RE:sounding is a new recurring feature on The Log, through which I’ll report and reflect on the concerts and other cultural events I attend regularly in New York City, and occasionally elsewhere. The column will appear whenever there is sufficient cause: weekly at a minimum, more often as needed. Reader response is invited, and accepted gratefully. — Steve Smith

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“I never imagined that I would write a string quartet,” the composer John Luther Adams offered in a program note for Everything That Rises, billed as his fourth and newest work in the genre, when it was presented in its New York premiere at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music on August 3. “Then I heard the JACK Quartet,” the note continues, “and I understood how I might be able to make the medium my own.”

It’s not hard to understand how the JACK Quartet might have that kind of impact on a composer, even one initially reluctant to embrace chamber music’s most venerated convention. The ensemble — formed in 2007 and 50 percent reconstituted in 2016 — already counts among those elite groups that can inspire composers not only to dare, but also to imagine. For Adams, a master of creating works that convey both the mighty force and the delicate balance of nature, a relationship with JACK has provided a fresh palette with which to fashion some of his purest elemental evocations.

Considering Adams’s quartets in sequence, you actually can sense the creative line that leads from one to the next: the open strings and natural harmonics of The Wind in High Places (2011) expanding through untouched (2015) to Canticles of the Sky (2015), in which the players finally touch their fingerboards. (That Adams omits from this lineage his 2013 work Dream of the Canyon Wren presumably has to do with its explicitly imitative intent.)

Also related to Sila: The Breath of the World, Adams’s choral piece based on a sequence of rising “harmonic clouds,” Everything That Rises presents a continual ascent paced at the gracious leisure of most natural processes. Beginning at a nearly imperceptible hush, the music emerges in four independent, constant tendrils, their steady arpeggios and shimmering trills rising through gentle dissonance and reassuring consonance, from low registers to high across a span of a little more than an hour, ending in glinting ether.

In mechanical terms the process is reasonably simple; the X factor resides in the intense concentration and palpable commitment these players — violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell — bring to the work. They played in a roughly circular position near one end of the acoustically amenable Mary Flagler Cary Hall, with the audience arrayed in rings around them. (An interview with Adams published by San Francisco Classical Voice in advance of the work’s world premiere in July suggests that precisely the opposite arrangement applied there: JACK players dispersed, surrounding the audience.)

Listening to their performance was something like witnessing a magnificent sunrise in real time, from soft gray haze to brilliant white corona. The sensation also could resemble the slow, steady climb to a mountaintop; that the air is thinner at the summit no doubt explained the dizzy elation that caused an audience to remain silent for a long, long moment before the clamorous ovations commenced.

Quatuor Bozzini
Photograph: Michael Slobodian

The JACK Quartet concert was the third event in Time Spans, a five-night series presented by the Earle Brown Music Foundation — the first New York City iteration of a festival previously mounted in Crested Butte, Colorado. (A review by Seth Colter Walls in The New York Times does an excellent job of covering the entire series, as well as recounting the late Earle Brown’s commitment to facilitating and preserving the work of his fellow composers.) Two previous evenings had featured the Talea Ensemble in a mix of works by established and emerging composers; in the final concert, Talea returned with Hyena, a new evening-length work that wed music by Georg Friedrich Haas to words and narration by his wife, Mollena Lee Williams-Haas.

Prior to that the finale, the fourth Time Spans concert offered another profound conjunction of composer and string quartet: two works by Jürg Frey, performed by the Montréal-based Quatuor Bozzini. What JACK has been to American composers, the Bozzini — formed in 1999, and presently comprising violinists Clemens Merkel and Alissa Cheung, violist Stéphanie Bozzini, and cellist Isabelle Bozzini — has been to its Canadian kin: a force for steadfast advocacy, and a source of evident inspiration.

But neither JACK nor the Bozzini limits its scope strictly to music cultivated in its home soil. Here, the Canadian group championed music by a Swiss composer — one who is himself best known for his alliance to a loose-knit global confederacy of likeminded creators, the Wandelweiser Group.

A recording by Quatuor Bozzini of two Frey works, Unhörbare Zeit (2004-06) and String Quartet No. 3 (2010-12; arr. 2014), showed the ensemble’s extraordinary sympathy for this deceptively simple music, its compelling finesse in meeting Frey’s unorthodox demands. Issued by Edition Wandelweiser in 2015, the disc is an essential document.

Even so, hearing these pieces played live in Cary Hall’s conspiratorial acoustic proved revelatory. Each simple stepwise move and each subtle shift in timbre registered with oversize impact, even as players adhered faithfully to the hushed dynamics that both works demand.

Unhörbare Zeit (“Inaudible Times”) opened the program, the Bozzini players spread apart by a considerable span with two percussionists, Noam Bierstone and Isaiah Ceccarelli (also a composer worth noting), stationed at batteries equidistant behind them. Frey’s motifs are almost stark enough to render Adams baroque by comparison. Yet somehow, a simple shift from one chord accompanied by sounds of metal surfaces scraped deliberately to another fused with woolly bass-drum rolls took on an intensity you couldn’t have anticipated adequately. The music, as Frey had explained beforehand, is meant to evoke architectural space, but not to define perspective or confine imagination; here, an ideal balance was struck.

