icarus Quartet
Sunday, April 24th, 2022 at 3:30pm
Event is free. Registration is requested, but not required.
Click here to register >>>
Half piano/half percussion, icarus Quartet presents an adventurous program including Michael Laurello’s Big Things, Ruby Fulton’s Wilderness Suite, plus new works from Scott Lee, Lila Meretzky, and Christian Quinones. icarus Quartet is highly-acclaimed—following their Carnegie Hall debut, composer Paul Lansky simply remarked, “This is music making of the highest order.”
Click here to register >>>
Half piano/half percussion, icarus Quartet presents an adventurous program including Michael Laurello’s Big Things, Ruby Fulton’s Wilderness Suite, plus new works from Scott Lee, Lila Meretzky, and Christian Quinones. icarus Quartet is highly-acclaimed—following their Carnegie Hall debut, composer Paul Lansky simply remarked, “This is music making of the highest order.”
Covid-19 Safety Policies
Proof of Full Vaccination or Negative PCR Test Required
Proof of full COVID-19 vaccination or proof of a negative PCR test result for COVID-19 on a sample collected within 72 hours is required for admittance to the concert venue.
Masking Optional
In keeping with public health and local government guidelines, facemasks are now optional. A limited supply of KN95 masks will be available at entrances to the venue.
Please arrive early to present proof of vaccination or negative PCR test result to our volunteers at the entrance to the church.
Proof of Full Vaccination or Negative PCR Test Required
Proof of full COVID-19 vaccination or proof of a negative PCR test result for COVID-19 on a sample collected within 72 hours is required for admittance to the concert venue.
Masking Optional
In keeping with public health and local government guidelines, facemasks are now optional. A limited supply of KN95 masks will be available at entrances to the venue.
Please arrive early to present proof of vaccination or negative PCR test result to our volunteers at the entrance to the church.
SIMULTANEOUS LIVESTREAM
The livestream will be available on April 24th at 3:30pm and will remain available to watch for one week.
PROGRAM
Churches Made out of Shipwrecks (2016) by Michael Laurello (b. 1981)
forgetting (2022) by Lila Meretzky (b. 1998)
*world premiere
Split Screen (2022) by Scott Lee (b. 1988)
*world premiere
~brief pause~
Wilderness Suite (in progress) by Ruby Fulton (b. 1981)
[AL]PATRÓN (2022) by Christian Quiñones (b. 1996)
*world premiere
forgetting (2022) by Lila Meretzky (b. 1998)
*world premiere
Split Screen (2022) by Scott Lee (b. 1988)
*world premiere
~brief pause~
Wilderness Suite (in progress) by Ruby Fulton (b. 1981)
- When it became the wilderness
- That beautiful gold
- CAT
[AL]PATRÓN (2022) by Christian Quiñones (b. 1996)
*world premiere
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Like the mythological figure from which it draws its name, the half piano/half percussion icarus Quartet dares to fly towards the sun, aspiring to new heights of artistry. Following their Carnegie Hall debut, composer Paul Lansky simply remarked, “This is music making of the highest order.”
Winner of the 2019 Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competition and laureate of the 2017-18 American Prize, icarus has given new life to old masterpieces as well as the future of their instrumentation. What started as a graduate school project that Yale composition chair Martin Bresnick regarded as “one of the best student performances of any work I have ever heard, played with great energy, sensitivity, and precision” has now toured professionally throughout the United States. The quartet was the first ensemble to hold the Klinger ElectroAcoustic Residency at Bowling Green State University and past engagements include appearances at the Horowitz Piano Series, Queens New Music Festival, Adalman Chamber Series, and a Lansky tribute concert at Princeton University held in honor of the emeritus professor’s 75th birthday.
Their 2021-22 concert season includes performances at the Kennedy Center, the University of Northern Iowa, Delaware County Community College’s New Music Concert Series, the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music, Florida State University, Community Concerts at 2nd, and the University of Idaho’s Lionel Hampton School of Music, as well as at the Vienna Summer Music Festival for their international debut. Fostering the development of new works through commissioning and collaborating with composers is at the core of the iQ mission, and this season will see the culmination of some of these endeavors with world premieres by David Crowell, Scott Lee, and Douglas Knehans. icarus also continues their iQ Tests, a program that incites collaboration and furthers the careers of gifted student composers, with current fellows Christian Quiñones and Lila Meretzky. Wilderness Suite, an ongoing intermedia project combining iQ with the forces of composer Ruby Fulton, video artist Benjamin James, and geographer Teresa Cavazos-Cohn, unveils new vignettes in Spring 2022, further examining the unique anti-development of the 2.4 million-acre Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness site through still imagery, data, film, recorded interviews, natural sound samples, and live music.
