11 Questions with Nick Revel
PUBLIQuartet’s Freedom & Faith is GRAMMY Nominated!
Best Chamber Music/ Small Ensemble Performance
Where did you grow up?
Wilton, CTWhat made you realize that music was your path?
I was given many opportunities and encouragement from my parents and teachers growing up including private lessons, youth symphony, chamber music, and concert-going. I applied to most of the top conservatories in the country before I had the "aha" moment of knowing music was my path. The defining moment was in the first couple weeks of undergraduate school at the Eastman School of Music when I finally felt like I had found my people and no longer wondered what I would be doing with my life.
How would you describe the music that you typically perform/create?
PUBLIQuartet's music is dynamic, fresh, new, and unexpected. We sometimes take classical music pieces or excerpts and place them in modern contexts, like against back-beats, or reharmonized bass-lines. And other times we take standard pop and reorient them in a "classical" context. We completely abuse our instruments to get the most variety of sounds, like beating on them as if they were drums, pressing so hard on the string with the bow that a crunch comes out, chopping the strings vertically with the bow to create percussive sounds, or hitting the wood of the bow against the strings to create even more percussive effects. Of course we use normal sounds too, but we enjoy the diversity of sounds available to string players not often used.Who are your biggest musical influences?
Growing up I listened to a lot of classical music on the radio. We usually just had the radio on in the house so I remember hearing beautiful music interspersed with news coverage I didn't quite understand but generally made me feel uneasy. I remember hearing all the Bach and Vivaldi they could squeeze into Sunday Morning Baroque. We went to lots of concerts at Lincoln Center, NY Phil, Emerson Quartet, and even more local groups and venues like the Norwalk Symphony, Candlelight Concerts at the First Congregational Church in Wilton. Later on in college I was big into string players that didn't play western classical music: Turtle Island Quartet, Christian Howes, L. Shankar, Adam Bladych, etc. And more recently, with the invention of streaming, the availability has become slightly overwhelming to me but artists that stand out to me are Punch Brothers, Flying Lotus, Jaga Jazzist, Björk, Joshua Redman, Chris Bathgate, movie scores, and lots and lots of old-school video game music.
What makes your musical life unique?
PUBLIQuartet has an opinion that the experiences we have as artistic individuals away from the group feeds back in highly positive ways into the group. We all have our own musical lives outside the quartet and we joke that when we come together it's like we form a megazord and all of these separate identities reorganize and merge in magical ways. So embracing that philosophy, I have now over a decade of audio recording experience, which has dramatically shaped the way I think about sound production, timing, intonation, improvising, and composing. I have written and recorded my own solo album of all-original compositions, improvisations, sound-designs for layers of viola, which I turned into a performable solo show using auto-triggering live-sampling and looping. I run a chamber music program in CT for youths and all of these musical experiences in my life lead back to the quartet, where I can say, "hey guys, check out this thing I did!" and then we figure out a way to incorporate it.
Has there been one particular moment in your musical career that you're most proud of
Sorry, I can't narrow down below three that all give me the same feels. The first was from our 2016-2017 residency at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This was a BIG step up career-wise for us and Ms. Limor Tomer, the director of programming, took a big risk on us. However, our audiences embraced our musical statements and performances and I remember feeling like we got so much energy from those performances. The second was being nominated for the Grammy's, which honestly, not fully processed yet! Still working on it. Still crazy feeling. And the third was my own CD release in Brooklyn less than a year ago, which gave me so much confidence and creative energy. I went from being a "quartet violist" to a "violist".
What is your favorite thing about your new album?
Freedom and Faith is the gift that keeps on giving! It's been our most widely-performed program in the last two years and the music on the album is so much fun to play. There is a great mix of improvised sounds, genres, playing styles, and lyrical / jammy music. It also feels great to be promoting music all over the country that was written by women composers, a group currently sorely under-represented.
Why was it important to you to feature women artists on this album?
It's important to PUBLIQuartet to pick music we connect with and present it in a way that we feel can make some sort of statement and impact. Women composers are still vastly under-represented compared to their male counterparts and so when we gather music that we love playing and we present those works in a single program, that feels like a big statement to us. It seems to me that in society the actions always lag behind the ideas. We are just now getting to the idea that women composers are just as valid as male composers. PQ is making the action happen.
What is the impetus behind Freedom and Faith and why did you feel compelled to release this into the universe?
Being a quartet that is not limited to the standard classical canon, we realized that we have a platform for making statements, publicly, through our programming and presentation. There is a lot of confusion and ignorance in our country and so what better way to combat that in our own way by programming and presenting music in ways that the audience might not expect. We sometimes call our programs trojan horses. Our first real political program, which also still gets performed, is called What is American?, where we present works like Dvorak's American Quartet fully infused with PQ American-pop-influenced improvisations that questions who gets to decide what is American. Over time we acquire music into our repertoire that we love and want to present it in a thought-provoking or (even triggering to some) way. Freedom and Faith is about the oppression of women's rights and ideas, and what emerged despite those strong factors.
What’s the next thing for you?
We just premiered a self-commissioned project with funding through New Music USA called Reflections on Beauty, which celebrates the life of Madam CJ Walker through the music she would have heard in her lifetime. We collaborated with her great-great-granddaughter A'Lelia Bundles, who is an amazing historian, public speaker, TV producer, and much more, as she performed with us, narrating and speaking quotations of Madam Walker. We're in the middle of creating a top-notch promo reel for the project so we can take it to bigger spaces all across the country and share Walker's heroic vision.
Have you decided what you are wearing to the Grammy's?
Way behind!! Working on it! Thinking of Rent-the-Runway, Jannina is looking into sponsorship. Either something real sharp and trim or something incredibly flashy and over-the-top. Maybe I'll bring both!