The Michigan-based ConTempus Quartet is celebrating its 10th year as an ensemble focusing on underrepresented music and living composers.
ConTempus is a self-described “all-female quartet performing in a medium historically shaped by male composers and performers.” For this new album, they’ve chosen pieces by three female composers: Florence Price, Fernande Decruck and Ivette Herryman Rodriguez.
Each of the works has an interesting background. For example, the String Quartet no. 2 in A Minor by American composer Florence Price was discovered in a trunkful of hand-written musical scores in dilapidated house south of Chicago. The house was undergoing renovations in 2009, and thankfully the music wasn’t chucked into a dumpster — the scores found their way to Price’s archives at the University of Arkansas. Many of the pieces have now been published and recorded, including a symphony, two violin concertos and this quartet.
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Like many of Price’s major works, this quartet includes a Juba movement, a dance originating in West Africa and brought to the U.S. with enslaved people. It also incorporates some blues and traditional spirituals within a thoroughly classical structure.
The second work on the album is the Suite dans le style ancien pour quator à cordes, or Suite in the Old Style for String Quartet, by French composer Fernande Decruck. She was born just a few years after Price in a small village not too far from Toulouse. Like Price, who studied organ, piano and composition at the New England Conservatory, Decruck studied organ and composition at the Paris Conservatory, and even traveled to the U.S. to give organ recitals.
Decruck is known especially for her saxophone pieces, and this suite was an unpublished work in manuscript form, possibly her only work for string quartet. The ensemble was able to gain access to scans of the hand-written music, which includes stylized dance forms of the baroque era, like the courante, sarabande and gigue.
The final work on this new release is the String Quartet No. 1 by Cuban-born composer Ivette Herryman Rodriguez, which was commissioned by the ConTempus Quartet. Rodriguez took inspiration from the other two pieces, synthesizing it with her own style and influences, creating an appealing sound that’s fresh and modern, but respectful of the past. The titles of the second and third movements of Rodriguez’s quartet are thought-provoking, as is the music: “Nostalgia: una mirada al pasado” (a look at the past), and “Montuna: Una mirada a mi tierra” (a country woman, or hill woman: a look at my land). The first is titled “Chorale and Variations.”
The title of the album, “Strings Intertwined,” represents a musical dialogue across generations, and this recording from the ConTempus Quartet is full of rich and meaningful conversations that are well worth listening to.
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