Passionate about educating and engaging with the next generation of musicians, iQ often works in school and university settings. They have given classes and coachings on chamber music, as well as composition seminars on writing for their instruments at institutions including the Peabody Conservatory, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Bridgeport University, the University of Florida, Yale College, Wright State University, and the University of Idaho’s Lionel Hampton School of Music, in addition to presentations for grade school and Pre-K students.
Larry Weng, Yevgeny Yontov, Matt Keown, and Jeff Stern are all celebrated soloists in their own rights, and together they have found a special chemistry and inimitable joy playing chamber music. They are dedicated to the discovery, creation, and performance of new music, but what distinguishes their approach to contemporary music is a strong training and background in the classical genre. icarus Quartet is committed to performing new works with a studied and convincing interpretation that mirrors the validity of works with performance practices developed over centuries.
icarus Members:
Jeff Stern, percussion
Matt Keown, percussion
Larry Weng, piano
Yevgeny Yontov, piano
Composer Bios:
Michael Laurello is a composer and recording/mixing engineer based in Northwest Ohio.
His compositions reflect his fascination with temporal dissonance and emotional immediacy, and have been presented at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, MATA, PASIC, Bang on a Can Summer Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Carlsbad Music Festival, Music from Angel Fire, NASA, National Conference of the Society of Composers, Inc., and other venues and festivals. He has collaborated with ensembles and soloists such as icarus Quartet, Nashville Symphony, Sō Percussion, arx duo, HOCKET, Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, Yale Percussion Group, and Ensemble Repercussion featuring the Duisburger Philharmoniker and Deutschen Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz.
His engineering work focuses on contemporary classical music, and can be heard on labels such as Furious Artisans, New Focus Recordings, Red Piano Records, and MSR Classics featuring collaborative partners including Vic Firth/Zildjian, icarus Quartet, Bowling Green Philharmonia, Elainie Lillios, David Bixler, Cole Burger, Nick Zoulek, and many others. He believes deeply in the capacity of production to enhance the conceptual framework of a musical composition or interpretation.
Laurello studied composition at Yale School of Music and Tufts University. He holds a bachelor’s in music synthesis (electronic production and design) from Berklee College of Music. His mentors include David Lang, Christopher Theofanidis, Martin Bresnick, and John McDonald. Honors include a residency at Avaloch Farm Music Institute, a commission from the American Composers Forum, a fellowship with the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab, selection for the EarShot Berkeley Symphony Readings, and a Baumgardner Fellowship and Commission from the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. He has attended the highSCORE and Etchings composition festivals, and was a composition fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival.
Laurello works as a freelance composer and engineer, and as Manager of Recording Services and Technical Engineer for the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music at Bowling Green State University.
--
Lila Meretzky is a composer, educator, and visual artist born and raised in New York City. She works primarily in chamber, vocal, electronic, and electroacoustic mediums, as well as in music for dance, film, and installation. Her work is often concerned with (the warping of) memory and language, and subjective experiences of time. Recent and ongoing collaborations include new works for the icarus Quartet, Omer Quartet, and the Yale Philharmonia, and for the dance companies New Dialect, X-Contemporary Dance, and the Nashville Ballet.
Lila is a graduate of the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, where she co-founded a new music concert series called A Humming Under My Feet. She is currently working on her MM in composition at the Yale School of Music. Her other pursuits include performing as a singer and pianist, and making noise on her laptop and accordion.
As a critic, her writings have been published on the arts blog ArtsNash and she has been featured on the radio at WXNA Nashville. As an educator, she has taught composition at the Walden School in Dublin, New Hampshire and with Yale’s Music in Schools Initiative, and musicianship at the W.O. Smith Music School in Nashville, Tennessee. Paper collage is her primary visual medium, and her work has been featured in Off Latch Press’ inaugural Off Latch Zine.
Lila’s music is self-published through OVNDROYT Music.
--
Praised as “colorful” and “engaging” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Scott Lee's music often takes inspiration from popular genres, exploring odd-meter grooves and interlocking hockets while featuring pointillistic orchestration and extended performance techniques. His music marries the traditional intricacy of classical form with the more body-centered and visceral language of contemporary popular music, creating a complex music of the present with broad appeal. The Berkshire Edge described the world premiere of his Slack Tide at Tanglewood Music Center as having “moments both of calm and maximum tension...we’ve never heard anything like it.”
