New York Classical Review

Perich work explores new path in JACK Quartet’s evening of world premieres

Sat Mar 21, 2026 at 12:53 pm

By George Grella

JACK Quartet performed Friday night at 92Y.

Classical music is a composer’s music, a vast and deep repertoire that keeps expanding. Composers, even ones who are talented instrumentalists, need musicians though to play their music—and one of the great things about being a composer is thinking of music for instruments one can’t play.

Even greater is being able to compose for JACK Quartet, one of the finest string quartets and new music ensembles on the planet. JACK has its own Studio program, where they collaborate with composers to develop new works and bring them to audiences. Friday night at 92NY, JACK did just that, playing three world premieres out of four total pieces. Some came through their studio, another from one of the leading established contemporary composers.

There was a wet-ink-on-the-page freshness to the music, composers exploring their ideas and their chops. That also meant that not all the work felt finished. Completed from beginning to end, yes, but not necessarily the last or most refined version on the matter.

That was the feeling with New Paintings by Ailie Ormston, which came out of the studio. Ormston was on hand, along with all the other composers, to introduce the piece. The visual metaphor of the title had to do with the series of vignettes for the quartet that floated into view over pre-recorded audio of heavily processed instrumental snippets and field recordings.

This was both intriguing and unsatisfying. Ormston used a lot of pleasantly boozy glissandos which gave the strings a nice vocalized quality. But this was overdone to the point it became the predominant musical idea. It had less effect each time and the piece moved away from pictorialism and, despite the electronic bed, about string technique. It was also an awkward fit with the deliberate long pauses between vignettes. With the quartet silently awaiting their next cue, anticipation that the music to come might break the mold the composer had established were ultimately dashed.

Ormston is a guitarist, and so is the next composer, Jules Reidy. Their playing explores just-intonation and other alternate (or ancient) tunings, and Reidy transferred this to a string quartet. Reidy’s new piece, Shadow Symmetric, was a focused, accomplished adaptation of their ideas from plucked to sustaining strings, an example of how a composer can learn from players in a studio setting.

The piece was as simple as could be, the quartet playing individual long lines, tuned in what seemed a combination of just intonation with plenty of vinegary micro-intervals inside, a lot of spaces lying between a whole and half-step. It’s worth noting how a group like JACK can go from equal temperament to alternate and microtonality with perfect intonation each way. Something like this shouldn’t sound so easy and matter of course, but it did.

Also worth noting was how enthralling it was to hear Reidy’s horizontal slabs of pitch slowly and independently move along, over, and past each other. This was music that took the simplest idea, set it in motion through several sections and at a variety of angles and order of layers, and with taste, craft, and discernment produced an uncanny and gorgeous sonic object, something with ideal balance and proportions that was rewarding to the senses.

The New York premiere was Keir Gogwilt’s Future Mode 1, more music based in alternate tuning. Where Reidy had a clear, disciplined idea, this was more like Ormston’s piece, where the composing felt unfocused, as if Gogwilt couldn’t decide exactly what he wanted to do and instead did a few too many things while never quite fitting them together.

There was a song-like quality to some of string lines, with rising and falling shapes in the phrases, and little details that displayed a fiddle-music quality, but there was never a clear direction or shape. Assured and energetic playing from JACK meant each individual moment was attractive, but the music seemed to drift away from the listener into a private and unknowable space.

After intermission, JACK premiered Tristan Perich’s A Selection of Colors. This was also a vignette form, with fourteen short, discrete sections.

Perich is one of the great contemporary composers, and as up-to-the-moment is his use of 1-bit (simple on and off) square wave electronics as a fundamental part of his music, he is also traditional in how he uses the simplest material and compositional techniques of repetition and counterpoint. He often sets one instrumental voice against one electronic voice. Yet, as he explained before the playing began, for this piece he doubled what the quartet was playing with the 1-bit sounds, a single speaker paired with each musician.

Having four voices to work with made the new piece technically simpler and leaner than his other work, but expressively more complex and deeper. Perich is a post-minimalist with a unique voice and this is the first one has heard him show so much of his roots. There was a marvelous opening up of history through sound, how the four voices came together to form fleeting harmonies that showed flashes of Perotin and Machaut, the legacy and path that connected from them through Reich to hearing new ideas from Perich in the moment.

The sheer sound was fantastic. Perich is always immediately and richly appealing, and the robust strings and bloopy 1-bit electronics made a glowing, buttery, grainy combination. And there was great warmth and charm from his own ideas, buttressed by the presence of ancient ideas speaking with meaning and relevance. In the last third of the piece, there was something else new from him—a solo cello line by Jay Campbell playing a melody that spelled out the passing chords. It was beautiful in itself and wonderful for embracing the simple virtues of the traditions of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Reich.

Violinist Alex Kenney and pianist Janice Carissa play Sibelius, Schnittke, Britten, and others, 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 25. 92ny.org.