Kory Reeder (b. 1993)
Homestead
Apartment House
rec. 2024, St. Andrew’s United Reform Church, Sheffield, UK
Reviewed from a WAV download 44.1 kHz/24-bit
Another Timbre at-236 [54]

Kory Reeder’s Homestead is a long-form work for string quartet, which takes as its starting point the Homestead Act of 1862. The passing of the Act was an important, some might say pivotal point in the history of the United States. It granted any citizen or intended citizen ‘who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies’ 160 acres of free land. In effect the Act, and the related legislation which followed, enabled huge westward expansion. Over 10 percent of the United States, some 270 million acres, was ‘homesteaded’, transforming lands that had been long inhabited by indigenous cultures. It is fair to say that in 2025 there is a considerable critical and historical discourse on the effect of the Act, referencing the shaping of the American West as we know it against the effects on the indigenous dispossessed and the environmental consequences.

In 1936 the Homestead National Park was established in Beatrice, Nebraska to commemorate the Act and its profound effects upon both people and landscape. Kory Reeder grew up in Nebraska and in 2023 was the Artist in Residence at Homestead. During that time Reeder spent time in the archives finding a wealth of historical material, some of which found its way into Homestead, a project Reeder describes as ‘part of my process of learning, listening, and developing a relationship with the land and its stewards in my home state: a beautiful place with a rich history that is as much a part of me as it is part of the settler-colonial project of displacement and genocide through the Homestead Acts’.  My overall sense of Homestead, having listened to it more or less on repeat for the last week is of a work of extraordinary beauty and poignancy, but one which never veers towards sentimentality. It’s quite something.

Homestead consists of four movements with an interlude. It’s always an issue when writing about music that whatever one might say about form often doesn’t prepare the listener for the impact of its realisation. That’s especially true with this piece I think, but here goes. As I have said, Reeder used some of the artefacts he discovered in the archive as a starting point for the main movements. There is a hymn tune and a waltz with which, as he puts it, he does his own thing. There is a movement inspired by found quilts and another by old photographic negatives. At the same time as he was doing his archival research he was also teaching fundamental musical theory and wanted to explore that too in his own compositions. So, one movement is sonata, another a rondo, another theme and variations. It’s fair to say though that not all of these forms might be immediately apparent to the ear. That doesn’t in any way I think affect the music’s impact.

There are two other quite important things to say about the overall approach Reeder has taken, again with the caveat that words will only get me so far. The first is that despite the given complexity of the forms he has chosen, the music on the page and to the ear has an apparent simplicity. The uncanny atmosphere Reeder creates is literally in place from the off on the first page of the score. Yet in essence that consists of the rest of the quartet following the First Violin’s open A string by adding chords simply made up of the notes of the violin’s four strings. This almost ingenuous approach to texture is largely maintained throughout the work and it’s extraordinarily effective. The second and linked characteristic is what I will call temporality. Homestead isn’t in any sense one dimensional, but there’s an overriding sense throughout that one is somehow suspended in time. It’s true that Reeder has stipulated relatively slow metronome markings for the first three movements and interlude but the effect he creates I think is just as much down to his feel for harmonic movement and indeed stasis.

Within this framework, there’s variety and ingenuity in the separate movements, although one never loses the sense of the overall identity of the work. The first movement, ‘Hymns – from a dog-eared book found in an unmarked box’ starts, as I have said, with those chords made up of fifths and instantly sets the pattern for the chorale like development which follows, the chords themselves becoming a little more dissonant and the texture occasionally more mellow with the strings sometimes bowing over the fingerboard. Much of the movement is played pianississimo and the listener is drawn in, attentive perhaps as the settler congregation evoked in my imagination.

The second movement ‘Sonata – from preserved quilts and fabrics’ seems to me amongst other things a wholly successful attempt to represent in music the approach to blended texture that one finds in nineteenth century fabrics. The score is in fact marked ‘exceedingly blended’ and Reeder’s harmonies and textual stipulation really pay off – we occasionally hear individual instruments surfacing for a moment of colour like a particular striking thread or fabric. The movement grows in intensity and Reeder introduces an intense rhythmic pulse with sets of triplet quavers, initially in the cello but then in other instruments too, like a new congruent pattern on a quilt. It’s highly imaginative writing.

The Interlude, subtitled ‘Pax Americana’ is the most simple of all the movements. For cello alone, cells of rising figures, mostly starting again and again on a low F, most slightly varied melodically and rhythmically. Five and a half minutes which feels distinct from the rest of the work in mode, deliberately inchoate and questioning.

The third movement ‘Rondo- from several fragile plate negatives’ is I suppose recognizably a Rondo in that theme and alternations are discernible but to talk about this at length would be missing the point. Here, more than anywhere in the piece I had a vivid sense of daunting landscape, challenge and disturbance. It’s full of lovely details, not least the occasional use of harmonics by cello and viola or the sparse, stop start dialogue the same instruments have towards the middle of the piece. The Another Timbre webpage for the album has some pictures from the Homestead Archive. I don’t know if these are the actual ‘plate negatives’ that Reeder took inspiration from, but looking at them alongside this movement is a really rewarding exercise of the imagination.

The fourth movement is a waltz, in which Reeder uses a theme from one of the manuscripts he found in the Homestead archive. A set of variations follow with 3/4 time maintained throughout. The variations overlap and the transition from one to the other is cleverly managed so the effect is of one tableau gradually fading and transforming into another. The music again is staggeringly redolent. Reeder asks for it to be rendered ‘Blurry…but not sentimental’ and that’s exactly what Apartment House achieve here. Indeed, their playing throughout the piece is magnificent: profoundly musical, scrupulously precise, highly sensitive and utterly self-effacing. Reeder wrote the piece with them in mind. What a gift, and how they repay him!

This is another fine and beautifully recorded Another Timbre release, a piece written especially for the label and its founder Simon Reynell. There’s an excellent interview to accompany the release by Marat Ingeldeev on the Another Timbre website where as well as the background to Homestead, you can find out what Kory Reeder’s favourite string quartets are and how he chooses titles for his pieces. Fascinating.  

Dominic Hartley

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