Ryan Truesdell’s String Quartet Dreams

Interview, From the Magazine, Ryan Truesdell

By Phillip Lutz I Aug. 13, 2024

“It locked together 20 years of all that I’ve been looking for,” Ryan Truesdell says of his compositional contribution to *Synthesis: The String Quartet Sessions*.
(Photo: Leo Mascaro)

For more than a decade, Ryan Truesdell has been winning acclaim by excavating the lesser-known gems of big-band composer and arranger Gil Evans and presenting them to the public. So it was hardly a surprise that, as he took a break to chat amid a late-May run conducting Evans’ music at Birdland, he was in good spirits.

But back in 2020, when the pandemic hit, his mood was far less cheery.

“No one knew what was happening,” Truesdell said via Zoom from his New York apartment. “And the idea of putting 18 people in a room together for a big band again was, in our minds, never going to happen. What do we do as composers now that our main voice is not able to be together?”

The unlikely answer? Truesdell created a project enlisting 13 large-ensemble jazz composers, plus himself, to write music for string quartets.

Documented in a three-CD set titled Synthesis: The String Quartet Sessions (Artist Share), the project might seem to bear little resemblance to his work with Evans’ music, but Truesdell said it reveals, to great effect, a different side of the talents these composers possess. “We know their big-band writing. What would they do when they were asked to write a string quartet?”

Seeking players who could commit to the project and had the versatility to pull it off, Truesdell’s first call was to Sara Caswell, an inspired improvising violinist familiar with the classical quartet format. Starting in March 2021, Truesdell and Caswell brainstormed by phone and Zoom before recruiting three other distinguished players: violinist Joyce Hammann, violist Lois Martin and cellist Jody Redhage Ferber.

As the months wore on, the group gathered in Martin’s Manhattan studio to read through material. “This was a chance to get our heads wrapped around the concept of what we were doing,” Caswell said. By March 2022, they had developed the template they would follow for the next year. It would include rehearsals at Martin’s studio — celebratory affairs, she said, with the composers often contributing — followed, in short order, by recording sessions at Oktaven Audio in Mt. Vernon, New York.

Truesdell said he was surprised when all the composers he asked agreed to participate. The list ranged from Joseph Borsellino III, a graduate student steeped in electronica, to Rufus Reid, the bassist and bandleader, then in his 70s. It included composers from as far away, too, such as Vanessa Perica, who was living in Australia.

But Truesdell was less surprised that, with so many composers onboard — and with no restrictions being imposed in terms of running time or style — the collection of works would be a diverse one. In fact, the project’s yield, writ large, defies easy categorization.

“The element of change between each piece makes this collection in itself a genre of music,” he asserted.

Though the works vary in style, many of them inevitably reflect the time in which they were hatched — none, perhaps, more than “Tilting World,” by Christine Jensen.

Like most of the other composers, Jensen had impressive credentials in writing for big bands but had not written string quartets. “This piece was a struggle, and we were going through a struggle at the same time,” she said. “I went through a battle with my psychological state.”

Nearly a year in the writing, the piece ended up with more alterations to rhythm and tempo than she had expected. But the changes faithfully parallel her evolving state of mind as she emerged from lockdown in her Montreal studio. The result, Truesdell said, is a beautifully realized “musical depiction of her growth from a kind of despair at the beginning of the pandemic.”

Truesdell did not dictate whether the participating composers should incorporate improvisation. About half did, and the context in which it appears varies widely. At one end of the spectrum is “Tilting World,” in which Caswell, amid the shifting tempos, carves out a solo break over chord changes. In Alan Ferber’s “Violet Soul,” the improvisation seems structured to help create the impression of a jazz standard.

At the other end of the spectrum is Oded Lev-Ari’s “Playground,” in which the improvisation is collective and, as the title suggests, occurs in a game-playing environment based solely on adherence to rules Lev-Ari has concocted.

The piece, Lev-Ari said, furthers his interest in “how musicians interact with each other, with the audience and with the materials I provide.” The score is spare but hardly simple. Compared with the other pieces, Truesdell said, more time was spent hashing out a strategy for its execution.

Under Lev-Ari’s rules, a musician plays notes a half step or a whole step away from those her partner has played. One can only move in response to the other’s moves. The musicians, Caswell said, feel as though they are “chasing” each other; listeners sense an escalating push-and-pull. The experience for both groups is an intense one.

The intensity is no less real in more conventionally scripted pieces. Miho Hazama’s fully notated, vividly colored “Chipmunk Timmy’s Sunny Funny Day,” a day-in-the-life depiction of a sympathetic rodent, derives its intensity from the kinetic quality of what Hazama called the musicians’ “strong sense of playing rhythmical stuff.”

Perica’s “A World Lies Waiting,” also fully notated, likewise exploits the musicians’ capacity for rhythmic drive. But the greater part of its intensity arguably derives from a searing lyricism that evokes the sense of profound isolation she felt locked down in the South Pacific before receiving the boost from Truesdell’s invitation to take part in Synthesis.

“I was on the tip of Australia looking out there onto the ocean,” she recalled. “But when I got the message from Ryan, I felt the sense of connection I was desperately craving.”

Truesdell, for his part, was dealing with a kind of separation as he put together his “Suite For Clarinet And String Quartet.” The separation was one of years — 18, precisely — a gulf across which he viewed himself as a master’s student at the New England Conservatory authoring a three-movement suite. He was now reviving that piece and adding a fourth and final movement to it.

Apart from shifting a few rhythms to make the modulations work better and fixing a note here or there, Truesdell left the original three movements intact. They had, he said, a “brazen youthfulness” that he liked. But the piece needed that fourth movement to reflect the man he was now. Having decided to contravene his rule about instrumentation by including the piece — a rule he relaxed for a few others — he brought in clarinetist Anat Cohen.

The new movement helps bridge the gulf between his younger and older selves by drawing on intervallic and other material established in the earlier movements. But Cohen’s exhilarating blurring of the line between interpretation and improvisation may be the more unifying agent. And that, Cohen argued, owes in no small measure to Truesdell’s willingness to entertain ideas.

“Ryan is very open,” she said. “He knows when somebody’s very strong, like Sara or me. He takes suggestions of how to make it better, to let it morph, to add our vision.”

As Truesdell sat in his New York digs, the irony of the situation seemed apparent: A musician celebrated for rescuing neglected works of others was now rescuing one of his own — and, by adding a new movement and a new soloist, elevating it to the status of a major contribution to a massive, perhaps unprecedented, undertaking of his own making.

“When Anat played it,” he said, “it locked together 20 years of all that I’ve been looking for.” DB