Lee has worked with leading orchestras including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, the Portland Symphony Orchestra, Symphony in C, the Moravian Philharmonic, Raleigh Civic Symphony, the Occasional Symphony, the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, and members of the Winston-Salem Symphony, as well as chamber groups such as the JACK Quartet, yMusic, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Deviant Septet, chatterbird, ShoutHouse, Verdant Vibes, and pop artist Ben Folds. Recent commissioners include the Tanglewood Music Center, Aspen Music Festival, Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra, Florida State Music Teachers Association, loadbang, and the Raleigh Civic Symphony.
In November 2020, New Focus Recordings released a recording of Lee’s 45-minute work Through the Mangrove Tunnels, performed by the JACK Quartet, pianist Steven Beck, and drummer Russell Lacy. Recorded at Duke University in 2018, the piece is inspired by the history and Lee's personal memories of Weedon Island, a nature preserve Lee grew up exploring in Florida.
Honors include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, winner of the Symphony In C Young Composer’s Competition, the Grand Prize in the 2015 PARMA Student Composer Competition, and the Gustav Klemm Award in Composition from the Peabody Institute. In 2020, Lee received fellowships from the Hermitage Artist Retreat and the Copland House’s CULTIVATE program.
Lee is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Florida School of Music, and has previously worked as a Lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an Instructor at Duke University. Lee earned a PhD in Composition at Duke University, and also holds degrees from the Peabody Institute and Vanderbilt University.
--
Composer and musician Ruby Fulton writes music which invites listeners to explore non-musical ideas through sound. Her musical portfolio includes explorations of mental illness, Buddhism, philosophy, psychedelic research, addiction, and chess strategy; and profiles of iconic popular figures like the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and musicians Syd Barrett and Whitney Houston. She has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects with thinkers and makers in the sciences and literary, movement and visual arts.
Fulton is a multi-instrumentalist, performing on and writing for violin, flugelhorn, and keys. Much of her work falls into the category of concert music, written for ensembles ranging from duos and trios to full orchestras, choirs, and wind ensembles. Fulton also writes music that she performs herself, using loops and samples to become a one-person orchestra. Whatever musical genre or instruments Fulton chooses, her music reflects the rhythms and pulses of daily life, and the world around her. Her music has been performed by the Boulder Philharmonic, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, the Holland Symfonia, Volti, and Newspeak; and programmed on the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Guadeamus New Music Festival, and the SONiC Festival. Fulton is a founding member of the experimental vocal collective Rhymes With Opera, a 5-piece vocal/composer ensemble based in New York City.
She teaches composition and music theory at the University of Idaho Lionel Hampton School of Music. She holds a doctorate from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, with additional degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Boston University. She has taught undergraduate and graduate composition and music theory at the Shenandoah Conservatory, the Peabody Conservatory, Johns Hopkins University, and Towson University.
--
Christian Quiñones is a Puerto Rican composer whose music explores concepts such as cultural identity and the intersection between vernacular music, electronic textures, rock, and Latin music.
For 2020 he was selected for the Earshot Underwood Orchestra Readings with the American Composers Orchestra and has received commissions from the Brooklyn Arts Council Inaugural Commission, icarus Quartet, the Bergamot String Quartet, The Goodwin Avenue Trio, and the Victory players where Christian was 2018-2019 composer in residence.
In addition, Christian has also been a fellow at the 2021 Bang on a Can Summer Festival, DePaul University Summer Residency, MIFA Festival, Red Note Music Festival, Connecticut Summerfest, CCI Initiative, and The Zodiac Festival in France where he was awarded the Distinguished Composer award.
Christian is a graduate of the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico (B.M.) and the University of Illinois (M.M), where he was the recipient of the Graduate College Master’s Fellowship. Christian is currently pursuing his Ph.D. as a President’s fellow at Princeton University.
Winner of the 2019 Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competition and laureate of the 2017-18 American Prize, icarus has given new life to old masterpieces as well as the future of their instrumentation. What started as a graduate school project that Yale composition chair Martin Bresnick regarded as “one of the best student performances of any work I have ever heard, played with great energy, sensitivity, and precision” has now toured professionally throughout the United States. The quartet was the first ensemble to hold the Klinger ElectroAcoustic Residency at Bowling Green State University and past engagements include appearances at the Horowitz Piano Series, Queens New Music Festival, Adalman Chamber Series, and a Lansky tribute concert at Princeton University held in honor of the emeritus professor’s 75th birthday.
