JACK Quartet

Contact

Katrin Matzke-Baazoug
km@karstenwitt.com
+49 30 214 594-213

European Management (except Italy: Resia Artists)

IN THE MAGAZINE

In the magazine

Congratulations to Samir Odeh-Tamimi and the JACK Quartet: they each receive one of the coveted Italian Premio Abbiati critics' prizes 2025.

IN CONVERSATION

Five questions for the JACK Quartet: For the Musikkollegium Winterthur magazine, the musicians gave humorous and revealing insights into their musical and literary passions.

NEW RECORDINGS

With a record release concert on 15 February at the Roulette in New York, the JACK Quartet presented the first album with compositions by its violinist Austin Wulliman.

FRI 07.08.

18:00
New Mexico Museum of Arts

SUN 09.08.

19:30
DiMenna Center for Classical Music, New York

Biography

Christopher Otto, violin
Austin Wulliman, violin
John Pickford Richards, viola
Jay Campbell, cello

Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK Quartet enters their third decade as a pioneering string quartet synchronized in their mission to create an international community through transformative, mind-broadening experiences and close listening. Founded in 2005, JACK Quartet operates as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of 20th and 21st century string quartet music, delving deeply into challenging new compositions and musical practices from a staggering range of stylistic viewpoints.

JACK Quartet has been awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant, Fromm Music Foundation Prize, Musical America’s 2019 “Ensemble of the Year” Award, Lincoln Center's Martin E. Segal Award, New Music USA's Trailblazer Award, CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, 2024 Chamber Music America’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award, and the Italian Music Critic's Prize as the Best Ensemble of 2024.

Among the highlights of their 2025-2026 U.S. season, JACK Quartet returns to 92NY with new works by JACK Studio Resident Artists and a world premiere by Tristan Perich; a performance at Miller Theatre at Columbia University celebrating the 90th birthday of Helmut Lachenmann; a Cal Performances ensemble debut with a world premiere by Gabriella Smith; a multi-concert residency at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and a collaborative work with Ellen Fullman and her long-stringed instrument commissioned by Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

International engagements include three concerts at Festival d’Automne (Paris), where JACK Quartet serve as the “Portrait Musicians” of the festival; JACK Quartet’s annual three-concert day-long marathon at Wigmore Hall (UK); and appearances at Pierre Boulez Saal (Germany), Instituzione Universitaria dei Concerti (Italy), Musica Festival Strasbourg (France), Open Music Graz (Austria), Only Connect Oslo (Norway), and Hochschule der Künste Bern (Switzerland), among others.

JACK Quartet has both self-commissioned and been commissioned to create new works with artists such as Philip Glass, Georg Friedrich Haas, Liza Lim, Caroline Shaw, and John Zorn, with upcoming and recent premieres by John Luther Adams, Ellen Fullman, Catherine Lamb, George Lewis, Andrew Norman, Terry Riley, Gabriella Smith, and Tyshawn Sorey.

JACK Quartet has a prolific recording catalog and has been nominated for two GRAMMY® Awards. Their albums include music by John Luther Adams, Zosha di Castri, Nick Dunston, Jason Eckardt, Helmut Lachenmann, Liza Lim, Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman, Du Yun, Iannis Xenakis, the complete string quartets of John Zorn and an upcoming release of the complete quartets of Elliott Carter.

Created in 2019, JACK Studio supports commissions for string quartet by prominent composers, two-year paid residencies for emerging composers, and annual reading sessions of existing string quartets by emerging composers. More than 40 composers have worked with JACK Quartet through JACK Studio thus far, hailing from Argentina, Belarus, Canada, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, South Africa, Syria, and the United States.

JACK Quartet has performed to critical acclaim at venues such as Carnegie Hall (USA), Lincoln Center (USA), UChicago Presents (USA), Library of Congress (USA), Berlin Philharmonie (Germany), BBC Proms (United Kingdom), Royal Library (Denmark), Philharmonie de Paris (France), Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), Sydney Opera House (Australia), Salzburg Festival (Switzerland), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Suntory Hall (Japan), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), Festival Internacional Cervantino (Mexico), and Teatro Colón (Argentina).

JACK Quartet makes their home in New York City, where they are the Quartet-in-Residence at the Mannes School of Music at The New School.

www.jackquartet.com

2025/2026 Season

This biography is to be reproduced without any changes, omissions or additions, unless expressly authorised by the artist management.

Download Bio EN

Programmes

JOHN LUTER ADAMS PORTRAIT

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Luther Adams emerged from decades of full-time environmental activism with a rich artistic voice and a belief that music can do more to change the world than politics. Adams' vision of a musical expression searching for its future home through a grounded presence in our natural world has inspired JACK Quartet to create nine quartets with him, including our GRAMMY-nominated album Lines Made By Walking. Letting the natural resonance of the quartet's strings ring out as if swept by the wind atop a mountain or tracing the steps of Adams' daily walks in the Montana foothills, the music is an invitation to inhabit space and sound and to rediscover a fascination with music's very relationship to the natural world.

Exemplary programme:

John Luther Adams

untouched (2016) 26'

John Luther Adams

The Wind in High Places (2011) 18'

***

John Luther Adams

Lines Made by Walking (2019) 30'

Modifications and further programmes on request.

