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Iris Collective presents Say It Loud: The Overlook Quartet in The Green Room

The Theater at Crosstown Arts
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Doors open at 7 pm | Show begins at 7:30 pm
Tickets: pay what you wish!

PAY WHAT YOU WISH

Monica Davis, violin
Ravenna Lipchik, violin
Angela Pickett, viola
Laura Metcalf, cello

The “breathtaking,” “paradigm-shifting” (New York Music Daily) string quartet The Overlook is a unifying, community-building force, whose dedication to a more representative musical tradition reverberates throughout their industry.

The Overlook formed from a simple need to make and share music with others during the pandemic shutdown. The longtime friends, some of New York’s most accomplished string players, gathered to play outdoors in parks and on street corners in upper Manhattan, and their community stopped to listen. Through these casual outdoor performances, they built a following in person and on social media, connected with local businesses and residential enclaves, and partnered with important neighborhood cultural centers for their first official performances. They witnessed firsthand the power of music to unite and inspire – all without playing a single note of the string quartet repertoire that has been held up as “standard” for hundreds of years.

Since their inception in June 2020, The Overlook has worked to effect permanent change in the “classical music canon” by developing a body of repertoire composed by BIPOC, female, and non-binary creators. The quartet has presented masterworks from the past by Florence Price, Samuel-Coleridge-Taylor, and Chevalier de Saint-Georges, as well as works by living composers Trevor Weston, Eleanor Alberga, Carlos Simon, Jessie Montgomery, Shelley Washington, Leila Adu, Forbes Graham, and many more. The Overlook has enjoyed collaborating with such artists as New York Philharmonic principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, multi-Grammy nominee Curtis Stewart, and noted visual artist Linda Sormin. To support their work, the quartet has been awarded grants by the Eastman School of Music, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Bronx Council on the Arts and Local 802’s Music Performance Trust Fund.

The Overlook has developed and presented a new performance series “If the Stars Align” in Uptown-NYC, with concerts at Washington Heights/Inwood cultural institutions including Hispanic Society of America, Morris-Jumel Mansion, Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, Fort Washington Collegiate Church, and United Palace Theatre. The quartet recently brought their mission to Lincoln Center at Kaufman Music Center’s “Musical Storefronts”, Chamber Music NY at Bruno Walter Auditorium, GatherNYC at the Museum of Arts and Design, Symphony Space, Fotografiska New York, and Wave Hill. Further afield, the quartet has performed at Chatter ABQ, WOCO Fest, The Arts Club of DC, Music for Montauk, Mass MoCA, LeHigh University, Tuckamore Festival in NL, Canada, as well as in a virtual performance presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art that has been streamed nearly 70,000 times.

By building relationships with composers and championing new works, collaborating with interdisciplinary creators, re-thinking the concert experience to include non-traditional spaces, and consistently engaging with their Uptown NYC community, The Overlook upholds its mission to create a more representative and relevant musical practice.