Astra

In APRIL and JUNE, two significant string chamber works by the late Keith Humble are heard among two contrasting networks of choral music. Humble’s String Trio, written in Paris in the 1950s, belongs in the Germanic expressive tradition of Mozart and Schoenberg. The string quartet Four All Seasons of nearly 40 years later is influenced more by American ideas of a continuous sonic environment and variable open forms.  

The June 10 program, in the sonorous space of the Carmelite Church, draws an arc of choral soundscapes of the American tradition – from Charles Ives and his neglected colleague John J. Becker to Donald Martino and Robert Carl – around Keith Humble’s spiralling perpetuo-moto of string-quartet sound and his open-form choral continuum ACCJ, first composed for the Astra Choir 10 years before the quartet, in 1979.