Benefit Performance • PUBLIQuartet

Program

Curtis Stewart and Jannina Norpoth, violins
Nick Revel, viola
Hamilton Berry, cello

WHAT IS AMERICAN: RHYTHM NATION

Cachumbandeando En Clave (2024)
Eddie Venegas

Blues for Buddy (2024)
Jeff Scott

Sixfivetwo (2018)
Henry Threadgill

Excerpts from Hip Hop Studies and Etudes, Book I (2006)
Daniel Bernard Roumain

Sunjata’s Time (2015), arr. Jacob Garchik
Fodé Lassana Diabaté

Digging Gold, Deeper Blue (2024)
Mazz Swift

Get into the Now (2017)
Jessica Meyer

About

Applauded by The Washington Post as “a perfect encapsulation of today’s trends in chamber music,” and by The New Yorker as “independent-minded,” multi-GRAMMY®-nominated PUBLIQuartet is an improvising string quartet whose repertoire blends genres and highlights American multiculturalism. PUBLIQuartet rose on the music scene as winner of the 2013 Concert Artists Guild New Music/New Places award, and in 2019 garnered Chamber Music America’s prestigious Visionary Award for outstanding and innovative approaches to contemporary classical, jazz, and world chamber music. PQ’s genre-bending programs range from newly commissioned pieces to re-imaginations of classical works featuring open-form improvisations that expand the techniques and aesthetic of the traditional string quartet.

PUBLIQuartet has held artist residencies at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Sawdust, and has performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to the Montreal, Newport and Detroit Jazz Festivals. Their 2016 appearance on The Colbert Report, “Requiem for a Debate” - in which they improvised a live soundtrack to the third presidential debate - not only received over a million views, but saw the Washington Post declaring them "the winner...indubitably." Their 2023-2024 season includes performances at USC and the Library of Congress, with the New York City Ballet, as well as tour dates with jazz artists including Hiromi, Diane Monroe, and Magos Herrera.

The quartet’s latest album, the GRAMMY®-nominated What Is American, released in June 2022 on the Bright Shiny Things label, explores resonances between contemporary, blues, jazz, freely-improvised, and rock-inflected languages, all of which trace their roots back to the Black and Indigenous musical traditions that inspired Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet (Op. 96). The album also includes CARDS 11-11-2020, written by Roscoe Mitchell for PUBLIQuartet, as well as works by Ornette Coleman, Rhiannon Giddens, and Vijay Iyer.

Committed to creating an inclusive performance space, supporting living composers of varying genres, and expanding the classical canon, PUBLIQuartet was the inaugural ensemble-in-residence for Carnegie Hall’s PlayUSA program in 2021-2022, working with high school music classes across the country on a large-scale creative project called Reflections on Resilience. Their innovative PUBLIQ Access program has promoted emerging composers by presenting a wide variety of under-represented music for string quartet--from classical, jazz and electronic, to non-notated, world and improvised music. Other unique projects include MIND | THE | GAP, a series of creative projects developed by PQ that weave together different styles of music via group composition, arranging, and improvisation. These unique works range from “Bird in Paris” (Claude Debussy meets Charlie Parker) to more recent extended works including Reflections on Beauty, a multimedia celebration of the life and legacy of Madam C.J. Walker featuring visual projections and narration by Walker's great-great-granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles.

Founded in 2010, PUBLIQuartet is based in New York City.