Escape Rites Austin Wulliman & JACK Quartet

• Austin Wulliman (b. 1982): The Late Edition:
• 1 Wulliman: The Late Edition 07:59
• Lost One:
• 2 Wulliman: Lost One 10:01
• Escape Rites:
• 3 Wulliman: Escape Rites 22:33
• Live News:
• 4 Wulliman: Live News: I. System Notes 06:01
• 5 Wulliman: Live News: II. Como se vive (II) 03:40
• 6 Wulliman: Live News: III. Live News 06:57
• Totem Ancestor:
• 7 Cage: Totem Ancestor (Arr. for String Quartet by Austin Wulliman) 02:10
• Total Runtime 59:21

Info zu Escape Rites

Violinist, composer, and educator Austin Wulliman releases his second album of original music, Escape Rites, performed alongside his fellow musicians of the JACK Quartet on Sono Luminus. Known for melding sounds both familiar and experimental, Wulliman weaves stories into his music with a deep passion for capturing emotional resonance.

The title track, Escape Rites, receives its European premiere with the JACK Quartet on Thursday, March 20, 2025 at Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, followed by performances at London’s Wigmore Hall on Saturday, March 22, 2025 and Musikkollegium Winterthur, Stadthaus in Switzerland on Saturday, March 29, 2025. In addition, JACK performs Escape Rites’ NYC premiere at a Miller Theatre pop-up concert for Wulliman’s music for string quartet on Tuesday, May 6, 2025.

Wulliman’s Late Edition (2024) captures the feeling of being physically and emotionally immersed in a powerful, overwhelming experience. In his program notes, Wulliman writes, “Pressed between bodies heaving to the pulse. The room inside the drum: each of us within its envelope. Sent elsewhere. Stamped to distant locales but together in this resonating box. My wrists were broken. My mind screwed on tight.”

Inspired by themes of self-discovery and connection with nature, Lost One (2024) depicts the story of a moment of clarity in a tranquil environment, where the boundaries between self and the natural world blur, bringing new discovery to an existential understanding. Wulliman’s notes state, “I wake next to a reflecting pool. An inlet. The water here is cool, shaded by trees that lean in to listen, swaying lightly with the gentle breeze, the hairs on my neck alive. I start my own religion here.”

I​​n Escape Rites (2024), Wulliman constructs intricate sonic totems using a palindromic 25-tone scale, where each note finds its distinct place within a complex web of timbral orchestrations and polyrhythmic relationships. Inspired by Boulez’s friendship with John Cage, the piece consists of six continuous movements that invoke wildly disparate emotions and a sense of regression into nostalgia. Wulliman filters the experimental energy of the postwar moment during which Boulez and Cage made a common cause, plus its aftermath, harnessing their utopian energy through the lens of JACK’s performance practice. As a motto for his new piece – and for the program as a whole – Wulliman cites an aphorism by John Cage: “Activity involving in a single process the many, turning them, even though some seem to be opposites, towards oneness, contributes to a good way of life.”

Live News (2023-2024) takes the material and ideas that formed the basis of Wulliman’s first album, The News From Utopia (2023 – Bright Shiny Things), and reimagines them for performance by live string quartet with electronics. The News From Utopia, “an almost psychedelic experience that celebrates how trippy harmony can be” (Bandcamp Daily), was imagined in the depths of the pandemic and created from home, never conceived to be executed in live performance. However, in this three-movement suite, Wulliman captures this material's structural layering and rhythmic energy in new ways. In SYSTEM NOTES, the voice of the quartet emerges along with the musical material that makes up this world. Each note pulses until it becomes part of a pattern, exploding into a pixelated universe. In como se vive (ii), the music crashes from this digital sugar high down to a muted calm, ruminating in a fog, forming and reforming through harmonic vibrations, gradually revealing the energies that ignite Live News. Full of vitality, but ever tugged downwards, this theme to the newscast from utopia ends with the four voices of the quartet coming together to sing a chant, a sad and soulful chorale of common experience if not purpose.

Inspired by John Cage’s energetic and curious Totem Ancestor for prepared piano from 1942, Wulliman created a new version for string quartet. Cage’s original uses just 11 notes on the piano, prepared with screws, bolts, and more, which reshape the harmonic content of each note. In Wulliman’s adaptation, the pitches are re-imagined and re-tuned to new ratios, while new layers of energetic polyrhythmic conflict are piled on. The result is a bacchanale or maybe a hoedown before the ancestral temple.

