Aeolus Quartet
arx duo
Jonathan Bailey Holland
AEOLUS QUARTET
Nicholas Tavani & Rachel Shapiro (violins), Caitlin Lynch (viola), Alan Richardson (cello)
ARX DUO
Garrett Arnay and Mari Yoshinaga
JONATHAN BAILEY HOLLAND
In this multifaceted program of works by American composers, the two pieces for percussion duo and string quartet together look ahead to untold possibilities in the genre while the two pieces for string quartet alone speak to traditions in American music in the 20th century.
arx duo joins Aeolus to present two new works for String Quartet and Two Percussion, including Michael Laurello’s “These Whose Lips Smashed Unimagined Skies”, and a 1900 Building Partner commission by Jonathan Bailey Holland “Third Quartet: for string quartet and two percussion”. These pieces mix the world of romantic string writing (like in Hollands piece) and the world of “math metal” (Laurello). “These Whose Lips…” features a wealth of sounds, shifting rhythms, and auditory surprises that creates an engaging, long form piece, moving continuously through mixing the world of percussion with that of the String Quartet. In Hollands “Third Quartet”, the romantic string quartet is emphasized and embellished by sounds from the percussion including some pitch, effects sounds, and a groovy snare drum. Both written in the last 5 years, this will be the 3rd ever performance of both works.
Bill Bolcom's Three Rags for String Quartet (transcribed 1989) celebrates the lively, syncopated energy of ragtime music made popular by such legends as Scott Joplin and James Scott. Florence Price's lush, soulful Quartet in A minor (1935) traces the roots of ragtime to the Juba dance, an African-American plantation dance performed by enslaved African people. This syncopated style originating in African drumming features prominently in Price's third movement, amidst surrounding movements showcasing a remarkable skill in fusing her mastery of Western Classical compositional techniques with harmonic idioms characteristic of the Black musical tradition. We feel especially honored to share this music here in Kansas City, where there is such a rich history of ragtime and jazz music making.
AEOLUS QUARTET
With performances acclaimed for both “high-octane” excitement (Strad) and “dusky lyricism” (New York Times), the Aeolus Quartet has been awarded prizes at nearly every major competition in the United States and performed across the globe with showings "worthy of a major-league quartet" (Dallas Morning News). Formed in 2008, the Quartet is comprised of violinists Nicholas Tavani and Rachel Shapiro, violist Caitlin Lynch, and cellist Alan Richardson. Mark Satola of the Cleveland Plain Dealer writes, “The quartet has a rich and warm tone combined with precise ensemble playing (that managed also to come across as fluid and natural), and an impressive musical intelligence guided every technical and dramatic turn.” The Aeolus Quartet has performed in venues ranging from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series to Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, to Dupont Underground, a subterranean streetcar station in DC's Dupont Circle. They were the 2013-2015 Graduate Resident String Quartet at the Juilliard School and are currently Quartet-in-Residence at Musica Viva NY.
In addition to extensive touring throughout the United States, the Quartet has recently been featured on “Inside Chamber Music” presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, at the Artosphere Festival hosted by the Walton Arts Center, and in the New York City premiere of chamber opera “Ellen West” at the Prototype Festival. Last season, they performed at Cornell University, the Austin Chamber Music Festival, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and NYC’s Bohemian National Hall, among others.
The Aeolus Quartet has released two critically acclaimed albums of classical and contemporary works through the Longhorn/Naxos label which are available on iTunes, Amazon, and major retailers worldwide. Part of an ongoing series entitled Many-Sided Music, these albums promote the diversity and breadth of works by American composers. The next album in the Many-Sided Music series is slated for release in Spring 2020.
The Aeolus Quartet’s numerous honors include Grand Prize at both the Plowman Chamber Music Competition and the Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competition, as well as First Prize at the Coleman International Chamber Ensemble Competition. They were also prizewinners at the Fischoff International Chamber Music Competition and the International Chamber Music Ensemble Competition in New England. The Austin Critics' Table named the Aeolus Quartet their 2016-17 "Best Touring Performance” for Rambunctious, a collaboration with Spectrum Dance Theater.
The Quartet has performed across North America, Europe, and Asia in venues such as Alice Tully Hall, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Reinberger Recital Hall at Severance Hall, The Library of Congress, Renwick Gallery, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and the Shanghai Oriental Arts Center. In addition, the quartet was recently featured on the hit Netflix show The Defenders.
