![]() ![]() “Caroline Shaw is a very lovely person, one of my best friends.” “We tend to play music by people we really like as human beings,” Yee said. In choosing contemporary works to champion, the Attacca obviously seeks well-crafted music, but its relationship with the composer is also important, too. Violist Nathan Schram was recruited seven years ago, and violinist Dominic Salerni joined at the beginning of 2020 just after the quartet’s Grammy win. It has undergone personnel changes since then, with Yee and Schroeder being the only remaining original members. “Like at 3 in the morning, Amy and I just opened a music dictionary and said every word until it sounded pretty good in front of ‘quartet,’” Yee said. The group needed to list a name when it entered a competition soon thereafter, so its members chose “attacca,” a musical term placed at the end of a movement to signify a continuation to the next section without pause. “And we just sort of kept going,” the cellist said. But when the pianist dropped out, they decided to create a string quartet with two other students. Yee and violinist Amy Schroeder met on the second day of orientation as undergraduates, and they began playing string duos and then were part of a piano trio. The Attacca was formed in 2003 at the Juilliard School in New York. “It can exist in whatever way an audience member sees fit, which is exciting.” “We like putting Philip Glass on programs because it’s the wild card,” Yee said. ![]() ![]() 3, Mishima, which the Attacca recorded on its last album, Of All Joys. Rounding out things is Philip Glass’ String Quartet No. It was via Adams that the group encountered Gabriella Smith’s Carrot Revolution, which culminates this program.Īlso included on the line-up are Shaw’s Evergreen, Anna Müller’s Drifting Circles, Louis Cole’s Real Life, and selections by Steven Ellison aka Flying Lotus, a Los Angeles DJ and rapper. “So, we have always had John Adams in our DNA, and John Adams took us under his wing and has had a lot of pieces cross our paths whenever he is in charge,” Yee said. The quartet spotlighted John Adams, the Festival’s 2022 Composer-in-Residence, on its debut album in 2013, performing all three of his existing string-quartet works at the time, including John’s Book of Alleged Dances, selections of which are featured here. Yee describes the July 12 Festival program as a “snapshot” of what’s important to the group at the moment. In that spirit of the now, the Attacca makes its Colorado Music Festival debut July 12, presenting a concert of all contemporary music as part of the summer event’s Music of Today and Robert Mann Chamber Music series. “That is a goal of ours, that a work by a living composer be on every concert that we play, which is not the norm, but I think it should be,” said cellist Andrew Yee, who uses the pronouns they and them. In 2019, for example, the foursome released Orange, a Grammy Award-winning album devoted to the music of the 2013 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Caroline Shaw. The Attacca Quartet pays respect to the past, playing works by composers like Haydn and Ravel and twice tackling the ultimate challenge for any such ensemble, a complete set of performances of Beethoven’s 16 career-spanning string quartets.īut the quartet is best known for its emphasis on the musical here and now. ![]()
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