Name: Carnegie Hall Citywide: JACK Quartet
Start: 2024-07-17T18:00:00
Location: Madison Square Park

Jay Campbell

Christopher Otto

Austin Wulliman

John Pickford Richards

Carnegie Hall

The Grammy Award–nominated JACK Quartet, “one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles” (The New York Times), is renowned for its expansive programming of 20th- and 21st-century string music. This free outdoor performance, curated in collaboration with the visionary Tania León, features music by four American composers who redefine modern string quartet repertoire. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet 1931 reimagines rhythm and harmony, still sounding fresh almost a century later. Gabriella Smith’s Carrot Revolution (2015) is a thoroughly modern patchwork of “wildly contrasting influences,” weaving together elements from J. S. Bach, Celtic fiddle tunes, The Who, and more. Amy Williams’s new work, Tangled Madrigals, offers a contemporary take on medieval hockets—a dazzling technique in the hands of a string quartet—while the pioneering George Lewis stretches the quartet to its virtuosic limits in a 2022 JACK commission.