Their 2021-22 concert season includes performances at the Kennedy Center, the University of Northern Iowa, Delaware County Community College’s New Music Concert Series, the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music, Florida State University, Community Concerts at 2nd, and the University of Idaho’s Lionel Hampton School of Music, as well as at the Vienna Summer Music Festival for their international debut. Fostering the development of new works through commissioning and collaborating with composers is at the core of the iQ mission, and this season will see the culmination of some of these endeavors with world premieres by David Crowell, Scott Lee, and Douglas Knehans. icarus also continues their iQ Tests, a program that incites collaboration and furthers the careers of gifted student composers, with current fellows Christian Quiñones and Lila Meretzky. Wilderness Suite, an ongoing intermedia project combining iQ with the forces of composer Ruby Fulton, video artist Benjamin James, and geographer Teresa Cavazos-Cohn, unveils new vignettes in Spring 2022, further examining the unique anti-development of the 2.4 million-acre Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness site through still imagery, data, film, recorded interviews, natural sound samples, and live music.
Passionate about educating and engaging with the next generation of musicians, iQ often works in school and university settings. They have given classes and coachings on chamber music, as well as composition seminars on writing for their instruments at institutions including the Peabody Conservatory, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Bridgeport University, the University of Florida, Yale College, Wright State University, and the University of Idaho’s Lionel Hampton School of Music, in addition to presentations for grade school and Pre-K students.
Larry Weng, Yevgeny Yontov, Matt Keown, and Jeff Stern are all celebrated soloists in their own rights, and together they have found a special chemistry and inimitable joy playing chamber music. They are dedicated to the discovery, creation, and performance of new music, but what distinguishes their approach to contemporary music is a strong training and background in the classical genre. icarus Quartet is committed to performing new works with a studied and convincing interpretation that mirrors the validity of works with performance practices developed over centuries.
icarus Members:
Jeff Stern, percussion
Matt Keown, percussion
Larry Weng, piano
Yevgeny Yontov, piano
Composer Bios:
Michael Laurello is a composer and recording/mixing engineer based in Northwest Ohio.
His compositions reflect his fascination with temporal dissonance and emotional immediacy, and have been presented at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, MATA, PASIC, Bang on a Can Summer Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Carlsbad Music Festival, Music from Angel Fire, NASA, National Conference of the Society of Composers, Inc., and other venues and festivals. He has collaborated with ensembles and soloists such as icarus Quartet, Nashville Symphony, Sō Percussion, arx duo, HOCKET, Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, Yale Percussion Group, and Ensemble Repercussion featuring the Duisburger Philharmoniker and Deutschen Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz.
His engineering work focuses on contemporary classical music, and can be heard on labels such as Furious Artisans, New Focus Recordings, Red Piano Records, and MSR Classics featuring collaborative partners including Vic Firth/Zildjian, icarus Quartet, Bowling Green Philharmonia, Elainie Lillios, David Bixler, Cole Burger, Nick Zoulek, and many others. He believes deeply in the capacity of production to enhance the conceptual framework of a musical composition or interpretation.
Laurello studied composition at Yale School of Music and Tufts University. He holds a bachelor’s in music synthesis (electronic production and design) from Berklee College of Music. His mentors include David Lang, Christopher Theofanidis, Martin Bresnick, and John McDonald. Honors include a residency at Avaloch Farm Music Institute, a commission from the American Composers Forum, a fellowship with the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab, selection for the EarShot Berkeley Symphony Readings, and a Baumgardner Fellowship and Commission from the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. He has attended the highSCORE and Etchings composition festivals, and was a composition fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival.
Laurello works as a freelance composer and engineer, and as Manager of Recording Services and Technical Engineer for the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music at Bowling Green State University.
--
Lila Meretzky is a composer, educator, and visual artist born and raised in New York City. She works primarily in chamber, vocal, electronic, and electroacoustic mediums, as well as in music for dance, film, and installation. Her work is often concerned with (the warping of) memory and language, and subjective experiences of time. Recent and ongoing collaborations include new works for the icarus Quartet, Omer Quartet, and the Yale Philharmonia, and for the dance companies New Dialect, X-Contemporary Dance, and the Nashville Ballet.
Lila is a graduate of the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, where she co-founded a new music concert series called A Humming Under My Feet. She is currently working on her MM in composition at the Yale School of Music. Her other pursuits include performing as a singer and pianist, and making noise on her laptop and accordion.
As a critic, her writings have been published on the arts blog ArtsNash and she has been featured on the radio at WXNA Nashville. As an educator, she has taught composition at the Walden School in Dublin, New Hampshire and with Yale’s Music in Schools Initiative, and musicianship at the W.O. Smith Music School in Nashville, Tennessee. Paper collage is her primary visual medium, and her work has been featured in Off Latch Press’ inaugural Off Latch Zine.
