Meet the Performers
The acclaimed JACK Quartet, called our generation's leading new-music foursome by The New York Times, opens Nova Linea Musica's third season in Chicago on September 30 at Guarneri Hall. The program features a new world premiere by composer Juri Seo, an artist the quartet has worked with before. Here's why this season opener matters.
Publish Date:
June 22, 2026
When Nova Linea Musica raises the curtain on its third season at Chicago's Guarneri Hall on September 30, it does so in the company of one of the most consequential string quartets working anywhere in the world today. The JACK Quartet has spent two decades proving that the four-instrument format still has vast, unexplored country left in it, even after some assumed it had said everything it could say by the time Beethoven finished with it. For an organization built around the conviction that the music of our own time deserves an intimate, devoted hearing, there could hardly be a more fitting ensemble to begin a new chapter in Chicago.
Founded in 2005, the JACK Quartet brings together violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell. The four met as students at the Eastman School of Music and refined their craft under the mentorship of some of the great quartets of the previous generation, including the Kronos Quartet and the Arditti Quartet. You can hear those lineages in JACK's combination of structural rigor and adventurous spirit.
The praise that has accumulated around them is the kind that usually arrives only after a career's worth of work. The New York Times has described their stylistic range, precision, and passion as the marks of one of contemporary music's indispensable ensembles, and elsewhere has reached for the phrase that now follows them everywhere: our generation's leading new-music foursome. Musical America named them Ensemble of the Year, and their shelf of honors includes an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Fromm Music Foundation Prize, and a string of GRAMMY nominations, most recently for their recording of John Luther Adams's Waves and Particles.
What sets the JACK Quartet apart is not simply that they play new music, since many fine ensembles do, but that they have organized their entire artistic life around it. Operating as a nonprofit dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century string quartet music, they treat the living repertoire not as a sideline to the standard canon but as the main event.
That commitment has produced some of the most striking experiences in contemporary concert life. They perform Georg Friedrich Haas's In iij. Noct. in total darkness, so complete that the players cannot see their own instruments or one another, communicating through sound alone. They have undertaken complete quartet cycles of composers as different as Elliott Carter and John Zorn. They have built evening-length theatrical works with composers like Natacha Diels and collaborated on sculptural, days-to-install instruments with the visionary Ellen Fullman. The thread running through all of it is a willingness to follow a composer's imagination wherever it leads, however far from convention.
Their list of collaborators reads like a map of the contemporary landscape: Philip Glass, Caroline Shaw, John Luther Adams, George Lewis, Tyshawn Sorey, Liza Lim, Julia Wolfe, and John Zorn, among many others. Through their JACK Studio initiative, launched in 2019, they have extended that generosity to emerging voices as well, offering more than forty composers commissions, workshop time, mentorship, and professional recordings. It is an investment in the next generation that mirrors NLM's own commitment to building a platform for new work.
For NLM's Chicago season opener, the JACK Quartet will premiere a new commission by composer Juri Seo, and listeners familiar with both artists will recognize that this is no first meeting. Seo, a Guggenheim Fellow and professor of composition at Princeton University, has already written for the quartet, including a body of work in extended just intonation that JACK premiered in recent seasons. Her music has been described as merging the expanded timbral world and unorthodox structures of the past century with a deep love of tonality, counterpoint, and classical form. It is a sensibility that swings, sometimes within a single phrase, between the serious and the playful, the lyrical and the violent.
That pairing of a fearless, microtonally adventurous quartet with a composer equally at home in old forms and new tunings promises exactly the kind of evening NLM was founded to present: a brand-new work, written for these specific players, performed in an intimate hall, followed by a conversation with the composer herself.
From its first season, NLM has held to a simple but demanding model: repertoire drawn from 1950 onward, a newly commissioned world premiere on every program, an intimate venue, and a direct line between audience and creator. Inviting the JACK Quartet to open Season 3 is, in a sense, the fullest expression of that mission. Here is an ensemble that has spent twenty years doing on the international stage what NLM does in Chicago, insisting that the music of our own moment is worth our fullest attention, our best halls, and our deepest listening.
The post-concert Q&A that follows the performance is not an afterthought. It is the point. When an audience hears a world premiere and then hears the composer explain how and why it came to be, the music stops being a finished object and becomes something alive and shared. With JACK and Juri Seo, that conversation should be unusually rich.
The JACK Quartet performs at Guarneri Hall in Chicago on September 30 to open Nova Linea Musica's third season, premiering a new work by composer Juri Seo alongside a program drawn from the contemporary quartet repertoire. Tickets are $50, all-inclusive, and available through our box office at tickets.novalineamusica.org. We hope you will be in the room.
Stay tuned to the NLM blog for an in-depth Composer Spotlight on Juri Seo in the weeks leading up to the concert.
