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Incantations

Sirius Quartet
Fung Chern Hwei violin
Gregor Huebner violin
Sunjay Jayaram viola
Jeremy Harman cello

Release Date: January 10, 2025
Catalog #: NV6690
Format: Digital
21st Century
Chamber
String Quartet

The Sirius Quartet speaks past the veil in INCANTATIONS, a collection of nine works honoring memory, grief, and the aspect of loss as it appears in our interpersonal and social relationships. The music of INCANTATIONS is a speaking vessel to concentrate the profound loss experienced at the individual and communal level in recent decades into a great beyond, a release of grief for its composers, performers, and listeners alike. Exploring grief as it exists in political, cultural, and familial spaces, the Sirius Quartet commentates on the loss of loved ones as eloquently as it commentates on the loss of shared humanity in the great American political divide, or the devastating loss afflicted by unnecessary war. Pulling from various cultural diasporas, INCANTATIONS teaches a lesson in the universal language of loss, and the unique and beautiful ways we respond and adapt to it.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Echo Chambers Jeremy Harman Sirius Quartet 7:33
02 Sahasranamam Sunjay Jayaram Sirius Quartet 6:12
03 Chant pour l'ile Gorée Gregor Huebner Sirius Quartet 8:35
04 String Quartet Nr. 7 Op. 76 - Rage: I. Shut It Down Gregor Huebner Sirius Quartet 3:38
05 String Quartet Nr. 7 Op. 76 - Rage: II. Magutny Bozha (for the people of Belarus) Gregor Huebner Sirius Quartet 3:37
06 String Quartet Nr. 7 Op. 76 - Rage: III. Aleppo Gregor Huebner Sirius Quartet 8:53
07 Between Impulses Fung Chern Hwei Sirius Quartet 7:35
08 You Can't Get Them Back Sunjay Jayaram Sirius Quartet 8:08
09 Farwell, Horatio Fung Chern Hwei Sirius Quartet 8:07
10 At Sea (Scatter the Ashes) Jeremy Harman Sirius Quartet 7:00
11 Prayer of Mind and Heart Anonymous Sirius Quartet 4:18

Recorded at Kyberg Studios in Oberhaching, Germany
Recording & Mixing Kseniya Kawko
Mastering Christoph Stickel at CS Mastering in Vienna, Austria

Track 7
Recorded at the Bunker Studios in Brooklyn NY
Studio Engineer Nolan Thies

Executive Producer Bob Lord

VP of A&R Brandon MacNeil

VP of Production Jan Košulič
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Chelsea Kornago
Digital Marketing Manager Brett Iannucci

Artist Information

Sirius Quartet

Ensemble

Sirius Quartet combines exhilarating repertoire with unequaled improvisational fire. These conservatory-trained performer-composers shine with precision, soul and raw energy, championing a forward-thinking, genre-defying approach. Since their debut concert at the original Knitting Factory in New York City, Sirius has played some of the most important venues in the world, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, the Beijing Music Festival, the Cologne Music Triennale, the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Stuttgart Jazz, Musique Actuelle in Canada, the Taichung Jazz Fest — Taiwan’s biggest jazz event — and many others.

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Fung Chern Hwei

violin

One of the most sought after violinists in New York City, Malaysian-born Fung Chern Hwei absorbed a large number of musical styles growing up in a diverse environment. Artists that he has been fortunate enough to perform with include Hiromi, Uri Caine, Rufus Reid, Steve Wilson, Richie Beirach, Terence Blanchard, and the Turtle Island Quartet, among others. In addition to Sirius Quartet, Fung can also be found performing and recording with metal string quartet SEVEN)SUNS and Michael Bates’ Acrobat, a chamber jazz band that performs music from Soviet composers.

chernhwei.com

Gregor Huebner

violin

Gregor Huebner is a GRAMMY®-nominated and award-winning composer and violinist, celebrated by audiences and critics alike for his visionary work across genres. His music has been described by The New York City Jazz Record as “challenging and vivid… seamlessly incorporat[ing] chamber elements with avant garde jazz.” Born in Stuttgart, Huebner splits his time between New York and Munich. As a member of Sirius Quartet, Richie Beirach/Gregor Huebner Duo, El Violin Latino, Berta Epple, and founder of the Munich Composers Collective, he has performed at festivals including the Montreux Jazz Festival (Switzerland), Cork Festival (Ireland), Taichung Jazz Festival (Taiwan), Tbilisi Jazz Festival (Georgia), and the Bell Atlantic Festival in New York.

