Americana and the Arianna String Quartet

It was annoying enough to be diverted while flying, land at an unintended airport, wait out a storm, and then arrive home three hours late the evening of September 7. But I was also missing the season’s first performance of the University of Missouri-St. Louis’ (UMSL) Arianna String Quartet. It was especially disappointing because, as someone who plays a viola, I was really looking forward to the world premier of a quintet written specifically for Arianna violist, Joanna Mendoza.

Now here is where I was redeemed by social media. At the Arianna Facebook page, someone posted a comment about the performance and I casually responded that I had been waylaid and was so sorry I missed out. How welcome it was, then, that Joanna herself messaged me (it’s not out of the blue – I took lessons for a few months from Joanna several years ago, so she does know who I am) and offered me a CD of the performance. How could I refuse?

As lovely as the first pieces were, Haydn String Quartet, Opus 33 No. 2 (“The Joke”) and the Shostakovitch String Quartet No. 3, it’s Kenji Bunch’s “String Circle” I want to tell the world about. The composer, a violist, joined the quartet.

The concert was labeled “celebrations” and indeed, this piece fulfilled that word to a t (and a l and a b and all the other letters). I would describe it as a amalgam of Americana themes and styles including jazz and rockabilly (walking bass lines), southern mountain music (hillbilly), American West (Marlboro man), Americanized Irish jig, Aaron Copeland, Broadway musical, what I heard as television sitcom themes (e.g., Mary Tyler Moore, Andy Griffith), and even rock n roll. Like alchemists, the players spun a golden tapestry out of what might at first appear disparate fragments.

I heard train whistles, fiddles, dulcimers, mandolins, crows cawing, and the whispers of a sad broken old man comically crossing the Western Plains on his mule, as if he was in an episode of the Road Runner cartoon. The third movement was somber, elegiac, like residents were waiting for the last light to go out in their dying Midwestern town, and then the walking bass line in the cello took us into the grave. As percussive as the fourth movement begins, then growing playful, perhaps a horse trotting up to a saloon, it has a big finish. And the final movement is rhythmically complex (more like the Shostakovitch).

It’s gratifying when something I write agrees with something in the liner notes I haven’t yet read. At the beginning of the fourth movement, heavy on the pizzicato, I wrote down “gathered meeting.” I’m not sure what I meant except that this phrase, among other things I’m sure, refers to how, at a Quaker Meeting (what they call their Sunday service), the comments people make as they contemplate life in silence are related by a common theme. Bunch’s composition wove together so many familiar sounds from contemporary America, some as embedded in our consciousness as iconic images from film (think Hitchcock or Gone with the Wind), but a common experience unites them all. In the advance program notes, Ms. Mendoza describes String Circle as “the sounds of old friends coming together. And who are old friends but people with whom we have many common experiences?

As thankful as I was for the CDs, the one common theme running through my head as I listened was that this was no substitute for the live performance. Especially with chamber music, you are one not only with the music but the emotions, the expressions, and the movements of each of the players.

The Arianna Quartet is a treasure. And now, I believe they have released a new CD of the Janacek quartets. Check their website . And catch their next performance.