Spektral Quartet

performing 2010-2022

Creative, enterprising, and unconventional, the Spektral Quartet is remembered as a forerunner of progressive music-making and an unapologetic disruptor of the bourgeois values still clinging to Western classical music today. Having substantively expanded the art form’s listenership as well as its repertoire, the ensemble leaves behind a legacy of audacious presentations, gripping performances, and a confirmation that relevance originates at the local level.

After exiting the stage for the final time in 2022, the members of Spektral Quartet – Clara Lyon & Theo Espy (violins), Doyle Armbrust (viola), Russell Rolen (cello) – will offer three new recording projects in 2023: studio albums Behind the Wallpaper and Plain, Air, and art film Thus, the Night.

Spektral Quartet is forever grateful to its family of fans for their adventurousness and generosity, and to all future listeners for their curiosity.

Watch now: ‘thus the night’

THUS, THE NIGHT is an original art film based on Spektral’s performance of Henri Dutilleux’s landmark work Ainsi la Nuit. Produced in collaboration with visual artist Antonia Contro and Four/Ten Media, the film strives to reflect the composer's interests in surrealism, highlighting the unique and heightened qualities of perception and memory as enhanced by the liminal space between daylight and darkness.

Final Projects

Plain, Air

What if a 45-minute walk could revitalize your relationship to the environment, reversing the disconnection provoked by the workaday grind? Commissioned for us by Chamber Music America and supported by the Openlands land conservation organization, Guggenheim fellow Tonia Ko’s sonic meditation on Chicago’s dynamic lakeshore ecology and the larger ecosystem of the Great Lakes is deepened with original reflections written and read by NY Times bestselling author Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass). Together, these words and this music ask listeners to be fully present and alert to their surroundings, to reconsider our relationship to nature, and to dream of a more interconnected world – if we can believe in our powerful ability to change.

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Four/Ten Media skyscraper shoot in Chicago

‘Thus, The Night’ Music Video

We are in the process of creating an art film inspired by Henri Dutilleux's Ainsi la nuit (“Thus, the Night”) quartet, a seminal work for string quartet written in 1976, steeped in the aesthetics of surrealism and the avant-garde. Situated in three distinct environments of our region – the lakeshore, the prairie, and the metropolis – this film is also a love letter to Chicago, highlighting the magnificent organism that is our city's world at night. Alongside more familiar scenes, Antonia Contro's stunning visual imagery guides the mind as it traverses around the twists and turns of the twilight hours – and captured in arresting detail by the visionaries at FourTen Media.

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Behind the Wallpaper

Behind the Wallpaper tells the story of a person undergoing a mysterious transformation one night in a college science park – a moment that will alter her mundane life, but not necessarily in ways apparent to those around her. Featuring the vocals of art-pop luminary Julia Holter and slipping between 19th-century romanticism, indie pop, Weimar cabaret, and Elizabethan music, Behind the Wallpaper is a glimpse inside the brilliantly divergent imagination and intellect of its creator, Alex Temple – and a refuge for anyone who has ever felt like an “other.”

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Spektral in the Press

“The quartet proved that they have everything: a supreme technical command that seems to come easily; a capacity to make complicated music clear; and, most notably on this occasion, an ability to cast a magic spell of silence over a restless, gallery-going audience.”

From Review: Frequency Festival in Chicago Offers the Complicated and the Compelling (Dec 2016)

“It’s the perfect advertisement for an album whose works incorporate humor, in wildly disparate ways, into the often severe matter of contemporary music. The photos also say something important about Spektral’s talented and ambitious musicians: serious about the music, not about themselves.”

From For Spektral Quartet, modern music mixes well with humor (Mar 2016)

“Chicago’s Spektral Quartet continues to explode the stereotype of how a classical string quartet should behave.

From Chicagoans of the Year 2017 (Dec 2017)

“The Spektral has accomplished the signal service of obliterating the dividing line between past and present, tradition and avant-garde; chronological barriers collapse, and the sounds roam free.”

From Two Thriving String Quartets (Nov 2020)