JACK Quartet FILIGREE - MUSIC OF HANNAH LASH

Hannah Lash’s multi-layered music balances rhetoric with sensuality and enters into a dialogue with pre-existent forms while simultaneously reexamining them. On this excellent recording of her music for string quartet by the JACK Quartet, we hear Lash’s engagement with two canonic traditions as points of inspiration (the Baroque Suite as well as an extra musical discipline — tapestry arts from the Middle Ages), alongside two works that concern themselves with instrumental and musical phenomenon.
Frayed opens with sighing chords, breathing through the quartet like a series of inhales. The passage is performed with mutes on, lending it a covered sound, almost like a delicate harmonica. The accumulated energy eventually explodes into vigorous music before material from the opening is re-integrated, toggling back and forth between contrasting energies. As the work evolves, “frayed” edges of each expressive world begin to show—overpressure on the culmination of a repeated chord, a hybrid gesture of pizzicato and glissando articulated with the back of the frog of the bow.