Composer & Violinist Austin Wulliman Releases New Album, Escape Rites, In May

On Friday, May 9, 2025, violinist, composer, and educator Austin Wulliman will release his second album of original music, Escape Rites, performed alongside his fellow musicians of the JACK Quartet on Sono Luminus.

Known for melding sounds both familiar and experimental, Wulliman weaves stories into his music with a deep passion for capturing emotional resonance. More on Escape Rites here.

The title track, Escape Rites, receives its European premiere with the JACK Quartet on Thursday, March 20, 2025 at Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, followed by performances at London's Wigmore Hall on Saturday, March 22, 2025 and Musikkollegium Winterthur, Stadthaus in Switzerland on Saturday, March 29, 2025. In addition, JACK performs Escape Rites' NYC premiere at a Miller Theatre pop-up concert for Wulliman's music for string quartet on Tuesday, May 6, 2025.

Wulliman's Late Edition (2024) captures the feeling of being physically and emotionally immersed in a powerful, overwhelming experience. In his program notes, Wulliman writes, "Pressed between bodies heaving to the pulse. The room inside the drum: each of us within its envelope. Sent elsewhere. Stamped to distant locales but together in this resonating box. My wrists were broken. My mind screwed on tight."

Inspired by themes of self-discovery and connection with nature, Lost One (2024) depicts the story of a moment of clarity in a tranquil environment, where the boundaries between self and the natural world blur, bringing new discovery to an existential understanding. Wulliman's notes state, "I wake next to a reflecting pool. An inlet. The water here is cool, shaded by trees that lean in to listen, swaying lightly with the gentle breeze, the hairs on my neck alive. I start my own religion here."

I​​n Escape Rites (2024), Wulliman constructs intricate sonic totems using a palindromic 25-tone scale, where each note finds its distinct place within a complex web of timbral orchestrations and polyrhythmic relationships. Inspired by Boulez's friendship with John Cage, the piece consists of six continuous movements that invoke wildly disparate emotions and a sense of regression into nostalgia. Wulliman filters the experimental energy of the postwar moment during which Boulez and Cage made a common cause, plus its aftermath, harnessing their utopian energy through the lens of JACK's performance practice. As a motto for his new piece - and for the program as a whole - Wulliman cites an aphorism by John Cage: "Activity involving in a single process the many, turning them, even though some seem to be opposites, towards oneness, contributes to a good way of life."

Live News (2023-2024) takes the material and ideas that formed the basis of Wulliman's first album, The News From Utopia (2023- Bright Shiny Things), and reimagines them for performance by live string quartet with electronics. The News From Utopia, "an almost psychedelic experience that celebrates how trippy harmony can be" (Bandcamp Daily), was imagined in the depths of the pandemic and created from home, never conceived to be executed in live performance. However, in this three-movement suite, Wulliman captures this material's structural layering and rhythmic energy in new ways. In SYSTEM NOTES, the voice of the quartet emerges along with the musical material that makes up this world. Each note pulses until it becomes part of a pattern, exploding into a pixelated universe. In como se vive (ii), the music crashes from this digital sugar high down to a muted calm, ruminating in a fog, forming and reforming through harmonic vibrations, gradually revealing the energies that ignite Live News. Full of vitality, but ever tugged downwards, this theme to the newscast from utopia ends with the four voices of the quartet coming together to sing a chant, a sad and soulful chorale of common experience if not purpose.

Inspired by John Cage's energetic and curious Totem Ancestor for prepared piano from 1942, Wulliman created a new version for string quartet. Cage's original uses just 11 notes on the piano, prepared with screws, bolts, and more, which reshape the harmonic content of each note. In Wulliman's adaptation, the pitches are re-imagined and re-tuned to new ratios, while new layers of energetic polyrhythmic conflict are piled on. The result is a bacchanale or maybe a hoedown before the ancestral temple.

Escape Rites Track List

1. Austin Wulliman - The Late Edition (2024) [7:59]
2. Austin Wulliman - Lost One (2024) [10:01]
3. Austin Wulliman - Escape Rites (2024) [22:33]
i.. Power Switch
ii. Wa(l)king
iii. Escape Rite
iv. Etude X: a table of contents
v. NOTNA: the crystal
vi. el lago de los valores
4-6. Austin Wulliman - Live News (2023-24)
i. SYSTEM NOTES [6:01]
ii. como se vive (ii) [3:40]
iii. Live News [6:57]
7. John Cage (arr. Austin Wulliman 2024) - Totem Ancestor (1942) [2:10]

Total Time: 59:21

Austin Wulliman (composer, violinist): tracks 1-7
Christopher Otto (violinist): tracks 1-7
John Pickford Richards (viola): tracks 1-7
Jay Campbell (cello): tracks 1-7

Produced by Austin Wulliman and Ryan Streber
Recorded and Edited by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio, December 16, 2024 & January 16, 2025
Mixed by Austin Wulliman
Mastered by Daniel Shores
Artwork by Alex Sopp
Photography by Shervin Lainez (JACK Quartet) and Anneliese Varaldiev (Austin Wulliman)
Liner Notes by Austin Wulliman
Escape Rites was recorded with the support of a grant from the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University.

