Ciompi Quartet, The - A Duke Moment (2025)

Longtime Duke University string quartet in residence, the Ciompi Quartet releases A Duke Moment featuring three works written for them by Duke composers, Stephen Jaffe, Anthony M. Kelley, and Scott Lindroth. The three works draw some of their inspiration from different sources related to the Duke experience, including the North Carolina countryside and various athletic pursuits.

The Ciompi Quartet has served as Duke University’s string quartet in residence for several decades, and has commissioned and premiered many works by their composition faculty colleagues at the institution. A Duke Moment celebrates three of those collaborative commissions, featuring music by Stephen Jaffe, Anthony M. Kelley, and Scott Lindroth. Saxophonist Susan Fancher joins the quartet for the Lindroth work.

Stephan Jaffe’s String Quartet No. 3 (“A Tapestry”) is a taut six movement work that manages musical materials with economy throughout. “Prelude (Fragments)” establishes a genteel character immediately through a repeated phrase of four detaché notes followed by a sighing, tenuto chord. An angular, scalar passage breaks up the lilting mood only momentarily, returning to the saunter of the opening material to close the movement and elide with the opening of the next. The “Scherzino” takes the melodic contour and the sighed chordal gesture of the “Prelude” and adds more swing, playful rhythmic asides, and hiccups into its fabric. The quartet moves in and out of textures in which it functions as one unit versus as independent voices skittering around each other. The interrupting scalar passage from movement one is expanded and developed, presented in subtly shifting garb.

The very brief “Joy of Rhythm” revels in pointillistic interjections and disjunct ensemble machines, anchored by the percussive articulation of pizzicato in the cello. “Ribbons (Watercolor)” is immediately contrasting in its opening, creating lush pastels of instrumental color with legato chords that seep into each other. A long limbed melody is supported by lithe repeated notes in the accompaniment; over time, internal accents in the accompaniment assert themselves on the momentum of the section, before the movement toggles back and forth between enveloping chordal phrases and flitting bursts of animated energy. The longest movement in the work, “Scherzone (Night Blues)”, also contains the quartet’s most vigorous and multi-layered music. Squirrely figures connect pizzicato punctuations, and later strident, accented violin chords. Throughout, motivic arguments are made with Haydn-esque concision. A lyrical, shrouded middle section features a slightly halting violin melody in the high register over a gently rocking accompaniment. In a work that is overall quite assured in its thematic presentation, the “Scherzone” is the heart of its glimpse towards ambivalence, expertly placed in the penultimate position structurally to allow the final movement to resolve the newly injected tension. The “Postlude” delivers, opening with a reprise of the initial five note motive from the first movement, now heard integrating expressive elements from the subsequent movements, including the warm voicings of “Ribbons,” the swung figures from “Scherzino,” and the pizzicato texture from “Joy of Rhythm.”

Anthony M. Kelley’s Sidelines is a musical portrait of two of America’s most beloved sports, “Baseball” and “Basketball.” Kelley joyfully evokes a folksy Americana by embedding elements of ragtime, blues, and jazz into the piece. “Baseball (A Ragtime Fugue)” puts a slinky, chromatic theme through its contrapuntal paces, enlivened by sassy accents and smooth ornamental turns. In an extended episodic section, violin and cello play improvisational material in dialogue as a duo based on the fugue theme. The movement features nine entrances for the subject (for the nine innings) and even works in a “stretch” or augmented statement for its seventh entrance (7th inning stretch!). Kelley arrives at a dramatic pedal point in the cello, underscoring the inherent drama and tension built into America’s pastime in its closest games.“Basketball (Variations on the Jump)” draws more explicitly from mid-century jazz, at times sounding like it could be a track off of the classic hard bop album from Oliver Nelson, The Blues and the Abstract Truth. The violin is given a conversational, bluesy solo midway through the movement, and the easy shuffle groove gives way to a final word from the cello, doing its best walking bass impression.

Scott Lindroth’s Schley Road for saxophone and string quartet is a musical portrait of a rural North Carolina intersection, the kind of intersection that is the center of a town made up of one building. Lindroth’s experiences navigating this landscape on a bike inspired the piece, and the picture it paints. The opening movement, “Recollections,” is primarily lyrical and pastoral, with the saxophone line leading the way with elegantly contoured melodies. A restless “presto” section briefly emerges midway through the movement, an episode of velocity before the movement heads towards a gentle close. The title movement is exuberant, capturing an exhilarating navigation of the landscape through agile saxophone passages that fly above a fragmented, moto perpetuo rhythmic accompaniment. Lindroth lets textures evolve sonically as they gradually cover different registral areas. Mellifluous saxophone writing, wide swooping arpeggios, activated mixed meter passagework, and repetition with variation all combine to lend the music a sense of a breathless journey.

The Ciompi Quartet and their composer colleagues are standard bearers for a compositional tradition that is grounded in craft and connection with the chamber music lineage. This long term collaboration is testament to how institutions can be wonderful environments within which to arrive at shared aesthetic values and produce meaningful work that is directly responsive to a local community of listeners and musicians. A Duke Moment is just that, a snapshot of this quartet’s lasting contribution to the musical life at one of the country’s important academic centers.