JACK Quartet Announces 2022/23 JACK Studio Projects
For Press Inquiries: contact Tracy Mendez, Marketing + Development Manager, tracy@jackquartet.com.
JACK Quartet is pleased to announce its fourth cohort of the JACK Studio program, who were chosen from more than 500 international applicants. Founded in 2019, JACK Studio offers an alternative to the social, cultural, and economic realities of institutional access in classical music, which disproportionately and unfairly excludes many people. We address this by inviting artists to apply to JACK Studio, offering commission fees, opportunities to develop new work, hear their music performed by JACK, consult with mentors in the field, and receive recorded documentation. Inclusion is a driving inspiration for this project, and anybody may apply.
Nursalim Yadi Anugerah will begin a two-year creative residency with JACK Studio this fall, during which he will explore new projects with JACK. A composer and multi-instrumentalist, Anugerah’s works focus on sonic experimentation through cultural practice, knowledge, and cosmology of indigenous people and their activism on acoustic ecology related to entanglements of social-cultural and environmental issues in Kalimantan (Borneo). In 2021-2022, he was awarded the Prince Claus Mentorship Award for Cultural and Artists Response to Environmental Change by Prince Claus Foundation and Goethe Institut.
In 2022/23, we look forward to holding workshops with the following composers to delve into their existing string quartets: Abby Swidler, Andrés Poveda, Çağdaş Onaran, Henry Dorn, Oktawia Pączkowska, Paul Gabriel L. Cosme, Ty Bloomfield, Wesley S. Uchiyama-Penix, Juan Santiago Beis, Lawren Brianna Ware, and Niloufar Shiri. Each composer will work one-on-one with JACK and receive professional recorded documentation of JACK performing their work. Click here for more information about each of our newest artists.
Throughout the season, JACK will continue to deepen our collaborations and develop long-form works with previous JACK Studio artists, including Eduardo Aguilar (Cohort 1), Tatiana Gerasimenok (Cohort 3), and Elliot Reed (Cohort 1). Most recently, JACK performed an expanded version of Reed’s JACK Studio project, “Succulent Rust,” at the Lucerne Festival in August 2022. For this hour-long ambulatory installation, JACK and musicians from the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra were spread out all over the grounds of Lucerne’s Glacier Garden, encouraging audience members to walk through the sounds and create their own experience of Reed’s project.
On January 28, 2023, Mannes School of Music at The New School will present the inaugural JACK Studio Festival, featuring premieres by Cohort 2 Studio artists Amy Brandon, Michele Cheng, Andrés Guadarrama, Joy Guidry, X. Lee, and Njabulo Phungula in Stiefel Hall.
JACK Quartet created JACK Studio in 2019 in an effort to expand our community of collaborative artists. For years, JACK has worked with composers at schools and festivals around the world developing, performing, and recording their music. These experiences strengthen their portfolios and advance them to new artistic, educational, and professional opportunities. However, many artists who embody cultural diversity and aesthetic exploration do not attend these schools and festivals. The social, cultural, and economic realities of institutional access disproportionately and unfairly exclude many people. If access is not implicit in our creative ecosystem due to identity, class, or creative practice, it is the responsibility of an organization privileged with opportunity to help make material opportunities for all.
We address this by inviting artists to apply for JACK Studio, offering commission fees, opportunities to develop new work, hear their music performed by JACK, consult with mentors in the field, and receive recorded documentation. Artists who are underrepresented due to reasons of socioeconomics or identity are especially encouraged to apply, including but not limited to African, Latina/o/x, Asian, Arab, and Native American (ALAANA), disabled, immigrant, women-identifying, and LGBTQIA+ artists. We hope to meet an array of musicians and sound artists, ranging from those who already identify as composers to those who are curious about what they might discover working with a string quartet for the first time.
Commissioned artists have been paired with musical mentors including Marcos Balter, Clara Iannotta, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Georg Friedrich Haas, Donnacha Dennehy, Claire Chase, and Nadia Sirota.
One of the most acclaimed, renowned, and respected groups performing today, JACK Quartet has maintained an unwavering commitment to their mission of performing and commissioning new works, giving voice to underheard composers, and cultivating an ever-greater sense of openness toward contemporary classical music. JACK was selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year”, nominated for GRAMMY Awards for recordings in 2018 & 2022, and awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Through intimate relationships with today’s most creative voices, JACK embraces close collaboration with the composers they perform, leading to a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of new string quartet music.