The Spirit of Simple Sounds

I spoke with composer Samuel Adams ahead of the performance of his Third String Quartet, “Alma,” on the Sonic Spectrum concert on November 12, 2026.

Nicky Swett: What are some of your favorite string quartets from the standard, and perhaps not so standard, repertoire? Do any of those inspirations come out particularly clearly in this quartet?

Samuel Adams: A lot of my favorite music happens to be written for string quartet. Some well-known pieces that I return to again and again are the late Beethoven quartets, particularly Opp. 131 and 132, although Op. 59, No. 1 holds a special place in my heart. I’m also completely obsessed with the six Bartók quartets. Of those, No. 4 is a particular favorite. It was the first Bartók quartet I got to know on a very deep level, and there is certainly a nod to its third movement, Non troppo lento, in my piece.

Some other quartets I absolutely adore include John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts and Helmut Lachenmann’s quartets, especially his third, Grido. I also love the quartets of Caroline Shaw, whom I believe to be a total master of the form. She knows how to make the quartet glow with resonant beauty. Probably the “deepest cut” love of mine is Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, which can last anywhere between four and six hours. One of the most moving, out-of-body experiences of my life was listening to a performance in Chicago about a decade ago. There are moments of shocking beauty in that work. I even convinced my wife to allow a passage of the piece to be performed at our wedding!

I grew up listening to the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which was the Bay Area’s preeminent quartet for several decades until their beloved maverick leader, Geoff Nutall, recently passed away. Geoff was an unabashed Haydn evangelist, and his performances were electric, full of humor and deep feeling. Because of Geoff, it was easy to love Haydn. On the surface, my music bears little resemblance to these composers, but I am continually inspired by the myriad gifts each of them has given us. There is so much to draw from!

NS: How is this piece similar to previous works you have written for string quartet and how is it different?

SA: I wrote my first quartet more than a decade ago, while I was still in my twenties, and although there are things about that work that I still like, I think of it as an exploratory, experimental piece—much, much more allusive than my second and third quartets. My second quartet, which I wrote in installments over a three-year period for the Chicago-based Spektral Quartet, is a completely different animal. That work involves electronics: contact speakers are placed on snare drums, creating this otherworldly, slightly out-of-tune sound. It’s also quite a long-form work, with ideas evolving over large spans of time. This third quartet feels like a more complex and layered work due to, paradoxically, the simplicity of the materials. This is something that I’ve learned as I have grown as a composer: that it’s often the simplest materials that elicit the most emotionally complex responses.

NS: You subtitled the quartet “Alma,” after the Alma Quartet, who commissioned and premiered the work. Are there other ways in which the sounds or characters found in the piece relate to the title?

SA: To answer your question very specifically, the quartet’s movements have an A-B-C-A form, like the shape of the word “Alma” [A-L-M-A]. Beyond that, the individual letters carry no particular significance.

I have no idea what the name “Alma” means to the Alma Quartet; I never asked. But while writing the piece, I became interested in the word’s Latin and Spanish associations with “soul” or “spirit.” As I’ve grown older, music-making has become an increasingly spiritual exercise for me. I’ve made a greater effort to focus my attention on the unknown, and to trust that the formal logic of a work will emerge as a result of intuitive thinking. I was often told by certain teachers that one should maintain a healthy skepticism toward one’s own intuitions, but I frankly find this a very boring way to make art. Working in the dark is necessary to come up with anything good. I squirm having to say the obvious thing out loud, but it’s true that there are ideas and feelings that can only be communicated through music, and accessing those ideas, those states of excitement—of deeper feeling—requires a sort of spiritual attention.

NS: In the program note you wrote for the piece, you mention the “open notation” found at the climax of the third movement, when the cello and violin play expansive melodies and the middle voices play slightly out-of-sync, fast repeated notes. What effect were you going for at this moment?

SA: The notation isn’t entirely open—I’ve still made some important decisions regarding harmony and melody. I just wanted the music to open up and become supremely organic and soaring, particularly for the first violinist and cellist, and the best way to do this was by giving the players a lot of rhythmic flexibility. After 15 minutes of playing very precise, intricately notated music, the passage lands differently when the players are suddenly afforded that kind of freedom. They’re still moving through material that I’ve composed, but they’re able to shape its pacing and gestures much more intuitively.

NS: An interesting feature of the quartet is how you regularly have two or more players create the impression that they are a single voice. You do this using special effects, like the cello and viola passing off slides and plucked notes in the opening movement, and also through textural choices like all the unisons and pairs of voices in the third movement. Is this a general aspect of your musical style or something particular to this piece?

SA: Typically, before I think about orchestration or how to distribute voices, I engage with the material in a sort of vacuum. Rather than working with MIDI or electronically generated mock-ups of the music, I record layers and layers of material on my studio piano to build the pacing and form of the work. I want to spend as much time as possible engaging with the design of the work before thinking about the physical world and how to make the music happen. Of course, I still need to think about the physical limitations of the instruments I’m writing for—range, technique, and so on—but working this way gives me the ability to understand the pacing and architecture of a piece without being burdened too early by the nuts and bolts of how it will all work. In this sense, I’m a little like an architect: I first create an elaborate blueprint, and only after the design is complete do I start laying the bricks—or, in my case, orchestrating.

Because of this, I often find myself working with material that can’t be realized by one instrument alone, but instead has to be realized by several instruments working in tandem. In that sense, I don’t think it’s wrong to hear this string quartet as one big hyper-instrument rather than as a collection of four individual voices. It’s almost like a mass by Giovanni Palestrina: the individual voices are there, but what ultimately matters is the larger composite sound they create together.

NS: Could you share a bit about the difference in experience between hearing this piece in a live performance and listening to a recording, like the one made in 2024 by the Alma Quartet, and how that relates to our sense of the unity and diversity of the voices in the quartet?

SA: The Alma Quartet recording captures the precision of the writing beautifully and perhaps makes the illusion of four players becoming a single instrument especially clear. But in a live setting, you can see the physical mechanism behind these composite sounds: a gesture being passed from one player to another, or several players working together to create what the ear perceives as a single object. I like that tension between what you see and what you hear.

An important thing about hearing this piece in a live setting is just how resonant it is. There is a tremendous amount of doubling, open strings, and harmonics, and with the environmental control of a recording studio and post-production, some of that resonant wildness is lost. Particularly in smaller spaces, I’ve found that the resonance of the work becomes an extremely important parameter, just as important as harmony, rhythm, and melody. You’re not only hearing the notes the quartet is playing; you’re hearing the instruments activating one another and the room around them. Sounds accumulate and reinforce one another, and the room itself becomes a part of the piece.

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a program annotator and editorial contributor at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.