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The Ruby is a catalyst for creativity and a home for making art at Duke.
Date & Time
November 22, 2019 at 12:00 pm1:00 pm
Admission
Free; open to all.
Venue
Ruby Lounge at the Rubenstein Arts Center
2020 Campus Drive
Durham, NC 27705 United States
Description

Drop by the Ruby on Friday at noon for a casual art talk and free lunch to learn about the behind-the-scenes aspect of the creative process, careers in the arts, and more.

In this unraveling, we have a rare opportunity to hear the performance of a complete musical work followed by a session where composer and commissioning artists pull the piece apart, providing context for the expressive and dramatic elements that create the emotional arc of the work. The Lark Quartet, with Caroline Stinson as its cellist, commissioned “Ce morceau de tissu” for 2 String Quartets by Andrew Waggoner as part of its 30th anniversary in 2016 and the work was premiered at Carnegie Hall in May 2017 with the founding members of Lark, including Laura Sewell, cello. Now in their second season with Stinson as cellist, the Ciompi Quartet invites the Lark and Laura Sewell to Duke for its Duke Performances concert on Sunday, November 24th, presenting the Waggoner Octet. This “Fridays” event showcases Durham-based composer Andrew Waggoner’s new work and provides a behind-the-scenes look at how musical collaboration works.

About the Speakers

Since its founding in 1965 by the renowned Italian violinist Giorgio Ciompi, the Ciompi Quartet of Duke University has delighted audiences and impressed critics around the world. All its members are professors at Duke, where they teach instrumental lessons, coordinate and coach chamber music, and perform across campus in concert halls, libraries, dormitories and classrooms. In a career that spans five continents and includes many hundreds of concerts, the Ciompi Quartet has developed a reputation for performances of real intelligence and musical sophistication, with a warm, unified sound that allows each player’s individual voice to emerge.

Andrew Waggoner was born in 1960 in New Orleans. He grew up there and in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the Eastman School of Music and Cornell University. Called “the gifted practitioner of a complex but dramatic and vividly colored style” by the New Yorker, his music has been commissioned and performed by the the Academy of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Saint Louis, Denver, Syracuse, and Winnipeg Symphonies; the Corigliano, Miro, and Villiers, and JACK Quartets; the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble; Dinosaur Annex; CELLO; Flexible Music; Peggy Pearson and Winsor Music; Seattle Modern Orchestra; Tanglewood; Ekmeles; Ensemble Nordlys, of Denmark; and Ensemble Accroche Note, of France. He is the recipient of an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, grants and prizes from ASCAP, Yaddo, The New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer, New Music Delaware, the Lee Ettelson prize from Composers Inc., a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Roger Sessions Prize for an American composer from the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy.

The Lark Quartet has delighted audiences with its energy, passionate commitment and artistry since its inception in 1985. 2019 marks the final season of this quartet with a distinguished tradition of commissioning works from some of the country’s most celebrated composers, many of which have become mainstays of the chamber music repertoire. This history includes works such as Billy in the Darbies by William Bolcom with Stephen Salters, baritone; Scenes from the Poet’s Dreams by Jennifer Higdon with Gary Graffman, piano; Quartet no. 1 Musica celestis and Quartet no. 2 Musica instrumentalis (winning the 1997 Pulitzer Prize) by Aaron Jay Kernis; Piano Quintet by Paul Moravec with Jeremy Denk; Intarsio by Glen Velez and Big Time by Nico Muhly (commissioned by the Central Vermont Chamber Music Festival) for Lark and Yousif Sheronick, percussion.

Cellist Laura Sewell enjoys an active and varied musical career. From 2007-2016, she was a member of the esteemed Artaria String Quartet. In recent seasons, the quartet was appointed as one of Minnesota Public Radio’s ensembles-in-residence, was featured on Twin Cities Public Television’s “Minnesota Originals” series, and performed the complete Shostakovich quartet cycle to critical acclaim. Earlier in her career, Ms. Sewell was the founding cellist of the award-winning Lark Quartet. During her tenure in that ensemble the quartet won the bronze medal at the Banff International String Quartet Competition, served as the graduate string quartet-in-residence at the Juilliard School, and had a teaching residency at San Diego State University.  Over the past two decades, Ms. Sewell has been on the faculties of Augsburg College, the MacPhail Center for Music, Madeline Island Music Camp, Stringwood, and the Artaria Chamber Music School.

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