Natacha Diels: Beautiful trouble

Natache Diels' Beautiful Trouble for choreographed string quartet, video, and electronics is an evening-length music theatre piece with video clips, active lighting, scenic movement, instrumental and electronic sound, and vocalizations by the performers, bringing together the power of live performance with the hypnosis of the screen to confuse the line between hyper-reality and fiction. The project has been co-commissioned by the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, TIME:SPANS, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Beautiful Trouble premiered to great acclaim at Penn Live Arts on February 2, 2024 and will be touring from the 2024/25 season. Periods on request.

Videos and more information here.

References

"At MaerzMusik, that research met the JACK Quartet in a world premiere that made harmonics feel less like technical byproducts than like an entire mode of being. What mattered especially here was the location: St. Elisabeth Church did not simply host the piece; it completed it. The long strings, the quartet, the architecture, and the audience entered into one shared acoustic ecology, where feedback, partials, and hovering resonances gradually conducted the room toward a deeper listening state."

The next day Berlin, Gabriel Francisco Lemos, 10/04/2026

"The element of the uncontrollable in [Ellen Fullman’s] music is intensified in Energy Archive 4 through the accompaniment of the quartet. It is less a matter of Fullman playing with the quartet than of the quartet bringing out the sound of the unique instrument in the overtone range. (…) The overtones resonate throughout the space and are captured and amplified by microphones. (…) Listeners must be able to engage with this different kind of music, because it is less about sonic events and more about an act of empathetic perception."

NIGHT OUT@BERLIN, 04/04/2026

"At the MaerzMusik festival, Fullman was accompanied by the masterful JACK Quartet, the string ensemble blending into the sonic background, built upon the spectral texture of the Long String Instrument, contributing a melodic component that dissolved into that vibrating mass. Ellen Fullman presented her instrument to a spellbound audience, immersed in a sensory experience— both aural and visual—on a spring evening in Berlin."

Cyclic Defrost, Nicolás Melmannon, 31/03/2026

“It was a concert full of hypnotic sounds that gently took away the listeners’ sense of time. (…) Despite the epic length, they maintained the tension that the composer had imbued his work with right to the very end. (...) There was no hint of monotony whatsoever.”

Wuppertaler Zeitung, Lilo Ingenlath-Gegic, 19/01/2026

"From the whispering of the strings, the touch of the bows and the silence in between, the JACK Quartet creates an entire sound cosmos at the beginning of Helmut Lachenmann's third string quartet “Grido” (2001)."

Kronen Zeitung, Felix Jureĉek, 09/11/2025

"They sneeze together, they turn their heads together, they burst out laughing together. In a word, they play together perfectly..."

Le Monde, Pierre Gervasoni, 03/09/2025

"Finally, a quartet that ventures beyond its comfort zone... Clearly, these four (...) love nothing more than engaging in dialogue with the visual arts: performance, installation, video, dance, theatrical gesture. Each of their concerts thus becomes a unique experience. Multisensory, polysemic, brimming with mystery."

Télérama, Sébastien Porte, 03/09/2025

"The renowned Jack Quartet, which specialises in 20th and 21st century music, gave an impressive performance of Georg Friedrich Haas' third string quartet ’In iij. Noct.’ When listening in the dark, thoughts and associations flow differently and the ensemble created contrasting atmospheres with great intensity, sometimes disturbing, sometimes calming. The excellent interaction between the four musicians and their positioning in the four corners of the hall turned the dark concert into a physical experience with a Dolby Surround effect."

Orchester Graben, Christina von Richthofen, 27/11/2024

"Undoubtedly, the most radical and daring program of the Biennial came with Jack Quartet's proposal, dedicated exclusively to the String Quartet No. 3 In iij. Noct by Georg Friedrich Haas, a work which, performed on numerous European stages since its creation in 2001, continues to captivate for its exploitation of the microtonal language and its staging based on absolute darkness."

Scherzo.es, Lluís Trullén, 26/11/2024

"True to the vision of “rewriting history” the first half included arrangements of works from the Renaissance period, alongside pieces by contemporary US composers Johnny MacMillan and Amy Williams, both of which feature snatches of older works as an undercoat. (...) Williams was also inspired by Vicentino’s choral music for Tangled Madrigal, a work commissioned by JACK. Out of a patina of sliding insect sounds at the top of the fingerboard emerges a madrigal theme amid complex rhythmic shifts and pauses. Solo cadenza passages are thrown around after a yearning passage from Richards’ viola – first Campbell’s cello then Wulliman’s violin, accompanied by whiplike bow strokes then some manic agitated bowing by the ensemble. (...) This was an afternoon of outstanding musicianship and a programme which, in the first half, bestrode the ancient and modern worlds, while unleashing all the iconoclastic delights of today in the second."

Limelight-arts.com, Steve Moffat, 7.4.2024

"The JACK Quartet pushes the boundaries of what can be considered technically possible with breathtaking precision."

Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, Stefan Arndt, 16.05.2023

"Rushing and pounding sounds produced with the bow, but also with picks, with plucking and tearing finger and arm movements on truly all parts of the instruments. (...) There is breathless silence in the audience in the face of the magical lightness of these often barely audible sounds."

rbb24/rbb Inforadio, Hans Ackermann, 12.5.2023

"JACK Quartet’s committed performances are a model of flawless ensemble and intonation, captured in very clear sound."

Gramophone.