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It's also available archived on their web site: www.here-now.org.
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Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest
Classical NY meets Chicago PercussionClick here for the full article.
The Pioneer Local
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Performance Today with Fred Child
National radio and worldwide web broadcast of ETHEL's performance at the Grand Canyon Music Festival:
February 1, 2008: "Lighthouse"
December 21, 2007: "After Dust"
December 6, 2007: "Memory"
November 14, 2007: "Requiem"
November 8, 2007: "Arrival"
October 22 & 27, 2007: "After Dust"
October 8, 2007: "Pelimanni's Revenge"
A Conversation with ETHEL: Dorothy Lawson & Cornelius Dufallo
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ETHEL: A String Quartet with an Entirely New Sound
November 29, 2006
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ETHEL -- yes, that's the group's full name--is a New York crossover string quartet that artfully mixes classical elements with jazz, bluegrass, experimental rock, Brazilian folk dance, Finnish fiddling, speech, even animal noises. Each player is a composer in his or her own right; in fact, six of the dozen pieces on Ethel's latest album were written by them, the remaining six by others.
Ethel's ingenious, hard-driving, subversive pieces sometimes remind me of the Kronos Quartet's forays into vernacular styles, which is not to deny the former ensemble's creative originality or re-creative brilliance. This is their sophomore album for Cantaloupe Music; the music and performances are hugely enjoyable.
The new album by the Pacifica Quartet, ensemble in residence at the University of Chicago, illuminates a fascinating period in 20th-Century music (1922-1931), as represented by the Moravian Leos Janacek's String Quartet No. 2 ("Intimate Pages"), the German Paul Hindemith's Quartet No. 4 and the American Ruth Crawford Seeger's 1931 String Quartet. As Andrea Lamoureux points out in her excellent liner notes, the thematic thread that draws together these disparate works is their composers' public-spirited humanism.
The Janacek is diamondlike in its luminosity, intensely dramatic, deeply autobiographical music laced with plaintive sonorities. The Crawford Seeger quartet, a landmark of 20th-Century chamber music, is a study in dissonant dynamics that generates overwhelming tragic power. The five-movement Hindemith work bespeaks the contrapuntally complex, anti-romantic style cultivated by the young composing Turks of Weimar Germany. The Pacifica players prove themselves to be splendid advocates of all three pieces; first-rate recording, too.
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Soundcheck
Interview by JOHN SCHAEFER
September 13, 2006
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LIGHT WAVES
Ethel blends new classical music with experimental rock
By ROBERT HICKS
September 6-12, 2006
Downtown darlings ETHEL must be having fun playing in a string quartet. How else to explain all those car noises, footsteps, bird chirps, parrot talk, cowboy yelps, rooster crows, cat meows and strains of Marvin Gaye, Texas swing, Brazilian folk and Appalachia on the group’s new CD, Light? That’s light as in light, fun-loving music.
Juilliard alumni mix it together in Light, ETHEL’s new CD.
Photo © Steve J. Sherman.
Comprised of Juilliard alumni—violinists Mary Rowell and Cornelius Dufallo, violist Ralph Farris and cellist Dorothy Lawson—ETHEL showed its dark, serious side on its eponymous debut CD in 2003. In between its frosh and sophomore recordings, the string quartet collaborated with musicians as diverse as Joe Jackson, Todd Rundgren, Mark Stewart and New York singer/songwriter Dana Kurtz. The new disc features the members’ own original compositions, Rowell’s arrangement of jazz pianist Lennie Tristano’s “Requiem” and Farris’ arrangement of Timo Alakotila’s “Pelimanni’s Revenge,” as well as commissioned pieces from young, Brazilian composer Marcelo Zarvos, jazz clarinetist Don Byron, film composer Mary Ellen Childs and San Francisco audio artist Pamela Z.
“We like to groove. We basically like tonal music. Whatever the music is, we want it to have a voice, so that it’s not just an intellectual concept,” says Rowell. “We want to be accessible, but at the same time, we can’t just go out and play covers of rock tunes like other groups do.”
ETHEL recently appeared at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, Calif., where the quartet heard Einstein, a female African gray parrot who lives at the Knoxville Zoo in Tennessee. The bird’s talkative antics inspired Rowell’s humorous composition, “Also Sprach Einstein.”
“The opening Einsteinisms just created the mood for a party tune,” says Rowell.
