Rand Steiger (b. 1957)
Introspective Trilogy for string quartet and electronics: Undone; Inward; Rage/Resolve (2017–2025)
Tropes (2018)
JACK Quartet, Rand Steiger (electronics)
rec. 2023/2024, Studio A, Department of Music, UC San Diego, La Jolla; Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, USA
Reviewed from a WAV download 96kHz/24-bit
Kairos 0015079KAI [61]

This is avowedly political music: a trilogy bookended by two American elections. Begun in the shadow of 2016 and the rise of xenophobia on both sides of the Atlantic, completed in the immediate aftermath of 2024, with the composer Rand Steiger’s own bleak postscript that history has repeated itself, this time with graver implications still. The politics are entirely interiorised. The composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi in his booklet note calls the result a kind of activism enacted through music itself. That’s quite an assertion, and part of the interest of the disc is testing whether it holds.

Steiger is a composer who has long combined instrumental forces with digital signal processing, and who is drawn to the point at which a chord tuned in pure intervals fuses into a single coloured sonority. The Introspective Trilogy is the latest fruit of that long preoccupation. It falls into three definite titled sections, yet heard as a span it has a binding coherence, each work picking up and turning over what the last has left unresolved.

Undone came first, and it has the most complicated history. It began life not as a quartet at all but as an octet without electronics, written for the Arditti and JACK quartets to play together at Witten, seven players ranged around the hall to spatialise, resonate and echo the material first sounded by the principal violinist. The version recorded here is a recomposition for JACK alone, the signal processing supplying the four parts the other quartet once played. I found myself listening with one ear to what is on the disc and the other to the phantom octet behind it, trying to work out what, if anything, has been lost. The honest answer is: surprisingly little, because the spatial conception survives the change of means. You are aware at once of how intensely spatial the music is, sound moving back to front and side to side around you, and aware, too, that Steiger is doing something fresh with a grammar and a vocabulary that have by now become familiar. A veil of unease gathers and gradually obscures everything. Then, in the closing pages, after a central upheaval — two abrupt and total silences that slice clean through the loudest music on the whole disc, genuinely startling on first hearing — the texture empties out. A high, glassy register holds above while a folk-like melody intones low in the middle strings, and the harmonic field, saturated everywhere else, contracts almost to nothing. Takasugi hears this final image as a tall glass case drawn from sound itself, a vitrine enclosing something protected and sad. It’s an excellent metaphor. I felt I was experiencing the song from outside the glass, but could not get closer.

Inward is the deliberate retreat from politics into the self, and it begins, disconcertingly, almost in Timothy McCormack territory (see below): low scratchings and stretchings, a sound of material under strain, the unease now given a physical, tangible dimension and steadily increasing in volume. One becomes aware of the electronics as though the synthetic were about to pervade everything, only for a sustained low C to challenge the encroachment, though the held note is as unsettling as it is affirming. Where Undone was episodic, this is a single unbroken body of sound, opening in a dense warm wash, swelling to a crisis just before the seven-minute mark, then cut off by a sudden hush. What follows is the whole of the second half given over to receding: seven minutes of quiet, gently pulsing swells, each smaller than the last, the tuned chords of the electronics audibly throbbing. After a plunge back into the depths and a passage of flutterings, the music arrives at a sort of peace. This is the threshold Steiger’s own note describes, harmony held so long that it begins to behave like timbre.

