ANNOUNCING THE LYDIAN STRING QUARTET'S 2015-2016 SEASON

The members of the Lydian String Quartet are proud and excited to announce their 15-16 season. Between August 2015 and April 2016, the 'Lyds' will travel to the west coast, Utah, Wisconsin, and throughout the Northeastern United States performing music by a wide range of composers, including Kurt Rohde's Treatises for an Unrecovered Past, the result of the quartet's first Commission Prize Competition! A detailed 15-16 calendar is available here.

In late August, the Lyds kick off the season at Wisconsin's Token Creek Chamber Music Festival, performing the music of two Boston-based composers: Token Creek Artistic Director John Harbison and the late Lee Hyla. The quartet will play both composers’ third string quartets, both of which were premiered by the Lyds. In September, the Lyds return to the Music and More series in Western Massachusetts, and in October, the quartet brings the music of Hugo Wolf to Emanuel Music in Boston. Mendelsohn's first quartet rounds out both the programs for the aforementioned concerts.

"The one-movement, 13-minute String Quartet No. 3 (1989), written for and performed by the Lydian String Quartet, rounded out the first half of the concert. Ranging from simple to gnarly, harmonically transparent to dense, this is rich and multi-faceted, reminiscent of Bartók yet never derivative —here as elsewhere, wholly Hyla." - Boston Classical Music Intelligencer

As part of the Lydian's residency at Brandeis University, they will perform four times next season - in October with Tony Arnold, readings of student compositions in December, a Fauré festival in March, and a world premiere by Lydian Quartet Commission Prizewinner, Steven Snowden, in April!

Committed to new music, the Lyds will present chamber music master classes and composer workshops along their trips next year. Schools include UC Davis (concert at the Davis Mondavi Center), the Festival of New American Music at Sacramento State University, Brigham Young University, Amherst College, and York College (PA). For these programs, the quartet will perform music by Harold Meltzer, Lee Hyla, and Kurt Rhodes, three composers with strong ties to the ensemble. Please visit our calendar for more information!

For more information on booking the Lydians, please contact JMS Artist Management at www.jmsartistanagement.com or call 857-210-4607. The quartet teamed up with JMS Artist Management earlier this year.

COMPOSER STEVEN SNOWDEN WINS 2015 LYDIAN STRING QUARTET COMMISSION PRIZE

March 20, 2015 - The Lydian String Quartet and Brandeis University are proud to announce the winner of their 2015 Lydian String Quartet Commission Prize. Steven Snowden of Austin Texas has been commissioned to compose a new quartet for the Lydian Quartet, to be premiered in the spring of 2016 at Brandeis University. Snowden was chosen from an incredibly accomplished pool of composer applicants. In addition to awarding the commission to Steven Snowden, composers David Liptak, Lansing McLoskey and Andrew Waggoner have been awarded honorable mention.

Snowden received degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a DMA in composition, with a certificate in Electronic Music. He has recently received awards and fellowships from the Aspen Music Festival, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, the Austin Critics’ Table, Copland House, ISCM World Music Days, New Music USA, IC Hong Kong, The Mizzou New Music International Composers Festival, Future Places Portugal, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the ASCAP Morton Gould Awards among others. He was also the recipient of a 2012-2013 Fulbright Grant to Portugal. In 2013-2014 he was a visiting professor and composer in residence at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and currently works as a freelance composer and concert presenter in Austin, Texas. More information about Steven Snowden can be found at: http://www.stevensnowden.com.