The JACK Quartet of New York City has been championing string quartet music of the 20th and 21st centuries since its founding in 2005.
“There’s just so many great string quartets that perform the works of the classical canon,” says violinist Austin Wulliman. “What we feel is needed are people who are dedicated not to owning their interpretation of Beethoven, but to owning their ability to be sensitive to new ways of taking this skill set that we learn as classical musicians and applying that to a different kind of expressive output.”
The quartet (Wulliman, violinist Christopher Otto, violist John Pickford Richards and cellist Jay Campbell) appears in Berkeley in its Cal Performances debut on March 15 in a concert including the premiere of Bay Area composer Gabriella Smith’s “Aegolius”; the West Coast premieres of Wulliman’s “The Late Edition” and Keir GoGwilt’s “Treatise on Limited Freedoms: Future Mode 1”; Hans Abrahamsen’s String Quartet No. 4; and Wolfgang Rihm’s String Quartet No. 3, “Im Innersten.”
The concert begins with the 2025 piece “The Late Edition”: “There’s a bunch of pattern on a very clear rhythmic structure you can see passing through different time scales,” says Wulliman. “But at the same time, there’s these harmonies that sound like they’re plumbing from the string quartets of the past that emerge and fold back into that texture. It’s full of rhythmic energy that you couldn’t have without rock ’n’ roll.”
GoGwilt, 35, who was born in Edinburgh, Scotland and raised in New York City, shares his imaginative exploration of the Baroque style in 2024’s “Treatise on Limited Freedoms: Future Mode 1.”
Wulliman explains, “He’s imagining a different treatise on what pitches are and rewriting what we think of as the scale we hear. It’s fiddling through different cool lines and fascinating little passageworks for the instruments, and we even have a chance to improvise with ornamentation.”
Danish composer Abrahamsen’s 2012 opus has what Wulliman calls a very pure, almost crystal-like structure: “You get to see different patterns of light emerge through very simple melodies that are in very different time scales,” he says. “So you’ll hear one thing that sounds like the light is refracting over a bunch of surfaces, and in another way you see a very pure beam of light swing across the room.”
The quartet, having performed Smith’s 2015 “Carrot Revolution” for string quartet many times, commissioned her for a new work for this concert: “Aegolius.”
“Gabriella’s piece sounds like it’s a swirl from nature, but unlike the Abrahamsen piece, which has these kind of pure patterns, hers feels like the wind rushing through something,” Wulliman says. “It’s so unpredictable, you never know where it’s going to be, but you still feel it in your whole body and it sweeps you away. It’s very exhilarating music.”
“Aegolius” moves the quartet in special ways consistent with how Smith’s works are often inspired by the environment: “It also has amazing outbursts of an instrumental kind of virtuosity from this texture that feels like it’s invoking something natural, and then you see our bodies kind of take it up and move it to this instrumental virtuosic place,” Wulliman says.
German composer Rihm’s (1952-2024) 1976 piece “Im Innersten” concludes the program with a style evocative of a bygone era.
“It’s an emotionally elating journey through his relationship with the expressive music of Europe’s past,” Wulliman says. “At times, it’s very tortured, very intense, and at other times, it’s just incredibly beautiful, lush and full of romantic expression.”
The ensemble, quartet-in-residence at the Mannes School of Music at The New School in New York City, teaches at festivals, conservatories and universities nationwide and internationally. It continues to support the growth of the string quartet repertory through commissions, residencies and recordings.
“We’re already planning another decade of commissions with the JACK Studio program to take the work we’ve done over the early part of our career, like learning how to be a string quartet, how to embrace the creative process and make new things, and create the works that define our perspective on what makes us curious about contemporary music today,” Wulliman says.
Cal Performances presents the JACK Quartet at 3 p.m. March 15 in Hertz Hall on the University of California, Berkeley campus. Tickets are $50-$55 at calperformances.org
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