On March 12, 2025 professor Frank J. Oteri brought students from the class “John Cage and The New School,” which he co-teaches with Joan La Barbara at The New School College of Performing Arts, to Symphony Space for a concert with the JACK Quartet, presented by Victoria Bond’s Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival.
Each of the three students who attended were asked to write a review, which are published below.
By Sofía Alvarado
The most immediately noticeable difference in the JACK Quartet’s performance of John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts, compared to the other pieces of the night, is how much quieter it was. As if Cage’s piece demanded that silence, if unable to occupy the entire space of the piece, be at least brought into tension not just with the piece itself but also with the others around it. The Philip Glass piece that preceded it, String Quartet no. 5, instead called for the repeating melodies to fill the space, and in so doing seemingly suspended it in time, sending it floating through imagined places. But Cage’s String Quartet leads to a different kind of unmooring: we are brought to a deep awareness of the room we are sitting in, and made aware above all of the passing of time, of the authentically slow and quiet nature of the seasons, and of our experience of the current season that awaits once we exit the room; the JACK Quartet allowed Cage to use them and their instruments as a vessel for absence.
It is Heinz Holliger’s String Quartet No. 2 which brought the final surprising shift in awareness, with the final section of the piece involving the use of breath by the performers. At this point, we are made aware of our own bodies, but pulled through the breath and our attention to it into becoming something no longer human, our breath as an audience also being absorbed into the piece itself. As Kevin Davis writes in A Systematic Dismantling: Heinz Holliger’s Streichquartett, “The quartet is like a breathing thing, a living entity […] with appendages moving in different, unpredictable directions at all times, but yet possessing a highly unified vector; […] the entire quartet as the exhaling of a single, giant lung.” We too, inevitably, are invited to become part of this unhuman lung – before we fall back into silence.
By Kaizan Connor
Going into this concert, I didn't have a great deal of experience listening to string quartets in a live performance setting such as this, but one of the only other times I've been able to experience a string quartet in action was another JACK performance, playing the music of John Zorn. So going into this concert, I did have some expectations of the level of skill that JACK possesses, but I still felt like I had a somewhat naive perspective when it came to this format in general, which conversely granted me the unique ability to evaluate this performance independent of many of the preconceived notions I would have had otherwise; particularly about the selection of music that evening.
Although I knew of JACK's excess in talent as performers, high skill level doesn't necessarily guarantee a successful performance; luckily for me, I found the content of this performance to be highly engaging and inspiring. Particularly, I thought that the order in which the pieces were played contributed greatly to the entertainment component of my experience. To me, it felt as if the entire performance hung on the central axis of the Philip Glass piece, being distinctly tonal and relatively conventional in structure, whilst the surrounding pieces were by comparison much more esoteric and distinctly atonal with the possible exception of the Cage piece. It may also be that the Glass piece was the piece I was most familiar with going in, so the other pieces seemed even more esoteric by comparison.
The evening started off with what felt like an atonal double hit of a mysterious Boulez piece (or arrangement of another Boulez piece?) and Webern's iconic bagatelles. Boulez's style is so extreme and sort of disconcerting, it made for a very striking opener to the evening, particularly the way Boulez inserts silences into his music feels very unique and sort of mysterious; this seamlessly flowed into the elegantly structured, yet still iconoclastic bagatelles of Webern which all sort of ended up feeling like a single atonal gesture, which made the transition into the Philip Glass piece all the more obvious. I don't think it's possible to find a subtle way to insert Philip Glass into the program, but even if there was, I'm glad they didn't because the contrast of the pieces made the program all the more engaging. Glass's 5th string quartet is mostly normal Philip Glass, but with a touch more complexity in the harmony and structure, which I think helps make his music feel a bit more accessible, which I don't feel was a detracting factor in this particular instance. After that was finished there was a brief intermission, and then... John Cage! I really enjoyed his piece. Structurally it reminded me a lot of one of Zorn's game pieces hockey because of the use of limited musical elements, but Cage's piece definitely feels a lot more meditative and truly static. I really enjoyed this one, and I think it would've been a good closer to the program which brings me to... Heinz Holliger! I wasn't familiar with Holliger's music before stepping foot into Symphony Space that evening, and perhaps that made his music all the more difficult because I found that by this point my concentration was waning, and my appetite; growing. Despite these factors, I wouldn't say it was an unenjoyable experience to listen to Holliger's string quartet. It was immediately obvious that he is a very skilled and thoughtful composer, but I don't think I quite had the mental capacity to engage with it by that point.
By Ivan Chen
I know JACK Quartet because they are a collaborator of John Zorn, one of my inspirations for contemporary music. I like how JACK plays Zorn's string quartet. When they play his piece, each section is emotional and always straight to my heart. They always bring organic interpretation and lots of energy to the stage. Therefore, when Frank mentioned this concert to me. I was looking forward to hearing them play Webern, Boulez, Glass, Cage, and Holliger.
This program has an interesting combination. From "Livre 1, 2, 3c" by Pierre Boulez, "Six Bagatelles" by Anton Webern, "String Quartet No.5" by Philip Glass, "String Quartet in Four Parts" by John Cage, to "String Quartet No. 2" by Heinz Holliger. I like the order of the concert. They organized atonal, dissonant pieces for opening and ending, with Glass's and Cage's in the middle. The huge difference between the music, just like a roller coaster, makes the audience build up lots of tension and release.
I particularly enjoyed Glass's string quartet in this concert. As a composer, I am not a huge fan of minimalism. I want music to develop faster rather than stay in one piece for a while (By the way, I still like the slower progress of music, like Toru Takemitsu, but Glass's pieces are too slow for me!) However, his music worked well in this concert because it was so beautiful for his repetitive, tonal, simple pattern after lots of dissonance and tension.
After Glass's piece and intermission, I had a different experience of Cage's piece. Compared to Holliger or Boulez, this piece is also relatively peaceful, harmonic, and less chaotic, but I didn't get it and felt a little sleepy. I think because it was after a twenty-minute, repetitive Glass's piece and an intermission. The longer time let me lose some concentration on this beautiful piece. However, JACK still sounded great on this piece.
I also like the last piece, "String Quartet No. 2" by Heinz Holliger. I didn't know this piece before the concert, but I was surprised by the energy, emotion, and chaos. JACK sounded awesome on techniques, emotional interpretation, and brought me to outer space. Although this piece is around 25 minutes long without a stop. The organization of the dynamic and articulation was clear. I could visualize the whole structure when I listened. The ending of this piece was gorgeous. The lower-drawn texture was still dissonant, leaving lots of tension and complicated emotions for the audience.
For the interpretation and the program, every piece matches JACK's style a lot. These dramatic, emotional pieces always sounded amazing with JACK's awesome performance and the beautiful reverberation of Symphony Space. Although there is a tiny thing about order for me, it is still an impressive, beautiful concert. Thank you for sharing this beautiful music!