Lila’s music is self-published through OVNDROYT Music.
--
Praised as “colorful” and “engaging” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Scott Lee's music often takes inspiration from popular genres, exploring odd-meter grooves and interlocking hockets while featuring pointillistic orchestration and extended performance techniques. His music marries the traditional intricacy of classical form with the more body-centered and visceral language of contemporary popular music, creating a complex music of the present with broad appeal. The Berkshire Edge described the world premiere of his Slack Tide at Tanglewood Music Center as having “moments both of calm and maximum tension...we’ve never heard anything like it.”
Lee has worked with leading orchestras including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the North Carolina Symphony, the Portland Symphony Orchestra, Symphony in C, the Moravian Philharmonic, Raleigh Civic Symphony, the Occasional Symphony, the Peabody Symphony Orchestra, and members of the Winston-Salem Symphony, as well as chamber groups such as the JACK Quartet, yMusic, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Deviant Septet, chatterbird, ShoutHouse, Verdant Vibes, and pop artist Ben Folds. Recent commissioners include the Tanglewood Music Center, Aspen Music Festival, Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra, Florida State Music Teachers Association, loadbang, and the Raleigh Civic Symphony.
In November 2020, New Focus Recordings released a recording of Lee’s 45-minute work Through the Mangrove Tunnels, performed by the JACK Quartet, pianist Steven Beck, and drummer Russell Lacy. Recorded at Duke University in 2018, the piece is inspired by the history and Lee's personal memories of Weedon Island, a nature preserve Lee grew up exploring in Florida.
Honors include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, winner of the Symphony In C Young Composer’s Competition, the Grand Prize in the 2015 PARMA Student Composer Competition, and the Gustav Klemm Award in Composition from the Peabody Institute. In 2020, Lee received fellowships from the Hermitage Artist Retreat and the Copland House’s CULTIVATE program.
Lee is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Florida School of Music, and has previously worked as a Lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an Instructor at Duke University. Lee earned a PhD in Composition at Duke University, and also holds degrees from the Peabody Institute and Vanderbilt University.
--
Composer and musician Ruby Fulton writes music which invites listeners to explore non-musical ideas through sound. Her musical portfolio includes explorations of mental illness, Buddhism, philosophy, psychedelic research, addiction, and chess strategy; and profiles of iconic popular figures like the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and musicians Syd Barrett and Whitney Houston. She has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects with thinkers and makers in the sciences and literary, movement and visual arts.
Fulton is a multi-instrumentalist, performing on and writing for violin, flugelhorn, and keys. Much of her work falls into the category of concert music, written for ensembles ranging from duos and trios to full orchestras, choirs, and wind ensembles. Fulton also writes music that she performs herself, using loops and samples to become a one-person orchestra. Whatever musical genre or instruments Fulton chooses, her music reflects the rhythms and pulses of daily life, and the world around her. Her music has been performed by the Boulder Philharmonic, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, the Holland Symfonia, Volti, and Newspeak; and programmed on the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Guadeamus New Music Festival, and the SONiC Festival. Fulton is a founding member of the experimental vocal collective Rhymes With Opera, a 5-piece vocal/composer ensemble based in New York City.
She teaches composition and music theory at the University of Idaho Lionel Hampton School of Music. She holds a doctorate from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, with additional degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Boston University. She has taught undergraduate and graduate composition and music theory at the Shenandoah Conservatory, the Peabody Conservatory, Johns Hopkins University, and Towson University.
--
Christian Quiñones is a Puerto Rican composer whose music explores concepts such as cultural identity and the intersection between vernacular music, electronic textures, rock, and Latin music.
For 2020 he was selected for the Earshot Underwood Orchestra Readings with the American Composers Orchestra and has received commissions from the Brooklyn Arts Council Inaugural Commission, icarus Quartet, the Bergamot String Quartet, The Goodwin Avenue Trio, and the Victory players where Christian was 2018-2019 composer in residence.
In addition, Christian has also been a fellow at the 2021 Bang on a Can Summer Festival, DePaul University Summer Residency, MIFA Festival, Red Note Music Festival, Connecticut Summerfest, CCI Initiative, and The Zodiac Festival in France where he was awarded the Distinguished Composer award.
Christian is a graduate of the Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico (B.M.) and the University of Illinois (M.M), where he was the recipient of the Graduate College Master’s Fellowship. Christian is currently pursuing his Ph.D. as a President’s fellow at Princeton University.