Dedicated to sharing the joy of chamber music with audiences new to classical music, the Aeolus Quartet has been widely recognized for their highly creative and engaging outreach programs. In the 2015-2016 season, the Quartet was the recipient of a CMA Residency Partnership Grant. In recognition of the Aeolus Quartet’s artistic achievement, CMA awarded the project with the title of “Guarneri Quartet Residency” for 2016. The residency promoted engagement with multiple interactive performances at Duke Ellington School for the Arts, the Sitar Arts Center, and George Washington University. The Fischoff National Chamber Music Association awarded the Quartet their 2013 Educator Award in acknowledgment of the positive impact their educational efforts have had in diverse communities. Additionally, they were awarded the 2012 Lad Prize which culminated in large-scale community engagement work, performing in the Stanford area, and a masterclass residency at Stanford University. The Aeolus Quartet has also served as teaching faculty at Stanford University's Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY), the Austin Chamber Music Workshop, Point CounterPoint, and the Chloe Trevor Music Academy. Working in collaboration with the University of Texas through the Rural Chamber Music Outreach Initiative, the Quartet has presented educational programs and performances in communities throughout the state of Texas. Through their multiple residencies with the Chamber Music Society of Detroit alone, the Aeolus Quartet has reached over 18,000 students in the greater Detroit metro area.
The Aeolus Quartet has been fortunate to collaborate with many of today’s leading artists, including Renee Fleming, Ida Kavafian, Joel Krosnick, Peter Wiley, Michael Tree, and Paul Neubauer. They studied extensively with the Juilliard, Guarneri, St. Lawrence, Cavani, and Miró Quartets. Other mentors include Peter Salaff, Donald Weilerstein, Itzhak Perlman, and Mark Steinberg. Members of the Quartet hold degrees from the Juilliard School, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the University of Maryland, and the University of Texas at Austin.
The Aeolus Quartet is the ensemble-in-residence with Musica Viva NY. Thanks to the generosity of the Five Partners Foundation, the four members play on a set of instruments by famed Brooklyn luthier Samuel Zygmuntowicz. The Quartet is named for the Greek god Aeolus, who governed the four winds. This idea of a single spirit uniting four individual forces serves as an inspiration to the members of the Aeolus Quartet as they pursue their craft.
JONATHAN BAILEY HOLLAND
Originally from Flint, MI, composer Jonathan Bailey Holland (b. 1974) began studying composition while a student at the Interlochen Arts Academy, where he received a school-wide award for his very first composition. Upon graduation from Interlochen, he continued his composition studies with Ned Rorem at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he earned a Bachelor of Music degree. He went on to receive a Ph.D. in Music from Harvard University in 2000, where his primary teachers were Bernard Rands and Mario Davidovsky. He has also studied with Andrew Imbrie, Yehudi Wyner, Robert Saxton, and Robert Sirota. Currently, he is Chair of Composition, Contemporary Music, and Core Studies at Boston Conservatory at Berklee. He is also a Founding Faculty member in the first ever low-residency MFA in Music Composition program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he also served as Faculty Chair from 2016 until 2019.
Holland’s works have been performed and commissioned by numerous organizations, both nationally and internationally. Highlights include: three major works commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, including Ode (premiered during the 2018-19 season when Holland was composer-in-residence), Stories from Home (commissioned in 2018 to celebrate the reopening of Music Hall), and Halcyon Sun (commissioned to celebrate the opening of the Freedom Center National Underground Railroad Museum in 2003); El Jaleo, commissioned by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and premiered by the Phoenix chamber orchestra; Primary Movements, a ballet commissioned by the Dallas Symphony and the Dallas Black Dance Theater; Motor City Dance Mix, commissioned by the Detroit Symphony in celebration of the opening of the Max M. Fischer Music Center; Signals, commissioned by the National Symphony in honor of the 25th Anniversary of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; House of Dreams, commissioned by the Enterprise Foundation for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in memory of the Foundation’s founder James Rouse, and many more.
Recent concert seasons have included such highlights as the premiere of Holland’s The Party Starter by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, in celebration of Paavo Järvi’s final season there as music director; Sonata Variation, a newly interpreted first movement for Samuel Barber’s 1928 Violin Sonata, loosely based on Barber’s original sketches, which was commissioned by the Curtis Institute of Music and the Samuel Barber Society for the 100th Anniversary of Barber’s birth; the premiere of Shards of Serenity, commissioned by the Chicago Sinfonietta and the Chicago Architectural Foundation in celebration of the iconic architecture of Chicago; the premiere of The Clarity of Cold Air, commissioned and premiered by the Radius Ensemble; and His House is Not of this Land, commissioned and premiered by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, based on visual artist Cornelia Parker’s DeYoung Museum installation Anti-Mass.
