CSMA welcomes JACK Quartet, a Stanford Live Artist Spotlight, for a free concert in Tateuchi Hall on Saturday, January 19 at 7:30pm. JACK Quartet is deemed “superheros of the new music world” (Boston Globe) and they are focused on the spread of new string quartet music.
We spoke to Austin Wulliman, one of JACK Quartet’s violinists to learn more about him and what the audience can expect from their performance in Tateuchi Hall.
JACK Quartet
How did you begin playing and performing music?
All the members of JACK Quartet are lucky to have families that value music as a part of our communities and our upbringing. We all began studying our instruments in private lessons supported by our parents and in ensembles in our communities throughout childhood.
Tell us about a great music teacher you had.
My mother is a music educator. She taught grade school music in the public schools, early childhood music to single mothers, and played the organ in church. She encouraged me to always be singing and playing music. I was a boy soprano, and began violin at age 5 and piano at age 8 on my own initiative.
How often do you practice and/or rehearse?
We are practicing and rehearsing daily. The quartet’s schedule is very irregular, as you might imagine for a group that tours and gives 75 performances a year. So, every day we are on tour we are rehearsing and performing, not to mention our personal practice. But, each person additionally practices to prepare parts before rehearsal at home, and when we are not on tour we rehearse most weekdays for around four hours. We also spend a lot of our time on planes, trains, or in cars preparing scores and studying the music we perform. We are always discovering new composers and exploring new styles, so there is much work to do in simply comprehending and preparing the music we receive and are always learning before we even pick up our instruments.
What advice do you have for aspiring musicians?
Follow your own curiosity and discover what it is about making music that you love, not what you think will make your teachers happy. Ultimately, they want you to find your passion whether that’s simply as a lover of music or if you get more serious about pursuing your interests in depth. Enjoy your journey to finding what music truly speaks to you and find your way to express it. Push yourself to understand what it is about what you’re learning in lessons, school, on YouTube, and how that can feed your interests no matter how different it all might seem now.
Tell us a little bit about JACK Quartet.
JACK Quartet has existed for over 10 years, formed by friends in college and dedicated to performing challenging contemporary and new repertoire. We love working with living composers, many of whom are our close friends, on creating brand new musical styles we hadn’t imagined before. We also love exploring some of the classics of the 20th century that are still a challenge to our contemporary ears and finding out what we can say about these masterworks.
What can the audience expect during the performance in Tateuchi Hall?
You can expect to see us stretching the limits of our instruments and our technique to make some high-wire acts of the imagination come to life. You can expect to see some fast notes, crunchy sounds, smooth blends, and gnarly harmonies rise from our instruments. Feel free to take it in without the expectation that you were supposed to understand anything, it just is what it is!