Austin Wulliman, violin (tracks 1-7)
Christopher Otto, violin (tracks 1-7)
John Pickford Richards, viola (tracks 1-7)
Jay Campbell, cello (tracks 1-7)

Recorded and Edited by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio, December 16, 2024 & January 16, 2025
Mixed by Austin Wulliman
Mastered by Daniel Shores
Produced by Austin Wulliman and Ryan Streber

JACK Quartet
Undeniably our generation’s “leading new-music foursome,” JACK Quartet’s “stylistic range, precision and passion have made the group one of contemporary music’s indispensable ensembles” (The New York Times). Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK Quartet celebrates their landmark 20th anniversary season in 2024-2025, embarking on their third decade as a pioneering string quartet synchronized in their mission to create an international community through transformative, mind-broadening experiences and close listening. Founded in 2005, the ensemble operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of 20th and 21st century string quartet music, delving deeply into challenging new compositions and musical practices from a staggering range of stylistic viewpoints. Through intimate, long-standing relationships with many of today’s most creative voices, JACK Quartet has a prolific commissioning and recording catalog, has been nominated for two GRAMMY® Awards, and is the 2024 recipient of Chamber Music America’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award.

Among the highlights of the 2024-2025 season, JACK Quartet officially marks their 20th anniversary with a celebratory concert at 92NY in New York City, featuring the world premiere of a new JACK-commissioned work by Anthony Cheung; the U.S. premiere of JACK commission, Juri Seo’s Three Imaginary Chansons, at Lincoln Center; and the world premiere of Ellen Fullman’s Energy Archive at the Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival 2025 in Pittsburgh. In addition, JACK Quartet celebrates their long association with composer John Zorn with the release of Zorn’s complete string quartets on Tzadik Records, as well as an album release concert at Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium.

International engagements include JACK Quartet’s annual marathon of performances at Wigmore Hall in the UK and appearances at Pierre Boulez Saal, along with appearances in Toronto, Barcelona, and Lugano and Winterthur, Switzerland.

The JACK Quartet embraces close collaboration with the composers whose work they perform, yielding a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. JACK Quartet has both self-commissioned and been commissioned to create new works with artists such as Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe, Helmut Lachenmann, and Caroline Shaw, with upcoming and recent premieres including works by John Luther Adams, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Liza Lim, Tyshawn Sorey, Amy Williams, and John Zorn. The world’s top composers choose JACK because of their singular dedication to innovation and experimentation.

According to Musical America, “many of their recordings are must-haves, for anyone interested in new music.” They have been nominated for two GRAMMY® Awards, the most recent being Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for John Luther Adams’ Waves and Particles. Other albums include music by Helmut Lachenmann, Catherine Lamb, Du Yun, Nick Dunston, Zosha di Castri, Iannis Xenakis, and upcoming releases of the complete quartets of Elliott Carter and John Zorn.

JACK Quartet created JACK Studio in 2019 to support commissions, recordings, and workshops with emerging music artists who are interested in exploring and expanding the repertory for string quartet. By bringing together diverse groups of excellent and adventurous people to not only create new projects, but to contribute to the evolution of the JACK Studio project itself, JACK has created an artistic ecosystem that links the quartet with artists from around the world. As JACK marks its 20th Anniversary Season, JACK Studio will grow to include a full range of commissions including prominent composers who will also serve as mentors to JACK Studio’s earlier-career collaborators.

More than 40 composers have worked with JACK Quartet through JACK Studio thus far, hailing from Argentina, Belarus, Canada, Germany, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, South Africa, Syria, and the United States. Their projects have been performed by JACK Quartet at venues including TIME:SPANS, Central Park, the Lucerne Festival, MoMA PS1, and Mannes School of Music, in addition to being recorded for professional releases. Commissioned artists have been paired with musical mentors including Marcos Balter, Clara Iannotta, George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Georg Friedrich Haas, Donnacha Dennehy, Claire Chase, and Nadia Sirota.

JACK Quartet has performed to critical acclaim at venues such as Carnegie Hall (USA), Lincoln Center (USA), Berlin Philharmonie (Germany), Wigmore Hall (United Kingdom), Muziekgebouw (Netherlands), The Louvre (France), Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), Sydney Opera House (Australia), the Lucerne Festival (Switzerland), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), Suntory Hall (Japan), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), Festival Internacional Cervantino (Mexico), and Teatro Colón (Argentina). Among their honors, they have earned an Avery Fisher Career Grant and Fromm Music Foundation Prize, been selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year, and received Lincoln Center's Martin E. Segal Award, New Music USA's Trailblazer Award, and the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming.

JACK Quartet makes their home in New York City, where they are the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music at The New School and provide mentorship to Mannes’s Cuker and Stern Graduate String Quartet. They teach at summer music festivals such as the Lucerne Festival Academy, Banff Centre for the Arts, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and New Music on the Point. JACK has long-standing relationships with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall and spring.

Booklet für Escape Rites