Reidy, Jules: Clerestory

A clerestory is an upper section of wall, most often in a church punctuated by windows. It is a powerful image for grasping this luminous new music from Jules Reidy. Light casts shadows, of course, and logics of shadowing, mirroring, and distorted reflection—of key importance for Reidy’s work as a whole—inform the sumptuous surfaces of Clerestory.

‘Shadow Symmetric’ is a string quartet commissioned and performed by the JACK Quartet as part of their JACK Studio program. Reidy’s pairing with the quartet is felicitous: JACK are one of the preeminent new music ensembles working today, with a particular interest in just intonation, an important component of Reidy’s music.

The piece’s gentle pacing and constrained dynamic range invites us to become immersed in its language of static resonance, complex beating tones, and subtle harmonic surprise. Through it, there threads a melodic theme, passed between instruments and tuning systems, almost at the threshold of perception but with the same yearning quality familiar to listeners of Reidy’s guitar works.

‘Clerestory Windows’ offers up a distorted mirror image of the string quartet, arranged as a series of episodes that each remake the material in their own way. It begins with an arrangement of the string quartet material for MIDI strings and voices, then moves into a lyrical 12-string acoustic guitar air performed at the installation opening, before the strings from the first side reappear, now frozen and stretched into slow-moving waves.

From this emerge flickering arpeggios, achieved by arranging the string quartet material for the RMI. This cues a move into more active terrain, preparing the way for the delirious final episode, where the string quartet material is re-arranged once more, eventually giving way to spacious chords shadowed by a pair of ringing sine tones.