Mar. 20: PUBLIQuartet Performs NY Premiere of What Is American: Rhythm Nation at DiMenna Center

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
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PUBLIQuartet Performs the New York Premiere of
What Is American: Rhythm Nation

A Follow-Up to PUBLIQuartet’s GRAMMY®-Nominated 
Touring Program and Album, What Is American 

Featuring New Works by Jlin, Mazz Swift, Eddie Venegas, and Jeff Scott

RESCHEDULED - Thursday, March 20, 2025 at 7:30 pm 
The DiMenna Center | New York, NY

"a thrilling immediacy to the playing…boldly imaginative." – BBC Music Magazine

"a respectful acknowledgment of the past and confident step into the future…
the adventurous PUBLIQuartet" – The New York Times

www.publiquartet.com
 

New York, NY (February 20, 2025) – On Thursday, March 20, 2025 at 7:30 PM, GRAMMY®-nominated PUBLIQuartet presents the New York premiere of its new program, What Is American: Rhythm Nation in Mary Flagler Cary Hall at The DiMenna Center in New York City. The event was rescheduled from December 2024 due to a family emergency. 

What Is American: Rhythm Nation is 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 original works by PUBLIQuartet and four new works by Swift, Eddie Venegas, Jeff Scott, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Jlin. The program is 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. 

PUBLIQuartet’s GRAMMY-nominated album, What is American – released June 17, 2022 on Bright Shiny Things – explores the resonance between contemporary, blues, jazz, accessible, and rock-inflected music, all of which trace their roots back to the Black and Indigenous music that inspired Dvorak's "American" String Quartet. Interrogating these traditions of our nation's complex history, PUBLIQuartet attempts to connect the dots, illuminating American concert music's past, present, and future. What Is American is ultimately a call to ponder the kaleidoscope of composers and diverse genres that make up America's rich musical history. 

This season, PUBLIQuartet brought versions of What is American to Emory University as Schwartz Artists-in-Residence on Friday, November 1, 2024; the 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville, KY presented by New Lens on Sunday, November 3, 2024; and to the University of Wisconsin Madison on Friday, November 22, 2024. PUBLIQuartet was featured in a recital with founding quartet member and composer Jessie Montgomery to celebrate her tenure as the University of Iowa School of Music’s 2024–2025 Composer-in-Residence on Thursday, November 21, 2024. PUBLIQuartet also performed a new version of bass-baritone Davóne Tines’ MASS on Monday, November 25, 2024 at Music Mondays in New York City.

Program Information
Thursday, March 20, 2025 at 7:30pm
What Is American: Rhythm Nation
The DiMenna Center | New York, NY
Tickets: Free
Link: https://dimennacenter.org/event/what-is-american-rhythm-nation/ 

Program:
Jlin – Baobab (2024) [New York Premiere]
Mazz Swift – Digging Gold; Deeper Blue (2024) [World Premiere]
Jeff Scott – Blues for Buddy (2024) 
Eddie Venegas – Cachumbambeando En Clave (2024) [New York Premiere]

PUBLIQuartet's 2024 Chamber Music America Artistic Projects grant was made possible by the support of the Howard Gilman Foundation.

About PUBLIQuartet
Applauded by The Washington Post as "a perfect encapsulation of today's trends in chamber music" and by The New Yorker as "independent-minded," multi-GRAMMY®-nominated PUBLIQuartet is an improvising string quartet whose repertoire blends genres and highlights American multiculturalism. PUBLIQuartet rose on the music scene as winner of the 2013 Concert Artists Guild New Music/New Places award, and in 2019 garnered Chamber Music America's prestigious Visionary Award for outstanding and innovative approaches to contemporary classical, jazz, and world chamber music. PQ's genre-bending programs range from newly commissioned pieces to re-imaginations of classical works featuring open-form improvisations that expand the techniques and aesthetic of the traditional string quartet.

PUBLIQuartet has held artist residencies at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Sawdust and has performed everywhere, from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to the Montreal, Newport, and Detroit Jazz Festivals. Their 2016 appearance on The Colbert Report, "Requiem for a Debate" – in which they improvised a live soundtrack to the third presidential debate – not only received over a million views but prompted The Washington Post to declare them "the winner...indubitably." Their last season included performances at USC and the Library of Congress, with the New York City Ballet, and with jazz artists including Hiromi, Diane Monroe, and Magos Herrera. 

The quartet's latest album, the GRAMMY®-nominated What Is American, released in June 2022 on the Bright Shiny Things label, explores resonances between contemporary, blues, jazz, freely-improvised, and rock-inflected languages, all of which trace their roots back to the Black and Indigenous musical traditions that inspired Dvorak's "American" String Quartet (Op. 96). The album also includes CARDS 11-11-2020, written by Roscoe Mitchell for PUBLIQuartet, as well as works by Ornette Coleman, Rhiannon Giddens, and Vijay Iyer.

Committed to creating an inclusive performance space, supporting living composers of varying genres, and expanding the classical canon, PUBLIQuartet was the inaugural ensemble-in-residence for Carnegie Hall's PlayUSA program in 2021-2022, working with high school music classes across the country on a large-scale creative project called Reflections on Resilience. Their innovative PUBLIQ Access program has promoted emerging composers by presenting a wide variety of underrepresented music for the string quartets – from classical, jazz, and electronic to non-notated, world, and improvised music. Other unique projects include MIND | THE |GAP, a series of creative projects developed by PQ that weave together different styles of music via group composition, arranging, and improvisation. These unique works range from "Bird in Paris" (Claude Debussy meets Charlie Parker) to more recent extended works, including Reflections on Beauty, a multimedia celebration of the life and legacy of Madam C.J. Walker featuring visual projections and narration by Walker's great-great-granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles.

Founded in 2010, PUBLIQuartet is based in New York City. 

*Photography credit: Lelanie Foster

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