paul Horsley, had a 1,000 word piece on them in last Sunday’s paper. One thousand words is a huge amount of space for a single article on classical music performance in a U.S. daily paper. But the crowd here is not just turning out to hear something unusual they read about. This is not a ‘curious’ crowd hoping to be amused. It’s a ‘hungry’ crowd, expecting their ears and minds to be nourished!

CMT: The piece by Zhou Long, Visiting Professor of Composition at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, was fantastic! Very warmly accepted by these springjacketed and bluejeaned people. I think the Ying Quartet also does this piece regularly, as part of their ‘Musical Dim Sum’ program.

DSM: The Zhou Long is totally accessible, and anyone wary of Chinese music need have no fears. Complex but approachable work, this Chinese and Western music fusion.

CMT: Did you notice? During the playing, this bar audience is respectfully quiet. Not totally or obsessively quiet. Yes, drinks rising to meet lips; the occasional icecube sound against highball glass. But quietude during the playing, borne out of fascination, not decorum. Quietude, out of “What happens next?”; out of “I’ve never heard anything like this! Ever!” amazement; out of rapt absorption in experiencing music played in this way.

DSM: They’re getting thousands and thousands of ‘plays’ of their MP3s on the Chiara MySpace page.

CMT: Well, what do you need to carry this chamber-music-in-bars thing off? How can other quartets or chamber artists do club gigs like this, and be reasonably assured of a success?

DSM: First, you need programming and acoustical engineering savvy about the club venues. That’s something that the artists/ensembles tend not to have, unless they've gone to school at Berklee or places like that.

CMT: You need the sense of a re-mix DJ. You need a producer. You need a brilliant engineer. A chamber ensemble can’t afford to hire those. So, ideally, at least one of the musicians needs to be serious and experienced in those aspects. You need all of these skills, rolled into one person. Not to say that’s impossible. But it’s going to be pretty unusual. A virtuoso musician is rare enough. A virtuoso musician who’s a recording engineer and technical geek is rare as hens’ teeth.

DSM: Yup. But there are crazed geek polymaths in all walks of life, geekish renaissance persons of all ages. This is no different. And, what if this new-music, new-venue thing takes off in the next few years? If it does, if it’s really successful and chamber music ensembles and the classical establishment all see it being successful, then you’ll see more Berklee-type programs in other schools’ music departments and conservatories—to grow these skills in their students. They only hire faculties and build new programs when there’s an unmet need to fill, when there’s clear-and-present demand.

CMT: What else do you need? You need really decent monitors and miking and amps. You don’t want to suffer with any old junk that your garden-variety rock group puts up with. You’ve got to have sound equipment that’s capable of picking up every tiny, subtle sound and ornament clearly. What do you see up there on the stage where Chiara’s sitting? A $1,000 boom mic next to each player, plus dual Shure SM7B mics on the stand in the center between them . . .

DSM: You need rock-solid music stands and chairs with rubber feet that aren’t going to slip off the edge of a tiny stage. You need high-intensity LED micro goose-neck lamps on your music stand—ones that aren’t depending on house AC power to shine enough light on your music.

CMT: You need jazzband type music folders that can stand up to hard use on the road. You need to put plastic tabs on the edges of your music, to enable you to confidently turn pages—dog-earing the page corners as you would do for conventional concert-hall performance won’t cut it. You need to have some approach for preventing the draft—coming from the club’s A/C system or overhead ceiling fans that the bar may have spinning at high RPMs—keep it from blowing your music or flipping your pages.

DSM: You need to choose a wardrobe that’s flexible and designed for insuring your comfort—with pieces you can put on if the A/C is cranked down really cold, and with pieces you can take off if the crowd is packed in and the place is really hot. If you’re a pianist, you need to get there early-early, to check out and, if possible, fix whatever funkiness may be plaguing the instrument up there, if it’s not your own. Jazz musicians are used to dealing with these contingencies, taking them in stride without a fuss.