SLE-70037
UPC: 053479703705

About Austin Wulliman
Violinist, composer, and educator Austin Wulliman embodies the imagined and empathizes with the absurd through sounds both familiar and radical, telling stories with a limitless passion for tuning cries from every corner of the human capacity to hear. He is a member of JACK Quartet, called "the nation's most important quartet" by The New York Times, and has been praised as a "gifted, adventuresome violinist" by the Chicago Tribune. Through in-depth collaboration with performers and composers working in a panoply of aesthetic realms, Wulliman searches daily for the violin's voice in today's musical world.

As a violinist in the JACK Quartet, Wulliman has played in such renowned venues as Wigmore Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Elbphilharmonie, Carnegie Hall, and the Wiener Konzerthaus, and featured on such festivals as Tanglewood, Ojai, Spoleto, Lucerne and Wien Modern. Work with JACK has included premieres by John Luther Adams, Chaya Czernowin, Philip Glass, Georg Friedrich Haas, Clara Iannotta, George Lewis, Tyshawn Sorey and John Zorn, as well as collaborating with the likes of Barbara Hannigan, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Helmut Lachenmann, Igor Levit, Julia Wolfe, and leading a chamber orchestra of members of the Berlin Philharmonic. He has received awards from Musical America ("2019 Ensemble of the Year" JACK Quartet), the University of Michigan's "Emerging Artist Award," the Darmstadt Ferienkurse Kranichstein Prize (with Ensemble Dal Niente, 2012), the 2022 Fromm Foundation Prize, and was presented with Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2019.

Equally in demand as an educator, Wulliman serves on faculty at the Mannes School of Music, where JACK is Quartet in Residence. He teaches a malleable violin technique in the service of a wide variety of musical goals, from virtuosic solo repertoire to improvisation, and the refined set of tools needed to be a chamber musician in today's musical climate. He has taught violin and musicianship on faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity, the Lucerne Festival Academy, as well as the University of Chicago. Additionally, he has given guest instruction and master classes at such institutions as the Curtis Institute, The Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall's Ensemble Connect, New World Symphony, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan.

Wulliman's debut album as composer The News From Utopia was released in 2023, which Wulliman wrote, recorded, and mixed. His works have been performed in concert with pianist Conrad Tao at Miller Theater, by guitarist Alec Goldfarb at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse and Brooklyn's Roulette Intermedium, and frequently by JACK Quartet. With JACK, his works have been performed at such venues as the Melbourne Recital Centre, Carnegie Hall Summer Stage, Lincoln Center, and the Pierre Boulez Saal with upcoming performances at Wigmore Hall, the Pittsburgh Microtonal Music Festival, and Musikkollegium Winterthur, among others.

Austin Wulliman first forged his reputation in Chicago with the collective Ensemble Dal Niente, serving as the group's Program Director and helping build its artist-driven culture. With Dal Niente he collaborated with composers such as Brian Ferneyhough and executed a recording project with the band Deerhoof in music of Marcos Balter. Wulliman has performed with Dal Niente at such venues as Harvard University and Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, Chicago. As an ensemble player, Wulliman has also been a guest artist with groups such as Eighth Blackbird, The Knights, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNow Ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and has led the Lucerne Festival Academy's Orchestra as concertmaster under the baton of Heinz Holliger and Matthias Pintscher and section leader in a performance of Berio's Sinfonia with Pierre Boulez conducting.

As a soloist, he has performed Kaija Saariaho's concerto "Graal Theatre" with the Aspen Festival and Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensembles, as well as giving the American Premiere of her "Calices" for violin and piano. He recently recorded Elliott Carter's infamous Duo for Violin and Piano for the Library of Congress with keyboard luminary Conrad Tao, with whom he also premiered his own Insurgentes Sur at Miller Theater. Wulliman has premiered violin concerti by Chris Fisher-Lochhead and Kirsten Broberg, as well as collaborating closely on solo pieces by composers Augusta Read Thomas and Lee Hyla, two essential mentoring voices in his early years in Chicago. His debut solo release, Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight was released in 2014. The album is a concert-length collaboration with the composer-improviser Katherine Young, using 4 scordatura and prepared violins and a viola in conversation with 8-channel electronics and a chamber orchestra. Wulliman worked closely with Young from the creation of materials to the completion of the work, including traditional notation and improvised material.

Austin Wulliman was also a founding member of the Spektral Quartet, serving as Ensemble-in-Residence (as well as Adjunct Instructor of Violin) at the University of Chicago from 2011-2016. Exploring both the classical string quartet repertoire beginning with Haydn and organizing a robust commissioning program, they also explored contemporary jazz styles with artists such as Miguel Zenon and Billy Childs. With Spektral Quartet, he performed on series such as the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor and BargeMusic as well as giving educational residencies at the New World Symphony and Stanford University.

Wulliman received his Bachelor's Degree summa cum laude from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Aaron Berofsky. He was an endowed scholar and assistant to Blair Milton at Northwestern University, where he earned his M.Mus. Further studies took Wulliman to the Lucerne Festival Academy and the Aspen Music Festival Fellowship in Contemporary Music, where he also studied privately with Paul Kantor.

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