JACK Quartet

For the first time, the Festival d’Automne presents the work of JACK Quartet, one of the most charismatic ensembles in the field of musical creation, comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards and cellist Jay Campbell. Founded twenty years ago in New York, where it is in residence at the Mannes School of Music, this string quartet tackles, with a mixture of vitality and rigour, a vast array of styles from established and emerging artists alike. Performing pieces by the masters of modernity from the last century, it also plays a pioneering role, via its close collaboration with the composers whose works they perform. The four members of the quartet pass on, to the best of their abilities, the techniques, languages and the emotions these composers stir up. Music enters into a free-flowing dialogue with performance art, installation, theatrical or dance-based representation, and video. Either on stage or in exhibition spaces, each concert is an experience in itself. Drawing upon new forms of practice, their work broadens the horizons of artistic creation and stimulates, transforms our ways of thinking, and listening.

Undeniably our generation’s “leading new-music foursome,” JACK Quartet celebrates their landmark 20th anniversary season in 2024-2025. Through intimate, long-standing relationships with many of today’s most creative voices, JACK Quartet has a prolific commissioning and recording catalog, has been nominated for two GRAMMY® Awards, and is the 2024 recipient of Chamber Music America’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award. 
Among the highlights of the 2024-2025 season, JACK premieres new commissions by Anthony Cheung, Juri Seo, and Ellen Fullman, releases Zorn’s complete string quartets on Tzadik Records, and performs internationally at Wigmore Hall and Pierre Boulez Saal, as well as appearances in Toronto, Barcelona, and Lugano and Winterthur, Switzerland. JACK Quartet created JACK Studio in 2019 to support commissions, recordings, and workshops with emerging music artists who are interested in exploring and expanding the repertory for string quartet. As JACK marks its 20th Anniversary Season, JACK Studio will grow to include a full range of commissions including prominent composers who will also serve as mentors to JACK Studio’s earlier-career collaborators.
JACK Quartet makes their home in NYC, where they are the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music at The New School. They teach at summer music festivals such as the Lucerne Festival Academy, Banff Centre for the Arts, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and New Music on the Point. Learn more at www.jackquartet.com.

 

“Concentrating on one sense only is a new way of thinking in itself”

 

Read the interview with JACK Quartet

Cet automne

Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
septembersept 25

JACK Quartet, Ellen Fullman, Konrad Sprenger
Music Portrait

For many years, Ellen Fullman has been walking between long, tuned strings, rubbing her resin-coated fingers along them to bow-like effect. The intensity of this contact with her hands enables her to feel their minutest vibrations and to summon up an infinite range of notes from within the realms of sound. In collaboration with the strings of the JACK Quartet and the electronic music of Konrad Sprenger, this unique instrument also forms part of the installation.
Théâtre Silvia Monfort
novembernov 5

JACK Quartet, Natacha Diels
Music Portrait

In Beautiful Trouble, devised for and with the JACK Quartet, Natacha Diels does away with the dividing line between life and the work itself, electrifies the saturation of the times we live in and plays around with the hypnotic omnipresence of images. At the crossroads between performance art and installation, this chamber opera for the eyes and ears draws upon text, gesture, electronics and video in order to probe our most vivid emotions.
Théâtre de la Ville – Les Abbesses
novembernov 23

JACK Quartet, Georg Friedrich Haas
Music Portrait

In our modern-day existences, finding ourselves so constantly under the presence of lights has meant that we have lost all sense of the dark and darkness. Georg Friedrich Haas draws upon this observation In iij Noct, a string quartet performed in absolute darkness. Enveloping us with sound, it results in our experience of time being overturned, as well as the rhythms of our body, and our relationship with others and listening.