Jerod Tate and the Dover Quartet Chart New Territory for the American String Quartet

By Thomas May | From the September/October 2025 issue of Strings

When it was announced that Joel Link, founding first violinist of the Dover Quartet, had been appointed concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra, the chamber music world braced for what seemed inevitable. Surely the Dover Quartet, one of the most acclaimed ensembles of its generation, would have to call it quits—all the more so since violist Julianne Lee the previous fall had announced her intention to return to the Boston Symphony Orchestra full-time in her capacity as assistant principal second violin. Rumors of dissolution seemed all but confirmed.

Instead, to widespread surprise—and not a little delight—the Dovers leaned in. Alongside violinist Bryan Lee and cellist Camden Shaw, Link and Lee made the audacious choice to continue their musical bond as a quartet. “The truth is, we can’t imagine not making music together,” the group shared in a public statement on social media. “Today, we are overjoyed to announce that we are staying together in our current configuration: Joel, Bryan, Julianne, and Camden!”

“The decision was so immediate,” says Lee. “It felt so easy because of that solid foundation of the other three. And now, with our individual experiences outside the quartet, we’re only going to bring more growth to what we do as an ensemble.” Link adds that the challenges of playing in a quartet are significant enough from the outset that there’s no point to devoting time to a string quartet “unless it’s with people that you’re 100 percent behind and excited to play with.”

Their roots, after all, run deep. Formed at the Curtis Institute of Music in 2008 while its original members were students, the Dover Quartet first captured international attention with its sweeping victory at the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition. In 2023, founding violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt stepped away from the group to focus on family and solo projects and was succeeded by Lee, also a Curtis alum.

From the start, the ensemble members have maintained a vital connection to their alma mater as quartet-in-residence, carrying forward a lineage once held by the legendary Guarneri Quartet. This summer’s release of Woodland Songs on the Curtis Studio label—an in-house initiative showcasing original recordings by Curtis-affiliated artists—caps the conservatory’s 100th anniversary season, underscoring how deeply intertwined the Dover Quartet remains with the institution that launched its career. The album (distributed by Platoon) combines new commissions with a fresh account of Dvořák’s Op. 96 “American” Quartet.

This has also been a momentous period for composer Jerod Impichcha̱achaaha’ Tate, who began collaborating with the ensemble last year on a pair of commissions that are featured on the new album: both the eponymous Woodland Songs and Rattle Songs, an orchestration for string quartet of traditional melodies made famous by the vocal trio Ulali. A citizen of the Chickasaw Nation based in Norman, Oklahoma, Tate has become increasingly ubiquitous in the contemporary music scene. His debut opera, Loksi’ Shaali’ (Shell Shaker)—the first opera composed en-tirely in an American Indian language—premiered last fall, and this past spring saw the first performances of a new choral-orchestral work at Carnegie Hall and of American Indian Symphony by the Oklahoma City Philharmonic. 

The relationship with the Dovers, who toured widely with Tate’s new works ahead of the album release, meanwhile has proven mutually illuminating. It has deepened the composer’s engagement with a medium whose multilayered potential he finds fascinating. “The string quartet is a very modern way of expressing an incredible variety of things,” Tate says. For the ensemble, working with his music has yielded new perspectives on modern American identity as well as on the enigmas of the creative process. 

Voices of the Land

The Grammy Award–winning producer Alan Bise, who has collaborated with Tate and the Dover Quartet (producing the ensemble’s acclaimed complete Beethoven cycle), played the matchmaker role. When he became aware that the group was thinking of a new commissioning project, he recommended Tate as an ideal candidate.

“What was especially wonderful from my perspective is that they gave me carte blanche about what I wanted to compose,” Tate recalls. While he had written several previous works for the medium—including MoonStrike for the Apollo Chamber Players to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and Pisachi (Reveal) for ETHEL’s touring project Documerica—he decided to explore an unprecedented fusion of his Chickasaw cultural heritage with the compositional possibilities of the classical string quartet medium.

