JACK Quartet Performs The Music of Composer & Violinist Austin Wulliman at Miller Theatre Pop-Up Concert

Composer and violinist Austin Wulliman will be featured in a performance of his own string quartet compositions with JACK Quartet at a Miller Theatre pop-up concert on Tuesday, May 6, 2025 at 6:00PM. The concert celebrates the release of Wulliman's second album of original music, Escape Rites, out Friday, May 9, 2025 on Sono Luminus. The concert features the NYC premiere of the album's title track, Escape Rites, following its European premiere and tour by the JACK Quartet at Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin (March 20), London's Wigmore Hall (March 22), and Musikkollegium Winterthur, Stadthaus in Switzerland (March 29).

In his Escape Rites (2024), Wulliman constructs intricate sonic totems using a palindromic 25-tone scale, where each note finds its distinct place within a complex web of timbral orchestrations and polyrhythmic relationships. Inspired by Boulez's friendship with John Cage, the piece consists of six continuous movements that invoke wildly disparate emotions and a sense of regression into nostalgia. Wulliman filters the experimental energy of the postwar moment during which Boulez and Cage made a common cause, plus its aftermath, harnessing their utopian energy through the lens of JACK's performance practice. As a motto for his new piece - and for the program as a whole - Wulliman cites an aphorism by John Cage: "Activity involving in a single process the many, turning them, even though some seem to be opposites, towards oneness, contributes to a good way of life."

Wulliman's Late Edition (2024) captures the feeling of being physically and emotionally immersed in a powerful, overwhelming experience. In his program notes, Wulliman writes, "Pressed between bodies heaving to the pulse. The room inside the drum: each of us within its envelope. Sent elsewhere. Stamped to distant locales but together in this resonating box. My wrists were broken. My mind screwed on tight."