Frey’s quartet, for which the Bozzini players huddled into conventional configuration, is similarly spare, with dynamic markings that compel an almost untenable hush. Somehow, though, Frey’s slow, even sequence of chords struck, held, and ended assumes inexplicable qualities of moody incandescence. A single elongated chord that arrives roughly seven minutes in felt like an explosive epiphany; so, too, a grayish chord that rises from inaudibility at the 20-minute point, returns to silence, then tries repeatedly, unsuccessfully, to rise again before the music’s initial mode reasserts itself three minutes later.

I cannot imagine a listener being unmoved by this music, particularly when delivered by players capable of rendering its gestures with the unanimity of an accordion’s bellows and the naturalness of human breath. That this concert happened here was a gift; that it happened in an acoustically ideal space and with ample support from its presenter, even more so. Once again, meditative silence prefaced a well-deserved ovation.

JACK Quartet
Photographs: Steve Smith

On August 5 and 6 the JACK Quartet was back in action: this time at the Whitney Museum of American Art for two events presented in conjunction with Calder: Hypermobility, a current show that includes graceful and whimsical sculptures and mobiles customary of Alexander Calder’s practice, as well as motorized sculptures displayed less frequently, and almost never activated. A major draw of this popular exhibition is the chance to see (and hear) these things in motion, which happens on a regular schedule.

The idea to embed a performance of a John Cage work within a Calder show — part of a wholly admirable multimedia initiative that already had featured a Jim O’Rourke-curated Spotify playlist and live performances by Christian Marclay — is a sound idea, no pun intended. Cage befriended numerous visual artists and was influenced by their work; the same held true in reverse for Calder. Cage actually provided music for a short documentary about Calder, using as a sound source various mobiles colliding in Calder’s studio, taped in 1950.

Even the idea to have the JACK Quartet play Cage’s 30 Pieces for String Quartet (1983), a relatively late work written for the Kronos Quartet (and authoritatively recorded by Quatuor Bozzini in 2015), made sense. The work comprises four independent solo parts, each playing time-bracketed packets of music in three general modes (“tonal, chromatic, and microtonal”) but otherwise acting individually, producing an effect not unlike a mobile’s combination of free movement within basic constraints of gravity, velocity, and direction.

What I saw on August 5, though, struck me as a well-intentioned mistake. The JACK players would disperse themselves throughout the small show three times that afternoon, at 4:30, 5:30, and 6:30pm. That these performances happened during regular viewing hours — on a summer Saturday, no less — and essentially with no fanfare meant that the quartet’s exertions amounted to no more than ambient noise for shouting over within the cramped confines of a destination show. Some might view this as faithful to a Cagean ethos, but what I experienced (during the 4:30 rendition) struck me more as a misreading of “chance operations” as “anything goes” — an interpretation that does no justice to the music, the musicians, or ultimately to Cage.

On August 6, the JACK musicians scattered again throughout the Calder show — only this time they were playing after hours for a ticketed audience and no one else. Some people sat stone still in rapt contemplation; some wandered from place to place, watching the mobiles move and listening to perspectives shift. (Some snapped photos; you assumed these were less likely to be selfies than yesterday’s batch.)

This time, the music made its points resoundingly: an argument not for elitist restriction, but for care and consideration in mounting an event suited to all the artists involved. The Cage piece completed, the audience trooped down to the museum’s spartan yet comfortable third-floor Susan and John Hess Family Theater for the remainder of the program.

Here, paradoxically, was the weekend’s first opportunity to hear music by Earle Brown, whose String Quartet (1965) beguiled with its mix of notated (“mobile”) and improvised (“graphic”) elements. The same held true for a supremely confident account of Morton Feldman’s Structures (1951), a fully notated transitional work that recalls Webern’s crystalline delicacy and precision, while also anticipating the looping repetitions of electronic music — and the similar gestures to come in Feldman’s own subsequent epic-length quartets.

JACK completed its program with Richter Textures (2011), a striking, imaginative multi-movement work written by Pittsburgh-based composer-pianist Amy Williams in response to the art of Gerhard Richter. The performance was remarkable, the music imaginative and assured in its evocation of Richter’s own broad range of styles and techniques. Here, though, was one instance that felt like a missed opportunity: Since Williams runs her seven movements together without pause, it’s hard to envision through sound alone precisely which qualities she means to evoke in the brief time allotted to each movement. In navigating this “exhibition without any pictures” I found myself wishing, again and again, that we might see the paintings themselves projected on the vast blank wall behind the quartet.

Yes, I know, presumably there are rights issues involved… but if any institution is equipped to address them, you’d think it might be one like the Whitney. It’s not that the extra dimension would have increased my appreciation of Williams’s piece, per se, but it surely would have facilitated a richer, fuller appreciation for both the sources she meant to evoke and the means by which she set out to do so.