“I spend my life expressing American Indian culture, and specifically Chickasaw culture,” Tate says. “There are so many things to draw from in our traditions that are inspiring to me. They’re always burning in the background. Therefore I didn’t want to write a conventional quartet. It was important for me to make it have character and color.”

Tate, who was born in 1968 and named a Cultural Ambassador by the US Department of State in 2021, credits both of his parents with imprinting enduring musical influences. His father, Charles, whose inherited Chickasaw clan name signifies “their high corncrib” (Impichcha̱achaaha’), became a renowned tribal lawyer and judge and helped author the Chickasaw Constitution. Himself a passionate pianist and baritone, Charles Tate began giving his son piano lessons at the age of eight and also imbued him with a curiosity about his own and other tribes across North America. Tate’s mother, Patricia, came from Manx heritage and was a professional dancer and choreographer, instilling a deep love of theater and the stage. 

Classically trained in both piano and composition, Tate has developed an artistic practice reflecting his dual legacy: “I come from a history of both American Indian and classical musicians that sit on my shoulders as I’m composing. So I feel absolute full license to be all of who I am with this medium.”

For his Dover commission, this impulse sparked the idea of Abokkoli’ Taloowa’—the Chickasaw title Tate uses, offering “Woodland Songs” as the English translation for a five-movement suite of character portraits, each of which pays homage to a distinct woodland creature from the Chickasaw Nation’s Southeastern homelands. These animals—Squirrel (Fani’), Bird (Foshi’), Deer (Issi’), Fish (Naani’), and Raccoon (Shawi’)—are, in turn, closely associated with specific clans and a repertoire of ancestral lore. Tate has described the work as “a deep, dramatic, and rhapsodic expression of my feelings of being a Chickasaw man from a beautiful and robust culture. I love our animals, and I love composing works about them.”

But how does he convey this rich narrative material through wordless instrumental writing? Tate exploits a trove of Chickasaw melodies and rhythms, and even musical structures, yet he continually transforms these into novel expressions. “Sometimes these elements appear very clearly, where the melody may romantically soar above the ensemble,” he remarks. “Sometimes they are abstracted into the texture of the quartet and hidden inside the spirit of the animal. I allow myself to fluidly dance between cultural clarity and modern expressionism.” Tate compares this process to what his fellow American Indian artists do in other media, from dance and poetry to film, “each proudly expressing their individual identity within rich ancestry.” 

No prior knowledge of American Indian legend is necessary to enjoy Woodland Songs, Tate adds, since the pieces represent his personal expressions of these animal characters. “I encourage the audience to make their own internal movie about what they’re hearing. It may not have anything at all to do with animals but could be some certain event in their lives. At the end of the day, the goal is to tell an emotional and personal story—and, hopefully, to inspire emotional and personal stories from the listener.”

In the “Raccoon” movement, for example, he channels a traditional war dance through a bluegrass fiddle style prompted by his admiration for the playing of one of his most brilliant composition students, Katie Barrick. The bluegrass references evoke the mischievous unpredictability and even diabolical traits of an animal with which his own clan claims kinship. 

For the Dovers, one of the delights of performing Tate’s music is the imagination with which he conveys character through musical gestures. “He’s a very sensation-based composer who wants you to experience something strongly when you listen,” says Lee.

From ‘Rattleville’ to ‘Stringville’

Soon after meeting with the ensemble for the first time, Tate discovered that cellist Camden Shaw shared his admiration for the a cappella trio of American Indian women known as Ulali, whose 1994 album Mahk Jchi (“Our Hearts”) he calls “a unique work of genius in modernizing ancestral music from their Tuscarora tribe and from other tribes.” While Shaw had learned about their music at a young age through a family connection—his aunt was an expert in American Indian language revitalization at the Smithsonian Institution—Tate considers the work of Pura Fé Crescioni, founder of Ulali (now living in Canada), to be a formative component of his development as an artist. He had long wanted to create an orchestral version to reinforce the Ulali singers. 

