Invoke brings genre-bending music to Green Music Center

The first thing you notice about an Invoke concert is that the musicians all stand up when they play, except for the cellist.

Then you realize they have no music stands. They’ve memorized the music.

Finally, you see the violist and the cellist trade their instruments for a mandolin and banjo. Suddenly, the music swerves into bluegrass country, with its infectious foot-stompin’ and finger-pickin’ twang. Ludwig, we’re not in Deutschland anymore.

All this revolutionary rule-bending makes it difficult to describe Invoke’s style of music and how its square peg fits into the round hole of a traditional classical quartet. Perhaps David Srebnik, the classical producer for Sirius XM, came closest when he described the quartet as “not classical … but not not classical.”

“We call ourselves the Invoke multi-string quartet, but bowed and fretted is more visual,” said violinist Zach Matteson, a 29-year-old doppelgänger for a young Matt Damon. “We’re a quartet first, then we added fretted instruments. And singing was the final layer.”

If their music reminds you of mandolinist/singer Chris Thile and bassist Edgar Meyer, that’s not by accident. The only difference is that while Thile and Meyer were bluegrass players at heart who crossed over into classical, Invoke has made the journey in the opposite direction.

“We’re definitely classical players who peek into the bluegrass world,” Matteson said. “So it’s more about looking at bluegrass through a classical lens.”

Invoke will be plucking and picking, bowing and strumming their blended family of instruments when they appear on Friday, Oct. 29, at the Green Music Center’s Weill Hall Loft. The loft located within the larger hall is an intimate configuration where the musicians turn backward on the stage to face the audience seated in the choral loft.

In an interview with Matteson, we learned how the young ensemble came together during their college years and along the way, managed to reinvent the traditional string quartet by weaving in Americana, jazz and minimalist licks. The ensemble creates most of its own repertoire, with each player arranging, editing and contributing to the original pieces they perform.

Question: You were already breaking rules as members of the University of Maryland orchestra. Who came up with the idea of musicians dancing onstage?

Answer: The orchestra director, Jim Ross, had really interesting ideas about what an orchestra at a university can be. … He wanted to incorporate research, so he said, “Let’s try some weird stuff.” Every time we went to orchestra, there was something he was cooking up.

There were two concerts where the entire orchestra choreographed movement with legendary choreographer Liz Lerman. Ross brought her in to do Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun” and Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” So there was this environment of doing something different and unique.

Q How did you first decide to perform together as an ensemble?

A The University of Maryland has a huge chamber music component that was required for music majors. So we had all met in this environment, but we didn’t start playing together until we went to an opera festival in Siena, Italy. It was a summer festival, we were students, but mostly we were there to play music and hang out.

One of our friends who is a pianist came along, and we found Peter Schickele’s Piano Quintet No. 2. It’s a serious work, but it’s still really funny and witty. There are a lot of folk elements, and we had a blast playing it. When we got back to the states, we performed it at a new music concert, got a review, and we were like, “Maybe this is something we could do?” Initially, we thought we would do neo-American music, similar to Kronos or the JACK Quartet.

Q What spurred you to record your first album, “Souls in the Mud”?

A We had been listening to “The Goat Rodeo Sessions” (an album made by fiddler Stuart Duncan, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, bassist Edgar Meyer and mandolinist Chris Thile), so we were interested in the crossover with bluegrass music. Karl (Karl Mitze, viola and mandolin) and Nick (Nick Montopoli, violin and banjo) applied for an innovative chamber music competition, where the program was all original music. … We had three or four months to get the music together. What came out was basically the first album, and that was the impetus for what we’re doing now.

Q What does it look like to write music as a “composer collective?”

A Initially, Nick and Karl would bring us the pieces, and sometimes those pieces are fully formed on paper, and sometimes they send us a demo recording of them playing all the parts. We’ll go over it in rehearsal and learn it by ear.

But we’re all part of the editing process of all the pieces. We’ve all arranged for the quartet now, including songs by folk artists and popular songs. And we have done two film scores (for animated films). We will get the video and play it without any sound, and we’ll just improvise for an hour as a group. Then we’ll take the recording that we made, and we’ll listen back to it and make notes. … Then we’ll split up sections of the movie, and we’ll all go and compose or arrange the improvisation that we did.

Q When did you decide to stand up while performing?

A We saw the Meccore String Quartet from Poland in 2012. They actually stand, and we talked to them afterward. They made a traveling box for the cellist to raise him up. He was saying that everyone practices standing up, so why are we all sitting down?

Q What is the advantage of having the music memorized?

A When you’re playing music with a music stand in front of you, you have a relationship with the music stand, and you’re engaging with it. Your sight lines and body postures are pointing there. So you’re actually having a bigger relationship with the stand than the audience. When you eliminate that, you can engage more with your compatriots and your audience.

We like to highlight the things that are happening in the music. You can step in, step out. Sometimes the mandolin and the banjo need to move closer together to get that part really tight. Not only does it make the music better, but it’s visually interesting, and you can draw people’s attention to what’s happening.

Right now, we have a couple of new pieces that we’ve commissioned that we’re still working toward memorization. Some of the things we’ll be playing (at Weill Hall Loft) will be “on book.” We use iPads and read off the score, and we have these special mounts that are pretty sleek that attach on top of a regular mike stand. They also act as instrument holders for the banjo and mandolin.

Q Did Nick and Karl already know how to play the banjo and mandolin?

Karl grew up playing the mandolin in people’s living rooms in Florida. Nick picked up the banjo for the group. He had played guitar in a hair metal band, and he’s slowly learning all the different styles of banjo playing (finger picking for bluegrass and picking/strumming for clawhammer style).

Q Can you talk about American Postcards, your ongoing commissioning project?

A There’s a program in South Carolina called Southern Exposure, and we were encouraged by the artistic director to branch out into commissioning. We thought that was interesting, but this was right after the 2016 election, and we felt like … the music could be tied together by telling stories about different places in the U.S. And it’s morphed into an ongoing project where we ask young composers in the U.S. to write a piece for our instrumentation that deals with a specific time and place in U.S. history that’s hopefully meaningful to them.

That prompt is pretty loose, but it also ties all the pieces together in a meaningful way. We have eight now. The first four included one about “Picture Brides” who emigrated to Hawaii and California with just a picture of their husband, and they were required to be married on the dock.

Our newest is by Jonathan Bingham, who we met at Howard University. … His is called “The Lessons of History,” which is the title of a 100-page book by Will and Ariel Durant that is a collection of essays about the span of human civilization, the cyclical nature of society and the rise and fall of civilizations. With all the recent political upheavals, this piece has a gravity to it. It’s really powerful and in the moment, about realizing that all these things we’re working toward have a chance to fail.

Q Did the pandemic offer any kind of silver lining for you?

A Before the pandemic, we were really getting into touring. It was pretty exhausting, and we felt we didn’t have enough time to do all the work and rehearsals and have a personal life. Now that we’ve had a lot of time to re-up the creativity, we’re touring with a whole new set of originals that have come out of the livestreams we are doing through Patreon (a crowdfunding platform) once a month. It’s like a monthly new music concert and a laboratory to see where our new music will come from.

When we’re not on the road, we usually play around town in Austin. We work with local groups like the Beerthoven Concert Series. They do salon concerts and beer is free all night. It’s Austin-weird.

Staff Writer Diane Peterson can be reached at 707-521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @dianepete56.