Huebner’s collaborations with Richie Beirach and George Mraz have yielded three critically acclaimed albums including the Latin GRAMMY®-nominated Round About Federico Mompou. In 2017 he won the grand prize in the New World Composers Competition of the New York Philharmonic. Huebner has also been commissioned by the International Bach Academy in Stuttgart, the State Theater of Fürth, the State Academy of Music Ochsenhausen, the Grand Theatre Luxembourg, the WDR Big Band, and Tribeca New Music among many others. His works have been premiered by major ensembles such as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Nova Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. The Irish Times, reviewing a recording of Huebner, Beirach, and saxophonist Charlie Mariano writes “violinist Gregor Huebner… is in the kind of mood to blow anyone away… emotionally complex… lovely.” He currently holds a professorship of composition at the University of Music and Theater in Munich.

gregorhuebner.com

Sunjay Jayaram

viola

Sunjay Jayaram is a violist, violinist, and improviser who enjoys playing in a wide variety of styles including traditional and contemporary classical music as well as jazz, Carnatic music, and more. He is the violist in Sirius Quartet, a progressive chamber group that composes and performs its own music. He has worked with a wide variety of groups and ensembles in New York City such as the American Composers Orchestra, 8-Bit Big Band, Ene, and the chamber orchestra Parlando. Jayaram has also worked with musicians and directors including Ted Sperling, Bobby Sanabria, Huang Ruo, Elijah Thomas, Richie Beirach, Amir ElSaffar, and others. Find Jayaram on Instagram.

Jeremy Harman

cello

Massachusetts-based cellist, composer, and songwriter Jeremy Harman is always exploring shifting musical terrain with a continual desire to evolve as both an artist and a person. Equally at home on acoustic and electric instruments, Harman embodies the “post-genre” attitude in his broad-based love of music and insatiable curiosity to explore it through the lens of the cello. Whether playing string quartets, jazz standards, freely improvised creations, or hardcore and metal riffs, Harman’s musical voice is as impassioned as it is distinct.

Drawing from an ever-changing pool of stylistic influences often including contemporary classical, modern jazz, progressive metal, downtempo, free improvisation, and folk music of all kinds, his musical path has taken him across the globe and to venues ranging from Carnegie Hall and the Kodak Theatre to the House of Blues and the Newport Jazz Festival.

Harman is the cellist for the NYC-based Sirius Quartet, who have brought their original compositions and progressive sound to audiences throughout the United States, Germany, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and South Africa. Recent collaborators include Tracy Silverman, Uri Caine, Rufus Reid, Linda Oh, Billy Martin, John Escreet, Peter Stan, Frank Almond, and Marlis Petersen. He also appears frequently with instrumental chamber music/indie-rock alchemists Cordis, including performances on NPR’s Mountain Stage and concerts throughout the United States.

Harman has shared the stage with an extremely wide range of artists including Quincy Jones, John Williams, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Bobby McFerrin, Lady Gaga, Sir Elton John, Tony Bennett, Mary J Blige, Pinchas Zuckerman, DeVotchKa, Debbie Harry, Bright Eyes, Marc Ribot, and Dame Shirley Bassey, among others, and has done session and arranging work for countless indie artists in New England and beyond.

