After a bittersweet year, Quince Ensemble regains its momentum

A quince is a tart, bright-yellow fruit that is often used for preserves and jellies. It also happens to serve as the name of an all-female, contemporary vocal quartet that was supposed to make its debut last season in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW series.

Because of coronavirus protocols, the concert was postponed, and needless to say, the group was crushed. The good news is that the bulk of the program has been repurposed and will be streamed starting June 24 as part of CSO Sessions, a series of small-ensemble virtual concerts available via the CSOtv video portal. The virtual concert, conducted by Edwin Outwater, features CSO members including Principal Bass Alexander Hanna.

“This feels really, really emotional in the best possible way,” said mezzo-soprano Kayleigh Butcher, who serves as Quince’s executive director. “It feels like we are headed toward some positive things in the world right now in that we can finally do this. We are so grateful to everyone at the CSO and MusicNOW for being so diligent and patient with the world and with us in trying to reschedule this.”

Two of Quince’s four members reside in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, so the group uses that metropolitan area as its base. (It was headquartered in Chicago from 2012 to 2016.) Butcher, who lives in New York, and soprano Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, who resides in Omaha, Neb., normally fly there for rehearsals and meetings, but until March, such gatherings were not advisable during the pandemic.

Despite being isolated from one another, the four singers were nonetheless able last year to release “David Lang: love fail” (Innova Records), their fourth studio album (recorded before the pandemic’s outbreak), secure commissioning grants from Chamber Music America and the Fromm Music Foundation, and undertake online projects like the world premiere of Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh’s Amplified Traces with dancer-choreographer Veronica Santiago Moniello.

Initially, the word “quince” had a kind of double meaning for the ensemble, because the prefix “quin” refers to the number “five” in certain contexts. The group originally had five members when it was established in 2009 at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University where the singers were graduate students.

When one of the founding members left, the others decided to keep the appellation Quince Ensemble. “We didn’t feel like ‘Quartz’ was an appropriate name for us,” Butcher said. “We just liked the name ‘Quince,’ so we stuck with it. People still sometimes think that we’re five people. But, nope, we’re just four.” 

From the start, Quince has been devoted to contemporary music. To help expand the repertoire for its combination of voices, the group launched the Quince New Music Commissioning Fund, for which it continues to raise financial support.

“That’s where our interests lie when we’re together,” Butcher said. “We’re interested in commissioning new works for our voices specifically. All of us individually have side projects that fulfill those other desires. Carrie Henneman Shaw, one of our sopranos, is an early-music technician based in the Twin Cities. She really gets a lot of joy and happiness out of that, and the rest of us kind of do Romantic music. Liz [Pearse] is a really big Strauss fan, and I really like the Second Viennese School, so I have projects that focus on that.”

Opera News has called Quince “the Anonymous 4 of new music,” a reference to the famed vocal quartet that devoted itself to primarily early music from 1986 through 2015 but also performed some contemporary repertoire as well. The group obviously appreciates the link to Anonymous 4, because it trumpets the quote on its website. “We do love the comparison,” Butcher said, “because we think they’re awesome.”

In a normal year, the ensemble performs 20-30 concerts all over the United States, devoting much of its time to college and university residencies, like one at the University of Chicago from May 16 through 22, and other kinds of educational outreach. Quince is particularly interested in working with young, up-and-coming composers who have little or no experience in writing for voices. The group is a big fan of Warner Enström, whom it met during a student-composer residency at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It regularly performs his work, Hushers, and has even recorded an album which it named after that composition.

Performing on the MusicNOW series was going to be one of the big highlights of Quince’s 2019-20 season. “We were based in Chicago for a very long time, and we have been to so many MusicNOW performances,” Butcher said. “And Missy Mazzoli, we’re a big fan of hers. It’s incredibly exciting for us to be able to come back to Chicago in this way and to showcase vocal music that we’re really excited about.”

Mazzoli, who is in her third and final season as the Chicago Symphony’s Mead Composer-in-Residence, served as the curator for MusicNOW. She put an emphasis on composers who have never been featured on the lineup, especially women and those with Chicago connections. 

Mazzoli and Quince were aware of each other previously, but it was through composer Courtney Bryan, a professor of music at Tulane University in New Orleans, that the vocal ensemble was to have been featured in the 2020 MusicNOW concert. The four singers met her during a residency in New Hampshire and became fans of Bryan and her work.

Quince had already commissioned a work from her, and Butcher recommended to Mazzoli that Quince perform that composition as part of MusicNOW. “We kind of combined the commission together,” Butcher said, “so that there is a piece that we could premiere on MusicNOW but we also have something that we could tour later on. So Courtney was actually kind of the middle man there.”

The commission was to have been the centerpiece of that 2020 MusicNOW concert, but instead it will anchor the June 24 CSO Sessions program, curated by Mazzoli. Bryan proposed writing some type of a mass, and Quince readily assented. “We’ve never had anything like that before as Quince, so were really interested in knowing what that would be in her voice,” Butcher said. The result is a 20- to 25-minute piece titled Requiem, which will be accompanied by CSO members playing clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba and percussion.

The program will open with Gilda Lyons’ Bone Needles, which Butcher said is one of the group’s favorites. A wordless duet featuring Bartlett and Pearse, it’s a kind of a tapestry of the sounds the composer heard while watching a group of Nicaraguan women weave fishing nets with bone needles. “It’s a really cool piece, and there is no text at all,” Butcher said. “It’s just kind of women hooting in really beautiful ways.”

Next comes an instrumental work, Perspective Dwellers, by Chicago composer and cellist Tomeka Reid.

The program continues with The Pub, a Quince-commissioned world premiere by Chicago-based composer David Reminick. “He is one of my favorite people in the whole world, and one of my favorite composers,” Butcher said. The Pub is from a group of songs that Reminick is writing for Quince called In Dreams, which in turn is part of a larger work titled The Sleep Cycle. This section is based on a dream of composer Alex Temple in which she goes to a pub and then realizes that she has somehow committed a murder and is being chased by a detective.

“It’s a weird, bizarre piece,” Butcher said, “where we wind up singing backward a few times and creating this rewind effect, and that’s really, really fun to do.”