WHAT IS AMERICAN | New York TIMES REVIEW
What Is American Music? Three Classical Albums Offer Answers.
By Seth Colter Walls
June 23, 2022
The kaleidoscopic invention in those works courses throughout PUBLIQuartet’s “What Is American,” my favorite classical album of the year thus far. It contains winning arrangements of Dvorak, as well as of Tina Turner’s “Black Coffee” and the Ornette Coleman tunes “Law Years” and “Street Woman.” There’s a head-nodding performance of Vijay Iyer’s string quartet “Dig the Say” (itself inspired by James Brown).
And there is a newly commissioned string quartet, “CARDS 11.11.20,” from Roscoe Mitchell — the composer-saxophonist who came to prominence in the 1960s, alongside Braxton and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Like other works in Mitchell’s “Cards” series, this through-composed effort invites improvisation (with musicians allowed to shuffle fragments of the score, at one point in the performance); the PUBLIQuartet players sound at home inside this peculiarly American challenge.
And there is a newly commissioned string quartet, “CARDS 11.11.20,” from Roscoe Mitchell — the composer-saxophonist who came to prominence in the 1960s, alongside Braxton and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Like other works in Mitchell’s “Cards” series, this through-composed effort invites improvisation (with musicians allowed to shuffle fragments of the score, at one point in the performance); the PUBLIQuartet players sound at home inside this peculiarly American challenge.
Snaking among those and other works are the quartet’s fractured recitations of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s obscure fifth verse to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Amid the Civil War, this poet — and the father of the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — excoriated “the traitor that dares to defile / The flag of her stars and the page of her story!” (Think of that in the context of the Jan. 6 rioter who carried the Confederate flag inside the U.S. Capitol building, and who was recently convicted of a felony and four misdemeanor offenses.)
Never overstuffed, “What Is American” contains fun, eclecticism and civic engagement within the length of a single CD. The album’s ability to weave multiple traditions reaches an early peak in its radical yet recognizable adaptation of Dvorak’s String Quartet No. 12 — nicknamed the “American” in part because of its affection for, and inspiration from, Black American musicians like Harry Burleigh (as well as Indigenous American melody).
We have dozens of pristine, score-accurate renditions of this war horse; the PUBLIQuartet players have rightly intuited that it can withstand a bit of reinvention. Their performance represents, they note, “improvisations” on the work. They practically draw and quarter the opening movement’s first and second themes, introducing or elaborating on them with scratchy, rough-hewed accents.