A passionate educator, Harman is an Associate Professor of Cello at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and the creator of the online course Creative Expansion for Cellists, which has been helping intermediate and advanced cellists develop their creative and improvisatory skills on the instrument.

jeremyharman.net

Notes

Those we remember never fully disappear from our lives. As artists, we are gifted with the power to speak to the realm of our ancestors. With this new album, we each call out to those who came before us. The pieces on this record are our Incantations, through which we speak into the beyond. What we offer to the beyond, we offer to you, the listener, so that we may not forget great people in the ever-flowing river of spirits.

This piece has been a long time in the making, with the opening line being written years ago while killing time in the green room between our soundcheck and concert at a club in Stuttgart, Germany. It’s an angular and aggressive piece and draws a lot of rhythmic ideas from heavy genres of music like hardcore and metal (as does much of my music). “Echo chamber” is a term that is often used politically to describe the phenomenon of surrounding oneself entirely with ideas and opinions that reinforce what one already feels and/or believes. This has been intensified exponentially by social media and misinformation, and has played a large role in contributing to America’s current toxic political climate. This piece attempts to be a musical reflection of that, offered with the hope that we can learn how to get past the tribalism and demonization that have become the norm of American political discourse and find a better way forward.

My mother raised me as a Hindu, and like in many religions, Hindu priests communicate in melody, rather than pure speech. Sahasranamam channels the power behind those melodies to speak into the beyond. The music comes from the recitation of an ancient prayer for Vishnu.

Spending some time in Dakar/Senegal in a Sufi village and visiting the island of Gorée, the most western point of Africa, was inspirational and emotional. I’ile Gorée, also called the Gate of No Return for all the slaves shipped from Africa to the Americas, is a very powerful place. This visit, along with hearing the Chants of the Sufi people, informed this composition.

I. “Shut It Down”
Inspired by both the depressing time of the first COVID-19 lockdown in New York and the powerful Black Lives Matter demonstrations, “Shut it Down” is an expression of the uncertainty that often accompanies change.

II. “Magutny Bozha” (for the people of Belarus)
Magutny Bozha is a tribute to acceptance and perseverance in the face of change. Based on a folk song from Belarus, in which political change was hinted at but then rigorously suppressed, this piece is nevertheless intended to provide comfort and maintain hope for future improvement.

III. “Aleppo”
Based on three photographs of the war photographer Yusuke Suzuki, I tried to mirror the images of another unnecessary war in Syria and the destruction of the ancient city of Aleppo.

A few weeks before he left the mortal world, I visited Creative Music Studio’s Karl Berger at a Tibetan monastery in Woodstock NY. In the course of an hour or so, he shared some of his precious wisdom with me. One of the things he said which really stuck with me was his take on improvisation: Do not play the idea, but play between the ideas. I took this to mean to hold back from playing what immediately comes to mind, as those are most likely the things we already know and play by default. To play between ideas is to play contemplatively, hence getting closer to the possibility of discovering something new. This piece is my attempt to reinterpret this notion by composing sections and having the quartet improvise in between as transitions, hence forming a complete piece of music. I dedicate this humble little piece to Karl, may he transition to the next life peacefully.

You Can’t Get Them Back is dedicated to a friend who passed too soon. He was a violist, and one of my first musical heroes. The more time I spent writing, the more the piece became about accepting that he’s gone. Now through music, I’m able to give him a proper goodbye, without denial and confusion.

Dedicated to my first ever friend in New York City, Kim Dong-Hyun (1974–2020). He was a fearless warrior who fought for his dreams; and a friend, faithful as Hamlet’s Horatio. This piece is my telegraph to the other side of life, where he peacefully resides.

The seed of this piece was planted years back while the quartet was working on a cruise ship for 3 weeks, traveling down the Atlantic off the west coast of Africa, from Cape Verde to Cape Town. During a practice session in my room, with my patio door open to the ocean and its sounds, I wrote the opening cello part, and once it had crystallized, I recorded it on my phone. While listening back, I loved the background sounds of the waves crashing against the ship and wanted to recreate this with the bows of our instruments. This piece is dedicated to my father Brian Harman (1951–2018), an amazing jazz guitarist and music educator who I owe my entire career in music to, and who I think of often when I play and write.