From Haydn To Traveling Lotus, Attacca Quartet Embraces Tunes Non-Prevent : Deceptive Cadence : NPR

Attacca Quartet customers Amy Schroeder, Domenic Salerni, Andrew Yee and Nathan Schram dig into dance new music on their new CD.

David Goddard/Sony Classical

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David Goddard/Sony Classical

Attacca Quartet members Amy Schroeder, Domenic Salerni, Andrew Yee and Nathan Schram dig into dance new music on their new CD.

David Goddard/Sony Classical

1 of the most adventurous classical ensembles, the Grammy Award-winning Attacca Quartet, has created its track record with an eclectic musical palette – they’ve explored the string quartets of Haydn and Beethoven and premiered new pieces by contemporary composers. But the newest album from the group – violinists Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni, violist Nathan Schram and cellist Andrew Yee – could possibly be their most stunning: Authentic Existence features adaptations of electronic dance audio by Flying Lotus, Louis Cole and Daedelus, among other people.

Having occur alongside one another as Juilliard College pupils in 2003, the authentic users of the ensemble leafed through a songs dictionary, striving to arrive up with a name for their team. Commencing with the A’s, they speedily discovered what not only turned out to be a ideal name, but also a definition of their aesthetic.

“Attacca signifies attached to maintain participating in audio and to not cease,” says Yee, a founding member. “And I feel that’s been sort of what we’ve carried out in excess of the past nearly 20 a long time is to do a little something, but often be sort of in movement, always be seriously intentional about transferring on and then getting new factors and locating joy in distinctive areas.”

Pulitzer Prize-profitable composer Caroline Shaw collaborated with the group on the Grammy-winning album, Orange. “One particular of the points that I enjoy about Attacca is that they strategy all the things with creativity and enthusiasm and a willingness to consider a little something new,” she suggests. “Regardless of whether it’s, you know, with a little something that I’ve prepared in the previous couple yrs or it can be Beethoven. Anything feels – not to overuse a word – but it feels extremely fresh.

So, when Attacca puts with each other a live performance system, they like mixing things up, says Schram. “What we’ve been undertaking in our repertoire for so lots of yrs, we have been enjoying Beethoven up coming to Traveling Lotus up coming to Caroline Shaw.”

Which is ideal: Traveling Lotus, the Los Angeles-based mostly producer and DJ.

The customers of the team pay attention to all types of new music, which include electronic dance new music, so, it was not this kind of a leap for them to document a whole album of string quartet diversifications. “It seemed to make a large amount of sense with what we do,” suggests Schram, “simply because it’s instrumental music, it truly is incredibly dynamic, it really is tremendous clever and innovative. And it was this kind of a excellent fruit to test to dig into.”

The quartet’s users made their very own transcriptions and labored, by means of Zoom, with the album’s producers, together with Michael League of Snarky Pet. “This entire history is form of like poster baby of pandemic creation,” Yee points out. “We had a notebook that had just Mike’s facial area on it in the studio with us. We could see him jamming out 5 seconds behind, you know, on the pc.”

Attacca made use of all sorts of technological innovation on the recording: they overdubbed themselves, included electronic effects and even enlisted some EDM producers, like TOKiMONSTA, to operate with them. Their collaboration – accomplished completely long-distance – was on a Flying Lotus tune, “Remind U.”

“They experienced previously recorded variety of like a demo, and it was just remarkable,” says TOKiMONSTA. “I modified some of the sequencing, but not way too a lot. I additional additional rhythm and movement and that is what I did with the percussion.”

The quartet is conscious that the new album, Attacca’s initial on the Sony Classical label, might elevate some eyebrows. “For us, this new music isn’t really that diverse than Beethoven—like, in so many techniques it is!” Schram claims, laughing. “Finally for us, it is tunes we appreciate actively playing. We’re working with our instruments in the identical artistic way we would if we had been actively playing classical songs. Naturally, the generation tactics are really different. But for us, it nonetheless feels really much like we’re enjoying string quartet songs.”

And already, Attacca Quartet is promising a lot more instrumental mash-ups: Their future album, scheduled for slide launch, will pair performs by modern composers Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt with Renaissance polyphony.