ETHEL Uses Chamber Music to Smash the Status Quo 

By Greg Cahill | From the November/December 2024 issue of Strings

Ask Ralph Farris, the Grammy-nominated violist and cofounder of the avant-garde New York–based string quartet ETHEL, to distill the essence of that eclectic ensemble, and without hesitation he zeroes in on unity: “Ethel is a band of string players, a collective of like-minded composer-performers, ever seeking community and connection.”

And what are the 26-year-old ensemble’s main goals? 

“Celebrating community. Celebrating the local. Breaking down walls between performers, presenters, and audiences alike. And waking up our industry!” He adds, “It is well past the time to climb down from the ivory tower. For me, the greatest utility there is in music is its power to connect. And it is Ethel’s greatest responsibility to see that our music does just that.”

So just what makes Ethel tick?

“Connection. Collaboration. Seeking out and immersing ourselves in new sounds and styles,” he says. “Writing and performing engaging, surprising, and inspiring music. 

“Also, coffee.”

Farris is joined in those caffeine-fueled pursuits by violinists Kip Jones and Corin Lee and cellist Dorothy Lawson.

Coffee drinks notwithstanding, Ethel’s ideals are what drive its most recent recording, Persist (Sono Luminous), a collection of new works for string quartet and flute. It is a collaborative project with composer and flutist Allison Loggins-Hull, the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow to the Cleveland Orchestra and newly appointed resident artistic partner with New Jersey Symphony. 

Farris explains, “Persist—the album and the touring program—are both named after the awesomely powerful quintet that Allison wrote for our collaboration. The four other pieces from this collection mark the fifth edition of HomeBaked, Ethel’s commissioning program for early-career composers. Since the program’s launch in 2010, it has commissioned and premiered 20 works by 16 emerging artists. Allison joined Ethel in selecting this most recent HomeBaked class. And what a group it is! Migiwa ‘Miggy’Miyajima, Xavier Muzik, Sam Wu, and 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist Leilehua Lanzilotti. Amazing music by fantastically gifted composers.”

Ethel has presented Loggins-Hull several times on its Date Night series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her music was also featured on Balcony Bar from Home, Ethel’s virtual program with the Met. 

Persist marks the quartet’s first full-concert collaboration with Loggins-Hull. “The idea of the flute quintet came from Ethel’s collective admiration of Allison,” Farris says. “She is a virtuoso player with a profound and deeply moving compositional voice. And she’s such a cool human! We were super-keen to play her music, and her sound and style were the perfect complements to this expanded iteration of HomeBaked. And now there are five fantastic new pieces out there for everyone to play!” 

The inclusion of Lanzilotti—a native Hawaiian composer, multimedia artist, curator, scholar, and educator—reflects Ethel’s longstanding commitment to indigenous artists. Her multimedia installation the sky in our hands, our hands in the sky is touring the country throughout the next three years, and she is scheduled at press time to tour this fall with Ethel. “We were thrilled to invite Leilehua to the project,” Farris says. “Her [composition] we began this quilt there is devastating in its simplicity, its understatement. It reads as a meditation on righteous strength in the face of persecution—a railing against racism and colonialism.”

Other indigenous artists joining Ethel on tour include Grammy-winning Native American flutist Robert Mirabal, who will join the ensemble to perform “The Red Willow,” the latest installment from their long cross-cultural partnership. 

Strings first featured Ethel in 2008 when founding cellist Dorothy Lawson discussed the quartet’s initial foray to the Southwest desert, where the ensemble had spent a residency on a Navajo Reservation. The residency found the New York hipsters instructing isolated, teen rock guitarists on songwriting, arranging those works for string quartet, and then performing at a concert held in a neighboring concert venue. The residency was the subject of Molly McBride’s 2011 documentary Strings on the Rez, which was later used to raise funds for Covid medical services on the reservations.

The residency proved to be a learning experience for the classically trained instructors. “Even as we all have deep love and respect for the traditional quartet repertoire, Ethel always drew inspiration from seeking out new composers and new collaborators,” Farris says. “When we started out, we were working with all sorts of ‘downtown’ and ‘uptown’ composers from across the new-music map. But connecting with young Navajo and Hopi composers at the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP) changed everything. Truly, my ten years with NACAP remain the greatest, most powerful experience I have ever had. 

