TheThe Poiesis Quartet, Grand Prize winners of the 2025 Banff International String Quartet Competition and recipients of the 2026 Cleveland Quartet Award, makes its Nova Linea Musica debut with a program built around the act of listening itself. Each work on this evening invites a different mode of attention: structural, intimate, atmospheric, dramatic, and devotional.
The program opens with three works from A Love Letter to the Queer Community, Poiesis’s commissioning project centering queer and trans composers of color connected to Oberlin: Calvin Ray Shawler’s Order, Max Lang’s commonplace little perils, and Maya Irizarry Lambright’s forest of taldeni. At the heart of the evening is the world premiere of Roy’s Address, a Nova Linea Musica commission by Puerto Rican composer Iván Enrique Rodríguez, whose music draws on themes of social justice, cultural identity, and the depth of human experience. A recipient of the ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Award who holds a doctorate from The Juilliard School, Rodríguez will be in attendance to celebrate the premiere. The evening closes with Jeff Scott’s Tapestry of the Beloved Beatified, a tribute to four queer revolutionaries that Poiesis premiered at Caramoor in July 2026, gathering the threads of the program into a final, resonant statement.
Formed at Oberlin Conservatory in 2022, Poiesis takes its name from the Greek poiein: to make, to bring something into being that has never existed before. The quartet has built its identity around that idea, expanding the string quartet repertoire through close collaboration with emerging composers. Their 2024 debut album as we are on Bright Shiny Things was praised by Cleveland Classical for its “bottomless depth,” and a 2025 performance at Caramoor was named one of The New York Times’ Best Classical Performances of the year. They have given world premieres of works by Brian Raphael Nabors, Kitty Brazelton, Cara Haxo, and Kevin Lau, among others.
Poiesis Quartet comprises violinists Sarah Ying Ma and Coco Mi, violist Jasper de Boor, and cellist Drew Dansby. The Quartet is currently the Nina von Maltzahn String Quartet at the Curtis Institute of Music and was the 2025–26 Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-in-Residence at Caramoor. It previously served as Graduate Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where it studied with the Ariel Quartet. The 2026–27 season includes the Quartet’s Lucerne Festival debut, two European tours, and appearances at Strathmore and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Tonight’s program continues Nova Linea Musica’s commitment to resourcing the creation of new chamber music and bringing composers, performers, and listeners into the same room: an evening In the Listening, with one of the most exciting early-career quartets on the international stage.
