Ken Benshoof: Seattle's Maestro of Chamber Music

By Christopher DeLaurenti

“I write for the musicians around me,” says Ken Benshoof, who has been a perpetually busy composer, mainly of chamber music, in Seattle since settling here in 1960. Benshoof’s comment recalled advice he gave me 30 years ago and gives to young composers today: “Write for your friends — they’ll do their best to make the piece work. And if you care about your friends, you’ll try and write music that they want to play and that’s a joy to play.”  

Benshoof has heeded his own advice for decades. In 1965, the Jacovin Quartet premiered the composer’s Odds and Ends (1963) for String Quartet. One of the quartet’s violinists, David Harrington, later founded Kronos Quartet in 1973. For the modest fee of a now-legendary bag of doughnuts, Benshoof wrote Travelling Music No. 4 for String Quartet (1974), the first of eight pieces he has written for Kronos Quartet. Travelling Music No. 4 has the distinction of inaugurating the first of more than 1,100 quartets commissioned by the group.  

Originating as his master’s thesis, Odds and Ends is a suitable centerpiece for this month’s Chamber Series concert. Despite attempting (and discarding) three previous quartets, the composer marks Odds and Ends as the beginning of “when I learned how to write for string quartet.”  

With its mix of styles, Odds and Ends sounds elegantly eclectic, adroitly intermingling jazz, the blues and trenchant Bartók-inspired rhythms. Yet melody always remains at the forefront, which placed him out of step with the trends of the 1960s. Even the ominous piano clusters heard in the concert’s opening piece, Five Movements for Piano Trio (1969), contribute to the music’s palpably dramatic arc.  

Neither avant-garde nor neo-Classical nor post-modern, Benshoof says he was never interested in hewing to conformist orthodoxies or a set style. “I noticed that so many of my composer friends had trouble with that. They were aware of what was fashionable and felt like they should be competing in that world.” When asked why he didn’t “compete” back then, Benshoof pauses for a moment and wonders, “I think it was an accident.” He ventures that growing up in Midwest farm country, and later Alaska, instilled a comfort with being alone, making music at home and finding his own path.  

Part of that path charts an unusual route overlooked by most composers: writing chamber music for the piccolo, notably Spindrift (1992) and Timeless (1999). These sumptuously iridescent works for piccolo and piano have become staples not only of chamber concerts, but also for young musicians to highlight their technical range and emotional expression in graduation recitals.  

The piccolo is also showcased in the Symphony’s chamber concert. Commissioned by another Benshoof friend and collaborator, Seattle Symphony Flute and Piccolo Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby, in Shadow, light (1997) is a six-movement work for piccolo and string trio. The flowing, propulsive lines of the music sometimes hint at an early influence on Benshoof, Francis Poulenc’s Mouvements perpétuels, however, the unabashed lyricism and moments of sly mischief are uniquely his own. 

Experience Benshoof’s works performed alongside Dvořák in the next Chamber Series concert, which happens Tuesday, May 7, 2024, at 7:30pm. Read more in the program notes.

Zartouhi Dombourian-Eby’s position is generously underwritten as the Robert & Clodagh Ash Piccolo.