CMT: To return to the earlier comment, you want a house-music artist. If no member of the ensemble has a knack for this, doesn’t have an innate sense for this, then you need to enlist the help of a friend or collaborator who does have this gift and expertise. You want highly crafted playlists/mixes. The mixes mustn’t pander to the “obvious” next chart if a more exotic alternative is the one that’s capable of generating mass-bliss or excitement on a club-wide level.

DSM: You need to innovate radically. You need the mix to stay faithful to clubbing ideals – awe-inspiring breakdowns, huge rushes of energy, frenzy-inducing sonatas. You want to emulate the Ministry of Sound in London but with a pure chamber music repertoire. You want some familiar pieces, but you want radical new music, and you want “Ah ha!” pairings of disparate pieces, where you draw parallels that nobody’s heard before and that the composers would never have acknowledged, even if they lived concurrently.

CMT: Is Chen Yi here?

DSM: Haven’t seen her yet. Did you know that the Chiara Quartet was recently awarded the Guarneri Quartet Residency Award for artistic excellence by Chamber Music America. They are only the second group to receive this honor.

CMT: What else? You need a very good console surface, a front-of-house (FOH) rack housing the system's mix engine. You need a Stage Rack with recallable, remote-controlled preamps, and a multichannel digital snake.

DSM: Your engineer needs to keep a clean house. If your console has plug-ins installed that you know you definitely won’t need, disable them from the Options/Plug-ins list, so you won't get any “surprises” during a set. You want to keep your input faders around the unity-gain (0 dB) mark to prevent clipping.

CMT: The P.A. does not automatically or magically manage the room’s sound and, as such, sound system designers must include the room’s characteristics in their audio equation. Does the space have an echo? Does it sound boomy? The Brick is box-like, boomy. Do you remember what it was like at 09:00 p.m., before the place filled up? The engineer behind us was tremendously busy fixing that. He was back and forth to the stage 6 times before he was satisfied with the mic placements.

DSM: Does the sound system envelop the audience member as if the gallery is actually in the second row of tables? For acoustical and sound system consultants, matching the right rig with a venue’s sonic signature—and the playlist that will be played in that space on that night—is imperative. Otherwise, the audience will never hear the music in the way it was intended.

CMT: It’s no different, really, than a studio engineer’s craft. The studio mix must render okay in whatever playback medium the consumer listens on. So the studio engineer must choose the gear and the settings and effects and the acoustical design so that the energy generated onstage renders adequately in the room and musically meets the needs of the crowd.

DSM: Are there issues with maintaining sight lines in a place like this? The Brick has that little stage up there and the engineer raised up on a deck behind our booth here. Does the room exhibit a long reverberation time? There’s this little dog-leg in the back of The Brick, the path to the toilets. There’s also the “neighbor factor.” Is the club venue located in an urban or suburban environment where the sound from passing city buses or subways is intruding? You don’t want to be a string quartet and arrive and discover that fact 20 minutes before you go on! I don’t care if you’ve got a kilowatt of amps and monitors all over the place. You do not want that.

CMT: You may want a trellis to suspend the loudspeakers. A string quartet may want to talk with their local studio people, to get advice on this. A very small club—like Munchies in Houston used to be with their string quartets every Friday and Saturday 25 years ago—they didn’t need it. But in this black box that is The Brick, it’d be nice if they had a trellis—for visual as well as acoustic reasons.

DSM: You want a sound system that delivers lingering, enveloping sound characteristics with supplemental loudspeakers—one that can simulate reflections and reverberation using digital delay-line effects. Something like an Electro-Voice X-Array as part of a distributed reinforcement system, which provides direct or frontal sound, delivering clarity to everybody in the audience. A rock audience wouldn’t give a care. But a chamber music audience in a club would care. You want them to be thrilled, blown away!

CMT: You want to fire the acoustic energy at the listener and not outside the area. The violinists in Chiara are doing fine. I’d like to hear a bit more viola, more cello. Maybe they’ll tweak with that in the second set.

DSM: In addition, the geometry of the tables seating arrangement here isn’t as conducive to the horizontal coverage pattern of the monitor array they have, such as it is. I think I’d want to visit with the club owner ahead of time to adjust the tables a bit, if I were the engineer.

