The Ciompi Quartet

This New Year, as the Ciompi Quartet says THANK YOU! … for your support, your ears and your trust.

We want to spotlight the amazing work that KidzNotes, under executive director Shana Tucker, is doing to make music a catalyst for social change in Durham.

The month of November brought Advanced Chamber Music Students in Meeting the World Through Chamber Music to KidzNotes at Fayetteville Street Elementary School in Durham. We all came away inspired!

[Read more…] about Looking for inspiration? This year, we found it at KIDZNOTES!

DURHAM, NC – Duke Gardens has always been the setting for this delightful series, however this summer the series will open with a free concert at Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church presented by Caroline Stinson, performing with the Lydian String Quartet. However, the three remaining concerts will be held at Duke Gardens.

Subscriptions are $60. Purchase subscription tickets beginning May 24. Single tickets are $25 General Public; $20 Non-Duke Students/Duke Employees; $10 Youth/Duke students.

Tickets and subscriptions may be purchased online via ticket.duke.edu.

Tickets are also available at the Duke University Box Office, Bryan Center, Upper Level. The box office is open weekdays 11am-6pm, or you may call 919-684-4444. The box office accepts cash, check, credit cards and Duke Card FLEX payments.

All Concerts begin at 7:00pm.

Note: The June 2 concert is a FREE concert and will be presented at Trinity Ave Presbyterian Church, 927 West Trinity Ave, Durham, NC. You can reserve tickets online.  A non-perishable food item for the Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church’s food pantry is requested

The three remaining concerts will be presented at Kirby Horton Hall in the Doris Duke Center at Sarah P. Duke Gardens, 420 Anderson St, Durham, NC 27708. Call 919-684-3698 for directions.

Ciompi Presents is sponsored by the Department of Music, Sarah P. Duke Gardens and the Ciompi Quartet Fund.

In the summer of 2020, the Ciompi Quartet commissioned a unique project from four composers in Duke Music’s graduate program. The parameters of the commission were unorthodox: to find a solution to the compositional and performing challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic by creating short works that could be practiced and recorded remotely by each member of the quartet. Although the members were ultimately able to record together in Baldwin Auditorium in November/December 2020, the pieces submitted by James Budinich, Ryan Harrison, James Chu, and Maximiliano Amici demonstrate creative solutions to the challenge of creating works for musicians who are not present in the same space.

View the performances and read interviews with the composers »

As we each sit in front of our music stand with instrument in our hand, alone at home, all the memories from our concerts on the stage around the world flash back. Memories of how our music brought smiles to our audience who did not even speak the same language, or made someone cry who attended a concert for the first time, all are held dear to our hearts. More than ever, our heartbeats are pumped with rhythmic drives, ou…See More

Everyone in the music world, musicians of all types, are going through the same process: figuring out how to function during this indefinite shut-down of our normal musical life. Many of us feel there is no replacing the act of offering live music for a live audience in a setting intimate enough for everyone in the room to sense each other’s physical presence. Nevertheless it is interesting to try and reach each other through alternate means. I have paid scant attention to the various platforms available to collaborate and perform via the web, other than giving the occasional Skype lesson and watching the occasional live-stream. Suddenly, it is the only way we can communicate. There is a whole array of techniques and equipment to be mastered.

And so we begin: the Ciompi members are engaging in our first ever remote recording, each of us attempting record a separate track that is synced to produce a final result. It’s for a Duke senior whose senior project has been waylaid by the virus. We are trying to make it whole by this new method. All of us will benefit by the experience and we will have taken our first steps into the unknown. To be continued.