Trevor Bača, Paul Griffiths, Jack Quartet

Samuel Beckett completed Stirrings Still, his last prose work, in 1987, and it was published the following year. Here it is spoken by the critic and novelist Paul Griffiths and set against a score by the American composer Trevor Bača, written between 2016 and 2018 for narrator and string quartet and played by the JACK Quartet. The music is no accompaniment. It runs as a parallel stream, heard in alternation with the words, reflecting on what they say and drawing the listener further into them.

The quartet is Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman (violins), John Pickford Richards (viola) and Jay Campbell (cello). Griffiths, born in Bridgend in 1947, wrote the libretto for Elliott Carter's opera What Next?, also issued on ECM New Series. In Tyran Grillo's review for ECM Reviews he recalls hearing the quartet rehearse Bača's Akasha at Harvard in 2016, and names what drew him to the music in one word, "intimacy". The album was recorded in May 2023 and September 2024 at the Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI in Lugano, in collaboration with RSI Rete Due, and produced by Manfred Eicher. Bača has recalled sitting on stage on the second morning of the sessions, conducting the timing between music and words, until "a big part of the project snapped into place."

Beckett's text is more monologue than story. Its narrator stands at the edge between life and what lies beyond, between a wheatfield seen in black-and-white and a swirl of stumbling memories. Beckett cherished the songs and string quartets of Franz Schubert, and his prose works like music, through exact phrasing, repetition and form. Bača's score unfolds in eighteen numbered sections, and five of them (IX, X, XI, XIII and XVI) belong to the quartet alone. Grillo hears mournful scrapings at the outset, near-inaudible trembling and creaking textures further in, and quivering harmonics passing through the pauses of the voice. In the last section, according to the release notes, the strings carry the narrator's yearning to catch a half-heard word.

Bača was born in California in 1975 and raised in Texas. He studied with Stefano Scodanibbio and Julio Estrada, took a doctorate in composition at Harvard and has taught at Yale since 2019. The JACK Quartet, founded in 2005, works mainly in contemporary and experimental repertoire. Eicher has long been drawn to the inherent musicality of Beckett's writing. Grillo credits Bača with avoiding decorative accompaniment and finds the record's finest moments in its smallest, most physically precise gestures.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2801, released on 4 September 2026, with a cover photograph by Rosemarie Clausen.