WHAT IS AMERICAN | THE ART FUSE

Classical Album Review: What is American — PUBLIQuartet

JULY 28, 2022

By Jonathan Blumhofer

American-ness in music is impossible to define and constantly in flux, yet the threads that connect it all together – at once beautiful, tragic, humorous, ironic, whimsical – are all somehow recognizable.

The question of what makes music American is an old one and particularly charged of late. So it’s heartening to see (and hear) it addressed so thoroughly, inventively, and successfully by PUBLIQuartet on their new disc, What is American.

As often seems to happen with string quartets when they tackle issues of American-ness and the repertoire, Antonin Dvorak’s F-major “American” String Quartet looms large. Here, though, the ensemble takes a refreshing and wholly unpredictable tack, namely improvising their own version of this 1893 favorite. The effort is at once a fascinating deconstruction of the original and a gripping homage to its source materials.