Prior to their upcoming CD release show at Joe’s Pub, Ethel headed out West for the Grand Canyon Music Festival, the first leg of their “Truck Stop” project that found the quartet first working with young Native American composers for one week in late August. New York documentary film director, Molly McBride, captured the quartet’s activities there. Next spring, Ethel will work with shape-note singers in Lexington, Kentucky.
“We really want to be able to integrate into communities and learn about what’s important to them and to learn about our country a little bit through that kind of interchange,” says Rowell. Future plans for the Truck Stop project include working with a Texan conjunto artist and a Hawaiian musician for an upcoming concert in New York. This December, the group will present its House of Ethel show at the World Financial Center, sponsored by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). “There’s always an element of surprise in an Ethel show,” she says, “You never know what’s going to happen.”
September 12. Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette St. (betw. Astor Place & E. 4th St.), 212-254-1263; 7:30, $15.
Pop Classical ETHEL is Groove Until Itself
By EMILY HULME
September 11, 2006
Local pop classical group ETHEL is hard to define.
They're set up like a traditional string quartet, with two violins, a viola and a cello, but they rock out like a contemporary pop group. At their live shows, the audience is generally up on their feet, grooving to the music, rather than sitting politely and trying to unwrap hard candies without making any noise (not that you could hear a candy wrapper over the commotion Ethel and the crowd makes).
ETHEL is too cool for the concert hall.
We were all interested in other types of music and the type of audience you play for in pop music, and the enthusiasm you have," violinist Mary Rowell said. "The relationship between the stage to the audience was sort of lacking in classical music, where everyone is polite, and sits down and applauds at the right times."
The group is often compared to the Kronos Quartet, another radical contemporary string quartet. But beyond their unorthodox approaches to classical music, there aren't many other similarities. Ethel is a genre unto itself.
And they kind of like it that way. Part of their mission is to change people's conception of what classical music can and should be. Their Web site announces that they're receptive to unsolicited scores, and the group (each member of which has their own MySpace page, in addition to the official ETHEL MySpace) is all about having a direct connection with their audience.
"We want to hear ideas of what other people think ETHEL is," Rowell said.
The group has played all over the world, but ETHEL, with their urgent live show and melting-pot synthesis of musical styles, is very much a New York creature. This fall, they have a residency at Joe's Pub, "sharing the stage with our favorite artists and exploring new territory with them," said violist Ralph Farris.
"There isn't any doubt that this rose very specifically out of New York," said cellist Dorothy Lawson, "only because New York is so ready to promote fresh new faces, and is always curious."
ETHEL CD Release Party At Joe's Pub tonight. 7:30pm, $15. 425 Lafayette St, 212-539-8770
Light CD Review
By SCOTT PAULIN
September 2006
 | Album Details |
If you're not sure what to expect from a string quartet that calls itself ETHEL, the most sensible advice is simply to expect the unexpected. From one track to the next on Light, the group's second album for the wonderfully eclectic Cantaloupe Music label, you'll encounter Brazilian dance rhythms and Finnish fiddling, jazz licks and blues cadences, and a flawless classical technique in the service of rock 'n' roll energy. Like another of today's adventurous chamber ensembles, the Imani Winds, ETHEL's musicians are not only performers but composers and arrangers as well: Their own work accounts for half of the music on Light. But as on their self-titled debut, ETHEL also collaborates here with some of the boldest composers on the avant-garde scene. The album's furthest-out experiment, "ETHEL Dreams of Temporal Disturbances," is full of electronic effects, samples of an Irving Berlin song, and the vocals -- reminiscent of Laurie Anderson's wry observations -- of composer Pamela Z. In contrast, the hauntingly melodic minimalism of Mary Ellen Childs's "After Dust" provides a relatively tranquil respite from the more exuberant goings-on. The quartet's jazz leanings are also brought to the foreground, with ETHEL violinist Mary Rowell's arrangement of Lennie Tristano's "Requiem" providing one of the album's most powerfully emotive moments, and one of Don Byron's "Four Thoughts on Marvin Gaye" offering a more abstract, but no less intriguing, synthesis of jazz, soul, and the avant-garde. And then, just when you think you've mapped out the limits of ETHEL's influences and experiments, you encounter the "vocals" of Einstein -- an African gray parrot -- on the spirited final track, Rowell's "Also Sprach Einstein." Light may not suit those who want their music to fit neatly into one predictable category or another, but for the rest of us, it contains an album's worth of invigorating musical fun.