Rage/Resolve, the last and newest panel, is the most dramatic and the most explicit. It opens with the loudest, most relentless music on the disc, beating and pulsing strings, percussive plucked notes, passages of ascent repeating from one instrument to the next, the whole controlled fabric tipping over into chaos and stuttering. At 3:40 something even more insistent arrives, painful in its intensity, before the texture relaxes into soft glissandi and a calmer, less enervated music that turns increasingly Bartókian. Then, around the eight-minute mark, a continuous sounded G heralds a change of state — call it calm, or acceptance — and the second half unfolds as beautiful, almost romantic flourishes shaped by vibrato, a quiet, ungrounded retrospection. It is not serenely won: late in the work, at around fourteen minutes, the violin turns suddenly assertive and then hesitant, single high notes sounding and fading against the rest of the quartet, before an artificial echo closes the piece. The drama of that ending is real, and it supplies the key to a narrative that has been implicit all along. Everything suddenly coheres, even if the message is not a comfortable one. I should add that the work’s seminal gesture is one you cannot hear at all: Steiger asks at the outset for a kind of silent scream, intense vibrato without any bow, a physical intensity he frankly admits the recording cannot reproduce. The most extreme expression in the whole trilogy is, by design, mute.

The JACK Quartet are simply extraordinary throughout. Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman,  John Pickford Richards and Jay Campbell  move between these often fragmentary, exacting forms with a virtuosity that is by turns brutal and breathtakingly beautiful, displaying an uncanny rapport with the electronics, the live and the processed sound breathing as one.

This disc has a close sibling in the Kairos catalogue: a recent recording, with the same players and also with Jakob Gasteiger cover artwork, of two instrumental works by Timothy McCormack, who as it happens now teaches at the same University of California San Diego where Steiger holds his chair. I reviewed it here. The pairing makes for an illuminating contrast, almost a crossing-over in mid-air. Steiger deploys a computer, eight loudspeakers and Miller Puckette’s Pd software, yet everything is bent toward fusion, the processing designed to be mistaken for string sound. McCormack uses nothing but wood, gut and horsehair and conjures engines, foghorns and broken machinery. The electronic disc aspires to the organic, the acoustic disc sounds synthetic. If in 2026 you want a demonstration of the variety and sheer excitement possible in contemporary instrumental music look no further than these two CDs.

A word about the recording, because it raises a genuine issue. As an act of engineering this is a triumph, especially on headphones, where the immediacy and the fineness of detail are remarkable. And yet every work here was conceived spatially: from Undone as an experiment in acoustic placement around a hall, the trilogy proper for eight speakers ringing the audience, and the electronics-free Tropes with the players disposed around the room. All of it is necessarily folded into stereo here. Steiger is candid that something is lost in the process. None of this is a complaint, exactly; the disc captures what can be captured with great fidelity. But hearing this music live must be something else.

That leaves Tropes, the one work here without electronics. It’s interesting that Takasugi in his fine booklet essay treats it as continuous with the trilogy rather than separate from it. He listens to all four pieces as a single emotional argument. He’s right I think, because Tropes plainly shares the sound world of the Introspective Trilogy. Yet there is a nice irony in the fact that, despite the cycle’s title, Tropes is the most obviously introspective music on the disc. It’s built on Jewish cantillation, the ritual chanting of scripture, and you can hear the argument in its very shape. For the first two or three minutes a single repeated note forms the backbone, stated and re-stated like a voice reading aloud, with almost inaudible flourishes hovering at the edge of hearing. Gradually the fragments lengthen, like memories that once meant something recovering their substance. We hear transcribed cantillation traditions gather around the recitation tone until several voices sound at once. By five minutes it has become a hymn to melancholia; by seven, profoundly introspective; and by nine it blossoms into writing of real tenderness and beauty. What it finally arrives at is a resolution that may be incomplete but is peaceful and endurable.

That word, endurable, is the right one for the whole disc, and it returns us to where Steiger began, with his family. The trilogy and Tropes alike are haunted by his grandfather, who came to America in the early years of the last century, leaving behind twelve brothers and sisters, most of whom were later murdered in the Holocaust; the synagogue of his bar mitzvah survives only as a single wall absorbed into a secular building. Undone mourns the world he escaped, and Tropes is dedicated to him by name. The chant Steiger remembers from his own bar mitzvah, woven through these scores to honour the dead, possesses a sadness that the music, with great seriousness and without false comfort, makes it possible to bear.

Dominic Hartley