BY SAMUEL COTTELL
When four undergraduate saxophone students were ‘thrown together’ almost 14 years ago, they never predicted the future success of their ensemble.
This is the story of the Nexas Saxophone Quartet, which formed in 2002 and is now making its mark on the Australian chamber music scene. The group’s success comes from a combination of personalities, virtuosic saxophone skills, and an ability to program concerts of a wide appeal that has seen the musicians perform in a multitude of settings. I caught up with two members of Nexas Saxophone Quartet, Andrew Smith and Jay Byrnes, to chat about the history of the group and their up coming concert Folklore.
In their first year, the musicians performed over 100 concerts, something that they credit as helping them overcome stage fright. “What stage fright?” Andrew says. “When you do over 100 concerts in a year, there isn’t time to think about stage fright.” In their first year they were booked for dozens of performances as they forged a reputation as a group who was always ready to perform. “We were really lucky that were great friends as well, so rehearsals were also a way to hang out with mates. Because of this, we were rehearsing two to three times a week because it was a social event as well,” Jay says.
There’s an interesting story behind the name of the quartet – it came about as a combination of the word ‘nexus (noun) a connection or series of connections linking two or more things’ and the word ‘saxen’. Andrew tells me that Xenakis wrote a piece called ‘Xas’ , for saxophone quartet, which is Sax backwards, so the name is a combination of these things. A rather appropriate one as well, given that many of their concerts feature collaborations and performances with other artists across a wide range of genres. The collaborations help the quartet in reaching new audiences and expanding musical horizons. “It also helps us explore different possibilities in our ensemble setting. The interaction with other musicians can allow you to realise different possibilities and elements that you might not have thought about,” Andrew says.
From collaborating and building a network through many different musicians and their networks, numerous performance opportunities have developed. This year, the quartet recorded the music of Drew Crawford for a Melbourne Theatre Company production and later in the year it will perform new music by Matthew Hindson and Cyrus Meurant in a ballet production of Romeo and Juliet to be performed in Newcastle.
“These projects help with generating new audiences, but it’s also nice for us, going for nearly 15 years and the majority of what we do is with saxophone players. So it’s at a point now where we really want to explore working with other musicians, not just instrumentalists, but with all different musicians such as singers and others from different genres,” Jay says.
“We have found it really interesting and fun to work with a broad number of different musicians, such as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra clarinettist Frank Celata, or jazz singers such as Nicky Crayson. It has brought something different to the group and allows us to see how other people work.
“We all have ‘other parts of our lives’ apart from the quartet, which allows us to then rehearse as much as we do and do concerts as much as we do. We have had a lot of success with our recent concert series so we will be going next year into our third concert series.”
A saxophone quartet is a very versatile ensemble and arguably, any style of music can be successfully adapted and well suited to the group. “It can be one instrument, it can be an orchestra, it can be one super-voice, and that’s the beauty of it. I think that’s why it is appealing to a lot of composers. Its like depending on how you want to use it . It can be used as a beautiful homogenous sound or four very different voices,” Andrew says.
As for repertoire, given that the saxophone quartet is a fairly new ensemble, there is lots of room for arrangements, transcriptions and the commissioning of new works. Andrew and Jay explain: “The first really important quartet was only formed in the 1930s and 1940s, and if you’ve got no back catalogue of repertoire, what do you do? You commission new works and you transcribe. In our community, it’s not frowned upon to do the transcriptions and then have people hear them. They often say, ‘that works really well’.
“We’ve had string quartet friends who love the Dvorak string quartet on the saxophones, as it brings a different character to the work. Its nice from our perspective to get that reaffirmed. A lot of composers have said writing for a saxophone quartet can be easier because you know your work will get performed. A sax quartet is generally more accepting to perform new works so that’s a good chance for them.”
Andrew adds: “It’s important for us when we are doing arrangements and transcriptions to still make it a saxophone work. Whilst we do try to bring the sensitivity of the string quartet to the performance, there isn’t much point in us trying to mimic the string quartet exactly, because we will never sound like a string quartet. So, in that way, we try and bring something new to the music as well.
“We are really fortunate with the sax quartet, it is so diverse, we have played music from the renaissance period, right through to brand new works and everything in between. We feel that almost anything can work in the sax quartet medium if the arrangement is approached well.”
Their next concert called Folklore is a themed program featuring various aspects of music containing folk elements. It’s not your standard concert, though – there is something for everyone. The quartet had performed arrangement of the Dvorak ‘American’ string quartet while they were students at GAP, a summer school for saxophone. One of the leading saxophone quartets in the world suggested this work to them.
Is it difficult to translate string quartet repertoire the saxophone quartet? “I think that’s what the string players love – all of a sudden that ‘big moment’ becomes ‘really big’,”Andrew says.
“We have a much louder approach to the fortes,” Jay adds. “We work very hard, and find it very challenging getting the ‘softs’ that a string quartet can achieve. But also, I think because of our background of repertoire and the majority of it being French music for saxophone, our approach to vibrato and expressive techniques is very different as well. So, I think we phrase differently because of the repertoire we have grown up with.
“The Ligeti Bagatelles are pieces that we had done before as well and we thought, ‘that really works well’ and again wanted to approach it. Now considering ourselves as an established professional ensemble, we wanted to re-approach these works that we have looked at as students in the past to see how we would play them at this stage.”
Andrew arranged the Grieg Lyric pieces, along with ‘Fire and Rain’ by James Taylor, and set Paul McCartney’s ‘Blackbird’ to an Indian raga for this concert. “It’s actually folk music in two different ways there – Indian folk music with the Beatles. It works well,” Andrew says.
“We give five or six different ‘tastes’ of contemporary music in a concert like this and I think the audience who are not used to that music can really enjoy it and not be overwhelmed by it,” Jay says.
Adds Andrew: “And if they are, we still have a James Taylor number to give them a hug at the end.”
Nexas Saxophone Quartet performs Folklore as part of its 2015 subscription concert at Glebe Justice Centre on Sat October 24 at 7pm. For further information and tickets visit: www.nexasquartet.com
Image supplied.
