A nationally acclaimed string quartet will perform the work of USM resident composer J. Mark Scearce this Friday, in the season opener of the School of Music’s Faculty Concert Series. The Fry Street Quartet will begin their performance at 8 p.m. in Corthell Concert Hall. They will play Scearce’s “String Quartet No. 1 (Y2K),” Stravinsky’s “Three Pieces” and Debussy’s “Quartet.”
Prof. Scearce wrote the composition, his first for string quartet, specifically for the Fry Street Quartet. He originally met the Quartet in the town of Hickory, North Carolina, where they had been placed on a Chamber Music America grant. Scearce was in town on a separate grant — a three-year Meet the Composer residency.
Scearce said he got the idea for the composition from a conversation he had one day with Quartet members Jessica Guideri, Rebecca McFaul, Russell Fallstad, and Anne Francis. Gathered together in a coffee shop, he asked them about what they would like in a string quartet piece. Each of the Quartet members mentioned requests that combined into what Scearce calls a “wish list.” In effect, Scearce said, “They were describing for me who they are. And what they are is… they’re young, they have an incredible vitality, there’s an exuberance about them, and they aren’t afraid of taking both old and new music to the very edge… in short, they’re alive and they make you feel it.”
Scearce wrote “String Quartet No. 1” (often referred to by its subtitle, Y2K) with all these qualities in mind, he said, and he tailored it specifically to fit them as performers.
The Fry Street Quartet has performed “Y2K” many times, and featured it during last year’s tour of the Balkan States (sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and Carnegie Hall). Describing the response that audiences have had so far, Scearce said that even people without musical knowledge seem to relate to it immediately, which he finds satisfying as a composer. “That’s actually my goal — to communicate.”
He said that many people have told him that the piece seems timely and relevant to what’s going on in the world today. Scearce attributes this to a sense of anxiety that is present throughout the composition. “There’s a certain feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Something is going to happen in this piece, and you know that right away, and you spend the next 20 minutes… working out what that could possibly be.”
Scearce adds, “There are moments of repose, but they’re in motion — you can’t sit back and relax. And I defy the audience member to fall asleep to this… I think it’s nigh well impossible.”
The ending is something that each listener will have to interpret, he says, but he approached it “with speed and fury. I really felt that this thing had to be taken head-on, take the bull up by the horns, and one does that with a kind of moto perpetuo — constant, driving eighth notes from beginning to end. It’s relentless… it ends violently.”
The morning after the performance, the Fry Street Quartet will coach young performers, and Scearce will join the Quartet to give what he calls a post-mortem talk about putting the previous night’s event together. “Once this horrible accident has happened,” he explains, “we’re going to do an autopsy the next day.”
Tickets for the concert are $10 for the general public, $7 for seniors, and $5 for students. Tickets to attend the Saturday morning post-concert talk and coaching session are $5. The School of Music’s box office can be reached at 780-5555.
Brian O’Keefe can be contacted at [email protected]