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JACK Quartet: Modern Medieval - The Once and Future Micro-tonalists

We don’t often go into a transformative experience willingly. When it happens, the event wipes out distractions about oneself, immediate time, personal goals - the stuff of everyday conscious thought. Psychologists call it the “awe” effect.

An hour or more of evanescent whispers from sonic worlds past, present, and future conflated into a single musical riddle wrapped in 700 years of history, does not readily come to mind even for brainwave activists, as a wild night out on the town.

Wrong!

New York City-based JACK Quartet’s marvelously esoteric and thoroughly mind altering (no kidding) program on December 7 at the Music Academy in Santa Barbara - the second recital of the Academy’s 2024-2025 Mariposa Series - was also an utterly fascinating intellectual broadside.

Programmatic parable? Perhaps something about string theory, worlds in collision, and the oneness of all matter in the universe. Not bad for a Saturday evening adventure in music at the Music Academy.

In over 60 years of reviewing live concerts, it’s been my general policy to experience performances in the moment, without much if any preparation. I was not ready, therefore, to have neural surgery performed on my mindset by JACK Quartet’s profound thus a bit rattling, programming acumen.

Modern Medieval, a slightly disorienting, moderately oxymoronic program title on its face, was in fact a construct of bunker busting musical and cultural revelation. JACK captured the audience’s attention by means of sound sorcery, taking us on a journey through historical/musical time that set my head spinning softly in the moment, with long ruminations on the experience days after. How magnificent is that!

JACK Quartet - Christopher Otto violin, Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, and Jay Campbell cello - have created together, in a burst of foursquare intuitive genius, a deceptively unassuming, quasi magical realist, and thoroughly satisfying touring program of new music inspired by Medieval compositional experimentation centered in Venice, which Nostradamus himself could not have prognosticated.

The program’s raison d'être was inspired by one of the most progressive composers of his time, Nicola Vicentino (1511-1576) who invented a micro-tonal keyboard instrument, the archicembalo, which should have earned him a burning at the stake.

Jack Quartet’s approach to unlocking the Rubick’s Cube of Modern Medieval is like dumping puzzle parts out of a box and asking the audience to put it together while sniffing chloroform. The “awe” kicked in immediately upon trying to figure out the program order itself. Lots of new voices.

Despite the pan-generational music history jigsaw JACK Quartet put before us, the great joy of the quartet’s meticulously organized Modern Medieval program was its mindful construction, which created an overall confidence among us auditors, at least subconsciously, that deep down in our synapses a re-wiring of thinking about music and history was in play, and we were going to be the beneficiaries.

The evening’s several seductions began with violinist Christopher Otto’s beguiling narrative before the first work was performed. Luring us down a verbal micro-tonal rabbit hole, a 700-year musicological dive upward from Medievalism to the present sound universe Westerners are generally accustomed to hearing while sedated at the dentist, the mind-melting message from JACK Quartet to its audience was simple, “Whatever is has already been, and what will be, has been before.” (Ecclesiastes 3:15).

JACK Quartet’s Modern Medieval program in a codpiece, considers the fight several hundred years back over which tuning method “just” or “tempered” would prevail in Western music. The quartet has a thing or two to say about the issue, it’s outcome then, and how things that go around, come around.

Pieces by Taylor Brook, Organum (2017) and Ars Nova (2017) served as programmatic bookends for the Modern Medieval thesis. His Phrygea, also composed for JACK Quartet in 2017 was slipped into the second half of the recital as a bonus. All three are contemporary homages to the bedrock forms and sounds of Nicola Vicentino and his free-thinking Venetian colleagues.

Organum prepared us for the musical soundscape ahead in whispering, languorously sustained whole tones. And as a kind of benediction at evening’s end, his Ars Nova hinted at the profundity of the 360-degree circumnavigation of time and musical process JACK Quartet had created and bestowed upon us.

The music in between those bookends consisted of three works tweaked for JACK by violinist Christopher Otto - Angelorum Psalat after Rodericus (2011/1390), Miserere after Nathaniel Giles (2023/1594) and Fumeux fume par fumee after Solage (2018/1390); with two works by Nicola Vicentino realized by JACK - Musica prisca caput and Madonna, il poco dolce (1555).

On the menu as well, JACK Quartet violinist Austin Wulliman’s fascinating 2024 composition for the ensemble, Dave’s Hocket; Vicente Atria’s hot off the press 2024 composition, Round-About; and Juri Seo’s Three Imaginary Chansons, also composed in 2024.

Suffice to say, the most satisfying aspect of JACK Quartet’s intoxicating program December 7 was not about individual pieces, though there were plenty of trophy winners in that category. Rather, the helium in the room was generated by a realization that sounds past and present were intermingling easily, as in a ghost story, reinforcing the idea of timelessness. Sounds discovered and explored in the Medieval period (micro-tonalism), were lost for centuries then re-discovered and deployed in our own age. How “woke” is that!

Memories from the vaporous daydreaming of the concert’s sound experience: colors and pitches deliberately skewed in dizzying but fun mashups; fascinating pitch clusters and tonal meltdowns; high harmonics creating “ghost” echos; rogue pitches splendidly informing the mystical wonder of sound.

Compositional highlights: Juri Seo’s Three Imaginary Chansons, particularly the last, Confronted Cocks and Running Dogs, Austin Wulliman’s Dave’s Hocket (one had to turn away, look to the ceiling to hear everything subtly taking place in the sounds), and Vicente Atria’s Round-About, with its energetic passage work and busy winks and nods to all kinds of things musical, modular, and multi-tonal, not to mention his powerful skills at writing for string quartet.

Daniel Kepl | performingartsreview.net

“I try to use words as I would sounds - I want them to have meaning and create visualization.”