So the Dovers invited Tate to fashion a version of these songs for string quartet. The title, Rattle Songs,refers to the traditional source material that Pura Fé and her colleagues drew from, for which percussion instruments made from turtle shells and other natural materials are used to accompany stomp dancing as well as ceremonial songs. “The rattles are only one aspect of the depth and the impact of that music, which they recast with gorgeous harmonies,” Tate remarks. Carrying specific titles like “For the Pepper” and “Great Grandpa’s Banjo,” the pieces comprising Rattle Songs embody a series of tribute portraits of various tribal members they knew across North America, such as the 1970s fusion saxophonist Jim Gilbert Pepper II.

In themselves, the Ulali songs Tate selected represent a contemporary reworking of inherited material, which he in turn orchestrates for the string quartet idiom. Just as Woodland Songs evokes legends without words, Rattle Songs dispenses with actual rattles and obvious “effects,” shifting the musical events to a different plane. “I took it out of ‘rattleville’ and put it into ‘stringville,’” Tate quips, “and tried to find ways to make an impressionistic rather than straight-up rattle sound. The focus is actually on the vocal work from Ulali more than anything.” 

“It’s interesting to think about how we imitate the voice on our instruments,” Lee notes. “We always tell our students, ‘Sing this phrase.’ And in Rattle Songs, Jerod is moving from voice to string quartet in his compositional language.”

For Tate, the commission is “a beautiful example of the fluidity of folk art through time. No matter what we’re doing, we’re always in a state of modern art. All of us come from ancient cultures. You couldn’t be more Russian than Tchaikovsky, and he was drawing on folk melodies and stories all the time. It’s liberating to think that art is constantly evolving, on every possible level.” 

Continuum of Voices

The final work on the album brings Tate into dialogue with one of his classical heroes: Antonín Dvořák. The Dover Quartet decided to pair his commissions with the beloved “American” Quartet for its melodic warmth, rhythmic vitality, and open-ended ties to vernacular American styles. “A lot of the parallels you hear between the two are rhythmic, but through totally different lenses, almost like listening to similar languages spoken differently, as in a dialect. They complement each other,” says Link.

“There’s a sense of rhythmic groove in both Jerod’s Woodland Songs and in the Ulali Rattle Songs that can be found all over the place in the ‘American’ Quartet,” observes Shaw. “Mere seconds into the ‘American,’ there is a transition motive in D minor with a pulsing rhythm in the second violin that is almost certainly a rattle song or similar Native tune. Dvořák’s profound slow movement is also almost certainly from a traditional melody—perhaps slowed down and put in a new meter to explore it differently.” Lee also points to the shared interest in birds—the American songbird in the third movement of the “American” and Tate’s “hyperbolic” woodpecker in Woodland Songs.

For the Dovers, the experience of collaborating with Tate has proved unusually organic. “Every time we perform, Jerod’s music feels like a different experience,” says Lee. 

“What’s been most meaningful about the project is developing a relationship with Jerod,” says Link. “Although he puts everything on the page, whenever we offer suggestions or ideas, he is extremely open, even when he really knows what he wants to say. It’s always great to work with someone who has a clear idea of who they are and what they want their music to be.”

“I have a philosophy as a composer that it’s my responsibility to make sure the music I want is on the page,” says Tate. “I tell ensembles: ‘Don’t try to sound “Indian,” but be the finest classical musician you can be, because that’s what I need from you.’ That’s the tool I’m using. If anything, it’s closer to impressionism or Debussy, with a palette of color and technique.” He adds: “What I do is not as ‘exotic’ as maybe some assume it to be. It’s actually quite practical, because we all draw from personal experiences, and we have done so since time immemorial. We are part of a continuum. There’s nothing really new under the sun.”