Recently, the JACK Quartet played a series of concerts at the Whitney Museum, sounding the sparse celestial beauty of John Cage’s “Thirty Pieces for String Quartet” among the floating colors and shapes of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. Listeners wandered through the gallery featuring an exhibition of Calder’s works, aptly titled “Hypermobility,” focusing on the sound and space and breath of these tactile entities. The pairing of sounds with visuals was uncanny; I felt like I was looking at what I was hearing and vice versa. The quartet (and audience) then transitioned to a theater on another floor of the museum for a more “traditional” performance of Morton Feldman’s “Structures,” Earle Brown’s String Quartet, and Amy Williams’s “Richter Textures.” The following week, I talked with Williams about the genesis of her piece, the capacity for sound to convey multisensory experiences, and the diminishing division between “academic” and “nonacademic” composers.
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