The New Music Help Desk is a unique opportunity for composers and performers to get face time with Spektral – to ask pointed questions about notation, feasibility, tuning systems, harmonics, or simply how to stay motivated in the midst of a quarantine.
If you are interested in participating (or just watching), complete this brief form:
We will select a few questions in advance and then open it up to attendees using the Zoom Q&A feature. Which is to say, even if yours is not one of the few chosen beforehand, you can still ask us your question live during the event. If we don't get to your query this time around, have no fear. We’ll keep all submissions in the mix for future Help Desk sessions.
For this event we are bringing you long-time friend of the quartet Chris Fisher-Lochhead, a composer/performer whose intelligence is just as impressive as his creativity. We’ve played and commissioned a number of CFL’s pieces since our inception, and if his name rings a bell, it may be because his comedian-focused Hack was featured on our GRAMMY-nominated album Serious Business.
Chris is a generous artist with a wide breadth of knowledge…you are going to love this Help Desk!
This is frankly a scary time for all of us in the arts. We hope the New Music Help Desk brings at least a little glimmer of hope and assistance to our fellow artists.
More about Chris Fisher-Lochhead
Chris Fisher-Lochhead is a composer, performer, and educator based in Vermont. His work reflects an interest in cultivating adventurous and inclusive environments for music-making, exploring innovative approaches to musical notation and instrumental technique, critiquing the commodity model of musical production, reckoning with the tension between tradition and experimentation, and using collaboration as a critical practice to upend regressive structures of power and build social bonds in support of emancipatory communities. His music has been performed by soloists and ensembles around the world, including Third Coast Percussion, the Spektral Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Quince Vocal Ensemble, the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Recherche, Timothy McAllister, Graeme Jennings, the Mivos Quartet, Noise-Bridge, Marcus Weiss, Ekmeles, Fonema Consort, the New Thread Quartet, and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). In 2016, his string quartet Hack (hailed by Alex Ross as a "knockout") was released on the Spektral Quartet’s record Serious Business, which was nominated for a Grammy Award. As a member of the Grant Wallace Band, he has been featured by the Houston Grand Opera, Resonant Bodies Festival, New Amsterdam Records, and Fast Forward Austin. He is on the faculty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where he teaches composition, music theory, history of hip-hop, and leads the Fusion Ensemble. A portrait disc is forthcoming from New Focus Records sometime in 2021.
Spektral Quartet’s programming is supported by our members, our donors, and by the following foundations and organizations:
