By Miranda Wilson | From the January/February 2026 issue of Strings
These new works are performed by the JACK Quartet—violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell—which is rightly renowned for its longtime focus on contemporary music. The precision of its execution matches the composer’s demand for very specific intonation systems in String Quartet I, a work built around the idea of just intonation (a system of tuning based on simple whole-number frequency ratios).
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In his liner notes, the composer describes a transformative encounter with W.A. Mathieu’s theory treatise The Harmonic Experience, which teaches learners to sing resonances over a drone. The “Helmholtz-Ellis notation system” used in this piece results in some chords tuned in deliberately surprising ways, creating a harmony that sounds both natural and unsettling. The first part of String Quartet I starts with a heavy, deliberate melody with rhythmic cycles expanding in energy. The second part is composed of interlocking arpeggios, developing into a flowing, unified texture. Laplante’s writing allows for long spans of gradual, evolving change rather than dramatic contrasts.
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String Quartet II takes a more autobiographical direction. Laplante explains that the genesis of the composition came from the idea of love for his father and grew to include other forms of connection—to his wife, his mentors, and even the natural world. Here, harmonic progressions stretch familiar diatonic materials until they nearly lose their footing, then resolve gently into consonances. The Jack Quartet’s playing here is particularly strong, maintaining intensity at very soft dynamics and in slow, suspended passages.
Laplante’s quartets show how tuning and resonance (rather than extended techniques, for example) can be melodic, harmonic, and structural features of a composition. The systems used may not be familiar to listeners, but the music always keeps you listening.
The Jack Quartet performs throughout with typical energy, demonstrating its ability to meet the composer’s demands. These include “stretching the limits of the physical body and the instrument . . . how one can be taken to ecstatic places through this process of going out to the edge of where your body is at its limit.” The album is testament not only to Laplante’s renown as a composer, but also to the Jack Quartet’s continued reputation as one of the most important new music ensembles of today.
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