Trevor Baca: Samuel Beckett: Stirrings Still
ECM New Series

Anyone familiar with Samuel Beckett's writing knows that a musical treatment of it won't be gleefully rhapsodic, and consistent with that Trevor Baca's setting of Stirrings Still, the writer's final prose piece, is worlds removed from, say, pastoral reveries set to words by Romantic poets. As he should, Baca honours the integrity of the writer's work by fashioning a treatment that's as cryptic and bleak as anything Beckett put his pen to. Completed in 1987 and published the following year, Stirrings Still is more wry meditation than life narrative, as the narrator unsentimentally ruminates on being and non-being.

Such a project is tailor-made for JACK Quartet, given the ensemble's appetite for daring experimental music and contemporary repertoire. Violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell bring their customary commitment to their part. It's also a natural fit for Baca (b. 1975), one of whose concerns as a composer involves “the powers of musical storytelling.” His matching of music to text is scrupulous, so much so that it would be hard to imagine another approach bettering the one adopted. As a composer and scholar, he's well-qualified for the role: a Harvard graduate, he's a faculty member of the Department of Music at Yale University whose music has been performed throughout the world. Having authored more than twenty books and written the libretti for Tan Dun's Marco Polo and Hans Abrahamsen's let me tell you, narrator Paul Griffiths (b. 1947) also comes to the project with impressive credentials.

In the text (unfortunately not included in the release booklet), Beckett's unnamed protagonist sits alone at night at a table contemplating death and observing how even with the room darkened light from an upper window still penetrates. Visible too is a stool that he mounts to look out, his viewing more directed to the sky than the ground below. Despite actions of sitting, rising, and standing, a sense of crippling immobility, as well as claustrophobia and desperation, pervades the space. Words and phrases obsessively repeat, entangle, and circle around, their trajectories seeming analogues to the absurdity of life's repetitions.

The work, incidentally, was jumpstarted by ECM's Manfred Eicher, who asked Griffiths in 2006 to choose a composer whose music would complement Beckett's words, and upon hearing JACK Quartet rehearsing a piece by Baca in 2016 knew he'd found the ideal collaborators. The music's perfectly suited to the text, its ghoulish creep cryptic, nightmarish, and terse. Bows creak and scrape across strings to generate ghostly shrieks, shudders, and moans, with the convulsing, bone-dry music interweaving with narration by Griffiths that's expressive but subtly so, the voice free of florid theatrical gesture and more focused on dry utterance. Tension's never far from the surface, and words and music operate in tandem, with each to-and-fro gesture responding to the other. There is an inherent musicality to Beckett's writing that lends it especially well to a musical treatment, as does its use of space and silence. Eighteen tracks, a small number narration-free, are indexed, but the piece unfolds in an uninterrupted stream that facilitates immersion.

October 2026