Clarinetist McGill works with a simpatico string quartet in American compositions

Pacifica Quartet is in residence at the IU Jacobs School.

 So much of personal interest to the performers is conveyed by the music and the program notes included with "American Stories" (Cedille) that it's a little amazing not to find the names of Pacifica Quartet personnel anywhere in texts accompanying an inviting new CD by the ensemble now in residence at Indiana University in collaboration with clarinetist Anthony McGill. They are Simin Ganatra and Austin Hartman, violins; Mark Holloway, viola, and Brandon Vamos, cello.

Recent changes in the makeup of the quartet are just part of the reason the name of every performer in this recording should have been included. That aside, what "American Stories" comprises are four works by living American composers, each of them with programmatic content. Richard Danielpour, the  most established of the composers, is represented by "Four Angels," a title celebrating the 1963 sacrifice of four girls in Sunday school in a racist church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. (A piece by jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, titled "Alabama," is a notable precursor of music in tribute to their nation-shocking murder.)

Anthony McGill writes about link to American composers.

'Four Angels" is part lament, part protest.  The moods are effectively balanced. Toward the end, representation of throbbing and sighs dominate a piece that puts the five musicians on a consistently common plane.

 "We are sharing the story of the composers themselves, and ourselves as the performers," McGill explains in a program note. The Danielpour piece differs in that it has no autobiographical resonance, in contrast to pieces by James Lee, Ben Shirley, and Valerie Coleman that complete the CD. 

Lee's "Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet" comes closest to abstract music, though the work is informed by the composer's interest in pictorial and musical representations of African-American and Native American life. A  ritualistic dance tempo is established by the quartet in "Forgotten Emblems," the first movement, until the clarinet's entrance with a highly decorative melody. Problems of establishing who one is as an American in a minority community seem to be addressed in the third movement, "Alas, My Identity." The questioning nature of Lee's writing here is sealed by his use of phrases that seem to end in midair.  The finale, "Celebrated Emblems," brings forward vivid pizzicato writing in the strings and effusive clarinet trills to eventually achieve a unified climax.

Shirley's "High Sierra Sonata" strikes me as therapeutic program music, in which the  composer's shared experience of recovery from addiction and the healing properties of working in a natural environment provide all the information you need to enjoy the piece. In the first movement, for example, agitation grows quickly as a parade of accents (evoking a practice frequent in Beethoven) communicates the "Angry Secrets" of the movement's title.

Coleman's "Shotgun Houses" commemorates the Louisville neighborhood of her childhood, a milieu she shares with Muhammad Ali, who grew up as Cassius Clay there. I'm not among the admirers of Ali, but Coleman's tribute is picturesque and well-designed.  In the finale, "Rome 1960," the composer creates some clever depictions of Ali in the ring, floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, as he burst onto the world stage as an athletic celebrity in the Olympics. McGill and the Pacifica Quartet rise to the occasion here as they do throughout this rare program of new music.