PUBLIQuartet - What Is American: Rhythm Nation

Join us at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music's Cary Hall for What Is American: Rhythm Nation, the next issue in PUBLIQuartet's What Is American series, a GRAMMY®-nominated album and touring project. This second volume features and celebrates American rhythmic traditions as expressions of bodily autonomy and tacit history-keeping. The program features four new works by Jeff Scott, Mazz Swift, Eddie Venegas, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jlin, made possible through a 2024 Chamber Music America Artistic Projects grant supported by the Howard Gilman Foundation. Each piece evokes a distinct rhythmic world, reflecting the plurality of American movements and protecting the unspoken spirit of their lineage's narratives.

The program features Baobab, a new work with an intricate, multi-layered percussion audiotrack by composer and Pulitzer Prize-finalist Jlin, incorporating live-improvised string samples from PUBLIQuartet to create a dynamic sonic landscape evoking both motion and timelessness.

Next up is the world premiere of Digging Gold; Deeper Blue, which marks a departure from Mazz Swift’s recent works that explore the tradition of spirituals. Swift notes that the new piece reflects a desire to explore rhythm and groove through the lens of their own experience as a neuro-emergent composer, challenging “the virtuosity of the quartet as an ensemble.”

Written to honor the memory of the composer’s uncle, Jeff Scott’s Blues for Buddy sets lyrical blues melodies against march rhythms that evoke the tradition of New Orleans second-line parades and jazz works like Art Blakey’s “Blues March.”

Rounding out the program is Eddie Venegas’s Cachumbambeando En Clave, which incorporates the blend of salsa, Afro-Cuban, Puerto Rican, and jazz languages that the composer encountered when he arrived in New York City from Venezuela. With clave rhythm as its foundation, this piece presents a variety of energetic rhythmic textures and characters, with a moment for improvised solos by the members of PUBLIQuartet along the way.

Host or Publisher PUBLIQuartet