“Working first with Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, and then with Raven Chacon and Michael Begay, we were re-introduced to the idea of utilitarian music—music that serves some purpose other than being just some cool or lovely thing to listen to. NACAP students were writing tone poems about their grandmothers; they were writing heavy-metal work songs; they were living ceremony in the act of writing music. As the utilitarian inspirations of these musics were revealed, we were called to reckon with each story, each personal history, each moment of a young person’s life they chose to celebrate or memorialize. And these songs and stories live ever on with us as inspiration, a calling to be.”

Since its founding in 1998, Ethel has been an integral part of the New York avant chamber music scene, drawing rave reviews (“indefatigable and eclectic,” opined the New York Times; “vital and brilliant,” noted the New Yorker) and endeavoring to “fuse uptown panache with downtown genre mashup,” according to its own website. Ethel tours extensively, both as a headliner and in support of such pop acts as Todd Rundgren and Joe Jackson, and has recorded ten solo albums and appeared as a special guest ensemble on 50 others, including a Grammy-winning collaboration with jazz vocalist Kurt Elling.

Throughout its career, the ensemble has commissioned scores of works—collaborating with the Bang on a Can All-Stars, David Byrne, and Vijay Iyer, to name a few—and premiering more than 250 works, including those commissioned by the Ringling Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. 

One of those collaborators is French-Lebanese violinist and composer Layale Chaker, who contributed two works, including the haunting title piece, to the 2024 Ethel album Vigil, an homage to protest movements. “Vigil came to life over a couple years of collaboration with Layale,” Farris says. “We first connected in 2019, and we built our first recording demos in early 2020, just before the world changed. We received private support for this project, which was especially heartening in the face of the challenges we all were facing at that time, as [waylaid] touring artists. Layale was awarded an Early Career Musician Residency at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection [in Washington, DC] in the fall of 2021, and she invited us to workshop and present our program there. Layale is so gracious and kind, and she knew just what she wanted from Ethel. Our driving energy served well as a foundation for her work, and she called us to a vulnerability and an easeful space in tone production that was new and captivating. As to our own works, rehearsing your own music with your own band is always a challenge, but we are well used to it now, and coming together with Layale in our nation’s capital was deeply inspiring.” 

The second Ethel album released this year, Persist, also celebrates the defiant spirit of political-resistance movements. The project received public support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as private funding from longtime patrons. “After a period of sharing composers’ drafts and a lot of Zoom meetings, our longtime friends and collaborators at Gibney Dance opened their New York City studios to us, and we brought the composers together to work with the quintet,” Farris says. “We did deep dives into each composer’s sound world, from Miggy’s sweetly engaging jazz to Xavier’s sleepy-dreamy fantasy; from Sam’s sweetly intimate lyricism and Leilehua’s glimmering power to Allison’s deep driving grooves and her grace in presenting such potent and personal material. Our friends at Brooklyn Public Library were kind enough to host our premiere, and we found that we had built a remarkable program that held together beautifully.”

The latest recording projects are a testament to Ethel’s devotion to smashing the status quo, with a focus on gender equity: Between Vigil and Persist, the works of five women composers, including Ethel cellist and composer Dorothy Lawson, are featured. “Dead white guys have enjoyed plenty of time in the spotlight,” Farris says. “There will always be plenty of groups playing them. We chose a different path, celebrating community and being the change we wanted to see in the world. Over our 25 years together, Ethel has ever been about amplifying underrepresented voices—composers, performers, artists, you name it. It’s just what we do.”

What ETHEL Plays

Ralph Farris

Viola: Douglas Cox, No. 123 (1988)
Bows: Glasser Braided Carbon Fiber series (early 2000s) and the Incredibow (2020s)

Strings: D’Addario Kaplan (Amo or Forza)

Kip Jones

Violin: David Folland, No. 224 (2021)

Bow: Arcus Octagonal (2018)

Strings: Thomastik-Infeld Dominant Pro or PI Blue 

Dorothy Lawson

Cello: Luis & Clark carbon fiber (ca. 2008)

Bow: Salchow (ca. 1960)

Strings: A & D: Larsen Soloist, strong; G & C: Thomastik-Infeld Spirocore, tungsten-wound, stark

Corin Lee

Violin: Su Ding Hsuan (Taiwan, 2008)

Bow: William Hill (ca. 1900)

Strings: E: Lenzner Goldbrokat; A, D, G: Thomastik-Infeld Vision Titanium