PUBLIQuartet to Perform WHAT IS AMERICAN: Rhythm Nation At DiMenna Center

On Thursday, March 20, 2025 at 7:30 PM, GRAMMY-nominated PUBLIQuartet presents the New York premiere of its new program, What Is American: Rhythm Nation in Mary Flagler Cary Hall at The DiMenna Center in New York City. The event was rescheduled from December 2024 due to a family emergency.

What Is American: Rhythm Nation is the next issue in PUBLIQuartet's What Is American series, a GRAMMY-nominated album and touring project. This second volume features and celebrates American rhythmic traditions as expressions of bodily autonomy and tacit history-keeping. The program features original works by PUBLIQuartet and four new works by Swift, Eddie Venegas, Jeff Scott, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jlin. The program is made possible through a 2024 Chamber Music America Artistic Projects grant supported by the Howard Gilman Foundation. Each piece evokes a distinct rhythmic world, reflecting the plurality of American movements and protecting the unspoken spirit of their lineage's narratives.

The program features Baobab, a new work with an intricate, multi-layered percussion audiotrack by composer and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Jlin, incorporating live-improvised string samples from PUBLIQuartet to create a dynamic sonic landscape evoking both motion and timelessness.

Next up is the world premiere of Digging Gold; Deeper Blue, which marks a departure from Mazz Swift's recent works that explore the tradition of spirituals. Swift notes that the new piece reflects a desire to explore rhythm and groove through the lens of their own experience as a neuro-emergent composer, challenging "the virtuosity of the quartet as an ensemble."

Written to honor the memory of the composer's uncle, Jeff Scott's Blues for Buddy sets lyrical blues melodies against march rhythms that evoke the tradition of New Orleans second-line parades and jazz works like Art Blakey's "Blues March."

Rounding out the program is Eddie Venegas's Cachumbambeando En Clave, which incorporates the blend of salsa, Afro-Cuban, Puerto Rican, and jazz languages that the composer encountered when he arrived in New York City from Venezuela. With clave rhythm as its foundation, this piece presents a variety of energetic rhythmic textures and characters, with a moment for improvised solos by the members of PUBLIQuartet along the way.

PUBLIQuartet's GRAMMY-nominated album, What is American - released June 17, 2022 on Bright Shiny Things - explores the resonance between contemporary, blues, jazz, accessible, and rock-inflected music, all of which trace their roots back to the Black and Indigenous music that inspired Dvorak's "American" String Quartet. Interrogating these traditions of our nation's complex history, PUBLIQuartet attempts to connect the dots, illuminating American concert music's past, present, and future. What Is American is ultimately a call to ponder the kaleidoscope of composers and diverse genres that make up America's rich musical history.