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

To mark the 100th anniversary of Morton Feldmann's birth, the JACK Quartet, together with pianist Florence Millet, will perform his late masterpiece Piano and String Quartet on 16 January in Wuppertal and on 31 January in Tübingen.

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.

more articles in the magazine

SAT 31.01.

19:00
Saal Eins in der Westspitze, Tübingen

SAT 07.02.

11:30
Wigmore Hall, London

15:00
Wigmore Hall, London

Biography

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

Undeniably our generation’s “leading new-music foursome,” JACK Quartet’s “stylistic range, precision and passion have made the group one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles” (The New York Times). Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK Quartet celebrates their landmark 20th anniversary season in 2024-2025, embarking on 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, the ensemble operates as a nonprofit 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. 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 three 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 Quartet officially marks their 20th anniversary with a celebratory concert at 92NY in New York City, featuring the world premiere of a new JACK-commissioned work by Anthony Cheung; the U.S. premiere of JACK commission, Juri Seo’s Three Imaginary Chansons, at Lincoln Center; and the world premiere of Ellen Fullman’s Energy Archive at the Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival 2025 in Pittsburgh. In addition, JACK Quartet celebrates their long association with composer John Zorn with the release of Zorn’s complete string quartets on Tzadik Records, as well as an album release concert at Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium.

International engagements include JACK Quartet’s annual marathon of performances at Wigmore Hall in the UK and a concert at Pierre Boulez Saal Berlin in Germany, along with appearances in Toronto, Barcelona, Lugano and Winterthur, Switzerland.

The JACK Quartet embraces close collaboration with the composers whose work they perform, yielding a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. JACK Quartet has both self-commissioned and been commissioned to create new works with artists such as Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, Helmut Lachenmann, and Caroline Shaw, with upcoming and recent premieres including works by John Luther Adams, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Liza Lim, Tyshawn Sorey, Amy Williams, and John Zorn. The world’s top composers choose JACK because of their singular dedication to innovation and experimentation.

According to Musical America, “many of their recordings are must-haves, for anyone interested in new music.” They have been nominated for multiple GRAMMY® Awards, the most recent being their albums of music by John Luther Adams—both were nominated in the 2022 and 2023 Best Ensemble Performance category. Other albums feature music by Helmut Lachenmann, Catherine Lamb, Du Yun, Nick Dunston, Zosha di Castri, Iannis Xenakis, and upcoming releases of the complete quartets of Elliott Carter and John Zorn.

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. By bringing together diverse groups of excellent and adventurous people to not only create new projects, but to contribute to the evolution of the JACK Studio project itself, JACK has created an artistic ecosystem that links the quartet with artists from around the world. 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.

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. Their projects have been performed by JACK Quartet at venues including TIME:SPANS, Central Park, the Lucerne Festival, MoMA PS1, and Mannes School of Music, in addition to being recorded for professional releases. Commissioned artists have been paired with musical mentors including Marcos Balter, Clara Iannotta, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Georg Friedrich Haas, Donnacha Dennehy, Claire Chase, and Nadia Sirota.

JACK Quartet has performed to critical acclaim at venues such as Carnegie Hall (USA), Lincoln Center (USA), Berlin Philharmonie (Germany), Wigmore Hall (United Kingdom), Muziekgebouw (Netherlands), The Louvre (France), Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), Sydney Opera House (Australia), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Suntory Hall (Japan), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), Festival Internacional Cervantino (Mexico), and Teatro Colón (Argentina). Among their honors, they have earned an Avery Fisher Career Grant and Fromm Music Foundation Prize, been selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year, and received Lincoln Center's Martin E. Segal Award, New Music USA's Trailblazer Award, and the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming.

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 and provide mentorship to Mannes’s Cuker and Stern Graduate String Quartet. 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. JACK has long-standing relationships with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall and spring. Learn more at www.jackquartet.com.

2024/2025 Season

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

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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

"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.