These works and others have also been performed by the Atlanta, Baltimore, Charlotte, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Philadelphia, Richmond and San Antonio Symphony Orchestras, the Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Florida Philharmonic, Alea III, Concerto Soloists of Philadelphia (currently Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia), Orchestra 2001, Orchestra Society of Philadelphia, and soloists Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Sarah Bob, Demarre McGill, and others. During the 20/21 season his music was performed and streamed by Hotel Elefant, Tribeca New Music Festival, the Neave Trio, Cincinnati Symphony, Oberlin Sinfonietta and Contemporary Music Ensemble, Radius Ensemble, Emmanuel Music, Castle of our Skins, and more. In addition, his work has been featured on NPR’s Performance Today, and on Rob McClure’s podcast Lexical Tones. Holland’s chamber work Synchrony was profiled in the January/February 2018 edition of Harvard Magazine, and he was one of three living African American composers featured in the 2014 New York Times article, “Great Divide at the Concert Hall.
Holland has worked with such conductors as Louis Langrée, Leonard Slatkin, Robert Spano, Roger Norrington, Neeme Järvi, Paavo Järvi, Michael Morgan and David Zinman, among others. He served as 2019 Classical Roots Composer-in-Residence with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which included serving as mentor composer for the American Composer’s Orchestra’s EARSHOT Readings with the Detroit Symphony. He has also served as composer-in-residence with Boston’s Radius Ensemble during the 2008-2009 season, which featured the premiere of his composition Tone-Grafting for flute/alto flute and string quartet, with the Ritz Chamber Players during the 2006-2007 season, and with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra in 2003, as part of the Music Alive program, sponsored by Meet the Composer and the American Symphony Orchestra League (currently the League of American Orchestras). During this residency, he gave presentations at several schools, libraries and churches in the greater South Bend area, and the orchestra premiered two of his compositions, including Four Sections and Actions Rendered: Interpretations of Pollock for Three Orchestras. He has previously held residencies with the Plymouth Music Series of Minnesota (currently VocalEssence) as part of their 1995 WITNESS program, and with the Detroit Symphony, also in 1995, through the Unisys African American Composer Residency and National Symposium program, which included the premiere of his composition Fanfares and Flourishes on an Ostinato, which was later recorded by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and released on their private label.
A winner of a 2021 Live Arts Boston award from The Boston Foundation and a 2019 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, Holland is also a recipient of a 2015 Fromm Foundation Commission from Harvard University. In 2006, he was awarded a Faculty Fellowship from the Berklee College of Music to begin researching various aspects of artistic creativity. During the same year he was awarded an Artist Fellowship Grant by the Somerville (MA) Arts Council. He was a two-time winner of the Indianapolis Symphony’s Marian K. Glick Young Composer’s Showcase, in 1997 and again in 1999, which led to performances by the orchestra of his compositions Martha’s Waltz and Summer Frenzy. He received the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995, as well as a scholarship from the Presser Foundation that same year. Other awards include several Composer Assistance Grants from the American Music Center in 2003 and 2005, as well as awards from Austin Peay State University (1999), ASCAP (1998-2021), Harvard University (1998-2000), and Boston Conservatory (1992). His composition Visit to St. Elizabeth was awarded first prize in the treble division of the 2003 Roger Wagner Contemporary Choral Composition Competition and is published by Gentry Publications.
His music has been recorded by Cincinnati Symphony, the University of Texas Trombone Choir trumpeter Jack Sutte; and flutist Christopher Chaffee, pianist Sarah Bob, and more. Most recently his work Rebounds was featured on Transient Canvas’s release “Right now, in a second”.
A strong advocate for music education, Holland has written several works for educational concerts, and has given lectures and presentations at over 50 schools and other public institutions. In 1995, his composition It’s About Time was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, in consortium with the Cleveland Orchestra and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, specifically for their youth concerts. This work introduces the audience to the idea of musical meter. His work Four Sections was commissioned by South Bend Symphony Orchestra. It features each member of the different sections of the orchestra. Additionally, Holland has written educational works for the Baltimore Symphony and WAMSO – the Volunteer Association of the Minnesota Orchestra.
Upcoming projects include a new work commissioned for Roomful of Teeth, A Far Cry, and pianist Awadagin Pratt; Holland’s fourth string quartet, commissioned with support from a Live Arts Boston grant from The Boston Foundation, to be premiered by Boston’s New Gallery Concert Series; a consortium commission for a new concerto for two percussionists and orchestra, featuring the arx duo; and The Bridge (working title), a new opera commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project that explore the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the period between his seminary studies at Boston University and his rise to national prominence.
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