The Poiesis Quartet, First Prize and Commission 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 Calvin Ray Shawler's Order, followed by 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 a Nova Linea Musica commission by Puerto Rican composer Ivan Enrique Rodriguez, whose music draws from social justice, cultural identity, and the depth of human experience; a recipient of the ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Award and currently pursuing his doctorate at The Juilliard School, Rodriguez will be in attendance to celebrate the premiere. The evening closes with Jeff Scott's Tapestry of the Beloved Beatified, an extended work that gathers the threads of the program into a final, resonant statement.
The name Poiesis comes 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, focusing on 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 they have given world premieres of works by Brian Raphael Nabors, Kitty Brazelton, Cara Haxo, and Kevin Lau, among others.
Poiesis Quartet, comprising violinists Sarah Ying Ma and Max Ball, violist Jasper de Boor, and cellist Drew Dansby, is the 2025–26 Ernst Stiefel Quartet-in-Residence at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts and the Graduate Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where they study with the Ariel Quartet. Recent and upcoming engagements include Newport Classical, Chamber Music Raleigh, the San Antonio Chamber Music Society, the Austin Chamber Music Center, and Guarneri Hall.
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 young quartets on the international stage.
