PUBLIQuartet Reveals Spring 2024 Highlights Including Premiere Of WHAT IS AMERICAN: RHYTHM NATION

Called "ingenious" by The Strad, GRAMMY-nominated string ensemble PUBLIQuartet announces their spring 2024 season highlights, highlighted by premieres of two new programs. Violin Women, African Dreams, a collaboration with composer and violinist Diane Monroe, makes its world premiere on February 25, 2024 at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, PA, while What Is American: Rhythm Nation - the follow-up to PUBLIQuartet's original What Is American program, captured in a GRAMMY-nominated album - makes a Juneteenth world premiere at Fotografiska in New York City. The quartet also appears alongside pianist and composer Vijay Iyer for a May engagement at the Library of Congress. With a schedule that takes them across the United States, the quartet begins the new year just off a fall season that included performances with the Kronos Quartet at Carnegie Hall and Magos Herrera at National Sawdust in Brooklyn.

PUBLIQuartet's 2024 schedule opens January 13, 2024 with a showcase at Baruch College in New York City, where the ensemble is paired in a program with the Harlem Quartet.
In its next engagement, the quartet premieres its collaboration with Diane Monroe - Violin Women, African Dreams - on February 25, 2024 at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, PA. Monroe, whose musical oeuvre bridges jazz, classical, and traditional African music, employs a quintessentially Western instrument - the violin - to collapse boundaries between musical styles. For this new piece, Monroe has worked with visual artist and scholar Charlotte Blake Alston, with a narrative woven together using sound and visual art from Curlee Raven Holton and additional instrumentation from Yacouba Sissoko and banjoist and Broadway veteran Ayodele Maakheru.

PUBLIQuartet appears at Chamber Music in Yellow Springs on March 10, 2024 in Yellow Springs, OH, before presenting a second performance of Violin Women, African Dreams, in Bethlehem, PA, on April 11, 2024.

Next, the quartet joins Japanese jazz pianist and composer Hiromi on April 21, 2024, in a performance at the La Jolla Music Society in California. They perform together again on April 24, 2024, at the Gilmore International Piano Festival in Kalamazoo, MI.

PUBLIQuartet then performs two iterations of their original What Is American program, first to a sold-out audience at the Wharton Center for Performing Arts in East Lansing, MI on April 25, 2024, and next at Oregon State University in Corvallis, OR on May 18, 2024. The program includes works by Vijay Iyer and Rhiannon Giddens; the music of Ornette Coleman, Fats Waller, Tina Turner, Betty Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Ida Cox; and a reimagining of Dvořák's American Quartet, in which the composer's original melodies meet PUBLIQuartet's blues, jazz, and rock-inflected stylings. In this critically acclaimed program, PUBLIQuartet explores the resonance between contemporary, blues, rock, jazz, and classical styles, tracing their roots back to the Black and Indigenous music that inspired Dvorak's American Quartet, the centerpiece of the program. Singled out by The New York Times as its "favorite classical album of the year," What Is American places emphasis on the diverse kaleidoscope of identities and voices that influence modern American music and culture.

On May 9, 2024, PUBLIQuartet makes a special appearance at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., part of the institution's Live! at the Library series. Appearing alongside pianist and composer Vijay Iyer - who will premiere a new work commissioned by the Library of Congress - PUBLIQuartet will perform their program MIND | THE | GAP: Wild Women Don't Get the Blues: Improvisations on music by Tina Turner, Betty Davis, Alice Coltrane and Ida Cox. Initiated in 2011, PUBLIQuartet's MIND | THE | GAP series highlights connections between diverse musical genres through the ensemble's signature blend of improvisation and group composition.

On June 2, 2024, PUBLIQuartet joins The Music Series at South Church in New Britain, CT.

The ensemble concludes its season on a high note, staging its Juneteenth world premiere of What Is American: Rhythm Nation at New York City's Fotografiska, June 19, 2024. Building on the original What is American program, this second volume features and celebrates American musical traditions of rhythm as expression of bodily autonomy and storytelling, featuring original works by PUBLIQuartet and new commissions from Pulitzer Prize finalist Jlin, Mazz Swift, and Jeff Scott, as well as Henry Threadgill's Sixfivetwo.

PUBLIQuartet Spring 2024 Calendar

January 13, 2024

Joint Showcase
Baruch College | New York, NY
Link: bpac.baruch.cuny.edu

February 25, 2024

Violin Women, African Dreams collaboration with Diane Monroe
Montgomery County Community College | Blue Bell, PA
Link: https://calendar.mc3.edu/event/diane-monroe-violin-women-african-dreams/

March 10, 2024

Chamber Music in Yellow Springs
Presbyterian Church | Yellow Springs, OH
Link: https://cmys.org/publiquartet-sunday-march-10-2024-4-pm/

April 12, 2024

Violin Women, African Dreams Collaboration with Diane Monroe
Baker Hall at Lehigh University | Bethlehem, PA
Link: https://zoellner.cas.lehigh.edu/content/violin-woman-african-dreams

April 21, 2024

Hiromi: The Piano Quintet Ft. PUBLIQuartet
La Jolla Music Society | La Jolla, CA
Link: https://theconrad.org/events/hiromi-quartet-publiquartet/

April 24, 2024

Collaboration with Hiromi
Gilmore International Piano Festival | Kalamazoo, MI
Link: https://www.thegilmore.org/event/eliane-elias/

April 25, 2024

What Is American
Wharton Center for Performing Arts | East Lansing, MI
Link: www.whartoncenter.com/events/detail/publiquartet-what-is-american

May 9, 2024

Live! at the Library: PUBLIQuartet with Vijay Iyer, piano
Library of Congress: Thomas Jefferson Building - Coolidge Auditorium | Washington D.C.
Link: https://www.loc.gov/item/event-411406/live-at-the-library-publiquartet-with-vijay-iyer-piano/2024-05-09/

May 18, 2024

What Is American
Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts at Oregon State University | Corvallis, OR
Link: https://prax.oregonstate.edu/events/publiquartet

June 2, 2024

The Music Series at South Church
South Congregational Church | New Britain, CT
Link: https://www.musicseries.org/current-season

June 19, 2024

What Is American: Rhythm Nation Premiere
The Loft at Fotografiska | New York, NY
Link: www.fotografiska.com/nyc/venues/the-loft/

About PUBLIQuartet

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 prompted The Washington Post to declare them "the winner...indubitably." Their 2023-2024 season includes performances at USC and the Library of Congress; with the New York City Ballet; and 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 underrepresented 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.

Photo Credit: Lelanie Foster

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