Ari Takes Medieval Modern

Violinist Ari Streisfeld has garnered critical acclaim worldwide for his performances of diverse repertoire after originally establishing himself as one of the foremost interpreters of contemporary classical music. He’s also the co-founder of the world-renowned JACK Quartet, the fearless foursome that quickly became one of the experimental engines of new music after forming at Eastman School of Music in 2005. The JACK Quartet focuses almost exclusively on recent repertoire, works they’ve commissioned, or something they call Modern Medieval – programs that explore the work of long-past European composers through the lens of contemporary American composition. 

Streisfeld left the JACK – which was titled after the first names of its four original members – in 2016 for a less-travelled life on the faculty at the University of South Carolina School of Music and head of strings at the Carolina Summer Music Conservatory. But he’s heading to the Music Academy of the West’s Hahn Hall on December 7 to take in the current quartet’s concert – a Modern Medieval entry that features music by Juri Seo, Austin Wulliman, and works by JACK’s in-house arranger Christopher Otto based on Rodericus, Solage, and Nathaniel Giles, plus more contemporary pieces by Taylor Brook and Vicente Atria – where Streisfeld will join the JACK onstage for a post-performance discussion. 

It’s not a random occurrence. Streisfeld will be performing for two private MAW events later in the weekend, representing another return to the institute where he spent three summers in the early 2000s. 

“There’s so much I remember from my time there, including performing Mahler’s 9^th with Jeffrey Tate conducting, but the chamber music was the most influential for me,” said Streisfeld who spent summers in Santa Barbara to keep working with his violin teacher Zvi Zeitlin. “Things (then faculty member) Peter Salaff of the Cleveland Quartet said in his coaching resonated so strongly with me that I brought some of those ideas to the JACK Quartet when we started two years later. They helped form the sound that we were looking for as well as our overall aesthetic and approach to contemporary music.”

One of the coaching sessions still stands out, Streisfeld recalled, adding that Salaff’s suggestion on a Bartok string quartet formed the underpinnings of the JACK’s early understanding of how to play modern music. 

“We were showing off all of that kind of Bartok Hungarian energy, putting it all out on the table from the very beginning. But he stopped us after a few pages of the opening of this movement. After complimenting us on our energy, he advised us to approach the movement as if it were a Haydn quartet – focus on perfection and intonation, everything resonant and beautiful. We took that to heart and we spent the next three weeks playing it really slowly, really precisely trying to make everything perfectly in tune, perfectly together.”

Streisfeld’s fellows’ quartet then played the piece in a masterclass for the visiting Brentano Quartet and the coach said the intonation was perfect, but it didn’t sound like Bartok. It needed more edge. 

“We were thrilled,” he recalled. “We added back all of that Bartok edge that we had intentionally taken away while maintaining the clarity and the beauty of the sound and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of how one can play in a string quartet. When JACK formed two years later, we were immediately playing the most avant-garde, thorny music you could think of, including “Tetras” by Xenakis, which is much crazier than Bartok ever got. And we had this mindset of we’re not just going to play this piece; we’re going to play it as accurately as we can, and the sound should be exactly the sound we want, fully committed to finding perfection in whatever the sound is that we were trying to make. Including the scratch tones that get passed around the strings, which we spent about an hour mapping out. Things like that really elevated our performance of contemporary music, and I first learned it at the Music Academy.” 

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