Nova Linea Musica's Season 3 opens with JACK Quartet, the ensemble The New York Times has called our generation's "leading new-music foursome," in a program built around close listening and transformative discovery. The evening draws its title and its frame from Cenk Ergün's Sonare and Celare, the paired works JACK recorded for New Focus Recordings in 2020.
Written for JACK in 2015–16, Sonare and Celare stand in deliberate opposition: Sonare is dense, vigorous, and rhythmically alive; Celare is soft, sustained, and ethereal. Together they explore Ergün's interest in just intonation, microtonality, and the residue of Turkish modal music, opening a sonic world the audience is invited to inhabit on either side of the program. Between them sit two further works that extend the evening's experimental arc: Keir GoGwilt's Treatise on Limited Freedoms: Future Mode I (2024), by the violinist-composer who is a frequent JACK collaborator, and Escape Rites (2025), the title work from JACK violinist Austin Wulliman's own recent album.
At the heart of the evening is the world premiere of a new quartet by Juri Seo, Guggenheim Fellow, Princeton faculty composer, and a writer whose music moves with rigor and lyricism across an unusually wide stylistic range. The commission continues NLM's mission to resource the creation of new chamber music and bring composers, performers, and listeners into the same room.
JACK Quartet, comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, enters its third decade as one of contemporary music's indispensable ensembles. Founded in 2005, JACK has been honored with the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Fromm Music Foundation Prize, Musical America's Ensemble of the Year, and Chamber Music America's Michael Jaffee Visionary Award, and performs regularly at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Berlin Philharmonie, Wigmore Hall, and the Sydney Opera House.
The program closes a circle that Sonare opens: an evening that asks the audience to lean in, listen close, and discover what new music can do when four players have spent twenty years learning to hear together.
