Wadada Leo Smith - String Quartets Nos. 1-12 (2022) [Hi-Res]

EFLECTIONS ON THE STRING QUARTETS

"In 1965, I started what was to become a fascinating journey in my research and the practice of writing string quartet music.

I heard Ornette Coleman´s (1930-2015) music for string quartet performed and recorded at Town Hall in 1965; the six string quartets of Bela Bartok (1881-1945) and the six late string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).

I listened to Claude Debussy´s (1862-1918) String Quartet in G minor; John Lewis´ (1920-2001) music for string quartet; Anton Webern´s (1883-1945) 1938 string quartet.

In 2013, I started listening to the string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975); all 15 of his works are a reservoir collection of great string quartet music.

Delta Blues masters B.B. King, (1925-2015), Howlin´ Wolf (1910-1976), Muddy Waters (1913-1983) and John Lee Hooker (1917-2001) have all had a major impact on my writing for strings, both as composers and as electric guitarists.

Composers Scott Joplin (1868-1917), William G. Still (1895-1978), Florence Price (1887-1953), Thomas J. Anderson (1928-), Ulysses Kay (1917-1995), Hale Smith (1925-2009), George Walker (1922-2018), Tania León (1943-), Olly Wilson (1937-2018) and Alvin Singleton (1940-) have been important as creative artists and for their courage and will to thrive in a concert music environment that, at the time, was mostly hostile in response to their compositional art.

It is because of these composers and composer-performers and their music that I cannot complete a composition unless I find its emotional range or the emotional identity in the music.

My compositions for string quartet have four periods. The 12 recorded string quartets consist of three periods: four string quartets composed from 1965 -2001; four string quartets from 2005-2011; and four string quartets from 1987-2019.

Compositions from the fourth period are yet to be recorded. It´s a collection of three string quartets - Nos. 13, 14 and 15 - music correspondent to the 13th, 14th and 15th Constitutional Amendments passed during President Abraham Lincoln´s term in office.

The string quartet form and my ensembles have been major vehicles through which I have experimented with musical composition and philosophical ideas about performance and score. The ensemble as a unit required developing a language with the opportunity to apply research and dreaming-practice to reshape the terms in each new work I envisioned.

My aspiration was to create a body of music that is expressive and that also explores the African American experience in the United States of America. My music is not a historical account. I intend that my inspiration seeks a physiological and cultural reality.

I therefore construct a music that relies on non-traditional components and concepts that allows a shared responsibility for the horizontal flow of the music, including the creative ability to reshape recurrences of musical moments both with interpretations and expressions, to introduce new and different languages into a single work and use that language as a form of expansion and not as a development.

The create symbol is a command that allows the ensemble or the individual to investigate and explore both known and unknown musical materials in the music performance of the scores, and Ankhrasmation symbolic language scores.

Most of the pitched music events in the score have been reduced to long, short sonic relationships and are not metered or time-based events, and speed and mobility are an individual and collective act. A notion of invisible evolutionary forms and inspiration permeate the ritualized space."-Wadada Leo Smith, New Haven, Connecticut, March 29, 2022

Wadada Leo Smith-trumpet, composer
Alison Bjorkedal-harp
Anthony Davis-piano
Lynn Vartan-percussion
Stuart Fox-guitar
Thomas Buckner-voice