CMT: Hardly matters, though, with this packed-in, standing-up crowd, does it!? Whatever they did an hour ago has long since been undone and redone by the pumped-up club-goers shifting chairs and tables around.

DSM: I was thinking more of the musicians’ needs, not the audience. The front row of tables is too close for comfort, if it were me. The bar’s got a standard 8-foot ceiling, and the stage they’re on is a riser about 12 inches off the floor—and you can’t do anything about that. But the resulting low ceiling height on the stage has a detrimental impact on the acoustic environment onstage from the performers’ point of view/hearing. You need to give ‘em a bit more space in front of them. And you ought to have at least a couple of small monitors pointed back at them so they can hear each other better, given that the ceiling above them is so low.

CMT: You don’t want an excessive amount of sound being held onstage that would reduce the clarity of sound as picked up by microphones either. Actually, the Chiara’s engineer has achieved a nice, clean signal in his mics. Ideally, you’d like orchestra-type risers that allow the musicians to feel the vibrations created by cellos and bass instruments. A floating floor with rigid interconnections and resilient materials to maximize cross-stage vibrations. But no bar can afford that. Not even Sculler’s in Boston.

DSM: Chiara—if they do this routinely in NYC—maybe could get their favorite club to install a Yamaha Active Field Control [AFC] system to control acoustical conditions based on the ambient room properties by using the system’s acoustical feedback to balance the room. You want to tune the room to be as neutral and quiet as possible—get your reverb time down below 2 milliseconds—knowing that you can increase it to whatever setting you want—for the Zhou Long or other atmospheric pieces. If you need to damp it, you know you can damp it with a vengeance, once you’ve quieted the room down with AFC.

CMT: What if you were building a brand new club? What would you say to your architect, knowing that you want to book amplified chamber music gigs in your club?

DSM: First, make sure your architect has an acoustic engineer on-staff or available. Get Johns Manville ceiling treatments for their acoustical value. Put Johns Manville soundboard or other studio-grade stuff on all the walls. Soften the floors with some industrial-grade cork or rubber—something acoustically good that’s durable and that can be swabbed clean night after night.

CMT: The wall and ceiling shapes allow sound to be reflected across the stage, providing musicians with cross-stage communication. I’d ask the architect to put inlay, raised-panel things on some of the walls. Plan ahead so that you can swap out acoustic baffling in some pocket-door-like wall recesses if you need to—you could motorize those, like you would conference-room projection screens.

DSM: No trees or water features or free-standing partitions or other visual fluff. None of that velvety stage draping, sheesh. Techno cloth-backed seating with quiet Teflon slides on the chair legs.

CMT: You gonna buy one of Chiara’s “New Voice Singles” label CDs over there?

DSM: Sure! What else? You know why this thing is cooking tonight?

Every number has a “story” to help the audience get into it.
Each piece announced from the stage. Jonah and his colleagues are really personable!
When playing two sets, the second set could get away with a complete 4-movement string quartet piece, but with applause between movements entirely okay. I have to admit I prefer instead this eclectic playlist like the first set we just heard.
The playlist is altered dynamically, based on intensity and strength of audience feeling or artist mood.

CMT: Who else could do this most readily do you think? Manny Ax? Jeremy Denk? Eric Kim? Susan Graham?

DSM: Orion String Quartet? Miró String Quartet? Turtle Island String Quartet? Kronos Quartet? Jupiter Quartet? Parker Quartet?

CMT: In Italy, there’s Pierrot Lunaire’s Gudrun. There’s Opus Avantra. In Germany, you have Krautrock bearing the marks of Stockhausen’s composing techniques leading to many adventures, not all of them very listenable. The ensemble, Bartock, and some others have chamber music roots, although their members would not be thought of as first-rank virtuosic by any means.

DSM: Well—wherever the opportunity arises, whenever we get a chance—this bears repeating! The audience is loving it. And the Chiara’s, too. More, please! Thank you, Brick! Thank you, Chiara!

T his idea of a string quartet in a club: Is it working?” [SRO crowd roars ‘Yes’; exuberant clapping continues]
— Jonah Sirota, Violist, Chiara String Quartet gig at The Brick, KCMO music bar