Trevor Bača & JACK Quartet Adapt Beckett’s ‘Stirrings Still’ for New ECM Album

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Composer Bača creates a parallel musical stream to accompany Beckett's 1987 text.

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ECM New Series has released a recording of Samuel Beckett 's Stirrings Still, featuring music by Trevor Bača, narration by Paul Griffiths, and performance by JACK Quartet. The recording, ECM New Series 2801, is out now.

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Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett 's last message in prose, completed in 1987, and first published the following year. More monologue than story, it comes from a narrator on the edge between life and what lies beyond, which might be a vast wheatfield seen in black-and-white, or might be a swirl of stumbling memories.

Beckett cherished music, in particular the songs and string quartets of Franz Schubert . His writing is musical, in its meticulous phrasing, its use of repetition, and often its form. Stirrings Still is an example: a composition of interweavings and developments.

The music, created for this release by composer Trevor Bača, is no accompaniment but rather a parallel stream, heard in alternation with the words, reflecting and contemplating what they have to say. Imagined for the musicianship of JACK Quartet, it is a stream into which the listener is drawn from time to time, not away from the words but more deeply into them, through another medium.

Trevor Bača was born in California in 1975 and grew up in Texas. His concerns as composer include 'lost and secret texts, and the powers of musical storytelling.' Samuel Beckett 's protagonist, in the final section of Stirrings Still, hears something from deep within, a sentence with a word he cannot catch, and Bača's writing for the string quartet conveys some of the intense yearning to grasp it.

Bača studied art, music, literature and languages at the University of Texas, composition and string techniques with Stefano Scodanibbio in Macerata, Italy, and composition with Julio Estrada in Mexico City. He holds a PhD in composition from Harvard University. His music has been played throughout the world, with recent performances in New York, Tokyo, Berlin and Barcelona. Bača's compositions have been anthologized as part of Notations 21, in which graphic and experimental manuscripts of a hundred international composers are displayed and contrasted, and his scores have also been exhibited as art at the Chelsea Gallery in New York City and the Hutchins Gallery on Long Island. In 2019 he joined the faculty of the Department of Music at Yale University, where he lectures on 20th- and 21st-century music.

JACK Quartet was formed in 2005, its name an acronym of the initials of the founding members. Violist John Pickford Richards and violinist Christopher Otto were there from the beginning, with violinist Austin Wulliman and cellist Jay Campbell joining the quartet in 2016. They have established a reputation for their commitment to challenging contemporary repertoire and experimental chamber music – from Elliott Carter to John Zorn , from John Luther Adams to George E. Lewis – and enjoyed close working relationships with many composers.

Paul Griffiths, born in 1947 in Bridgend, Wales, is a British music critic, novelist and librettist, best known for his prolific writings on modern music. He wrote the libretto for Elliott Carter's only opera What Next?, recorded for ECM New Series in 2000, as well as the libretti for Tan Dun's opera Marco Polo, and Hans Abrahamsen's opera let me tell you. In 2003, ECM recorded his collaboration with cellist-composer-improviser Frances Marie Uitti, there is still time, subtitled 'scenes for speaking voice and cello,' which featured Griffiths as narrator of his own text.

The author of more than twenty books on music as well as novels, a collection of short stories, and numerous liner notes, Paul Griffiths has received many awards and prizes for his work, including an OBE for services to music, literature and composition.

Stirrings Still was recorded in 2023 and 2024 at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano, and produced by Manfred Eicher, who has long been fascinated by the inherent musicality of Samuel Beckett 's writing.

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/bwwtv/article/STIRRINGS-STILL-on-ECM-New-Series-with-Trevor-Baa-and-JACK-Quartet-20260914)._