PRISM Quartet, Chicago, IL (2026)

06/01/2026

Emily Cooley on "Dissolve" featured on PREMIERES — a pay-what-you-wish concert of brand-new works composed for the ensemble.

📍 June 6 | 7 PM — Germantown Branch, Settlement Music School, Philadelphia
📍 June 7 | 4 PM — Christ & St. Stephen's Church, New York City

Four world premieres!

🎷 Grant Stewart — Kind Mothers | DownBeat Critics Poll winner, founder of the Tribeca Jazz Institute
🎷 Don Byron — Quartet for Saxophones | Rome Prize winner, Pulitzer finalist, Blue Note recording artist
🎷 Teddy Poll — There/Back | conductor and winner of PRISM's Robert Capanna Commissioning Award
🎷 Henry Vidaver — Via Appia | 18 years old and already making his mark, winner of the PRISM/Walden School Student Commissioning Award

Rounding out the program: Emily Cooley's "Dissolve" from our newest release on XAS Records — her music described as "a beautiful delicacy."

Pay what you wish. Come as you are. This one's not to be missed.

05/31/2026

Grant Stewart on "Kind Mothers," his PRISM Quartet commission.

PRISM Quartet presents PREMIERES — an all-new program of works written for the ensemble.

📍 June 6, 7 PM — Germantown Branch, Settlement Music School, Philadelphia
📍 June 7, 4 PM — Christ & St. Stephen's Church, New York City
On the program:

🎷 Don Byron — Quartet for Saxophones (world premiere) | Rome Prize winner, Pulitzer finalist, Blue Note recording artist
🎷 Grant Stewart — Kind Mothers | DownBeat Critics Poll winner, founder of the Tribeca Jazz Institute
🎷 Teddy Poll — There/Back | Robert Capanna Commissioning Award winner; former resident conductor, Houston Grand Opera
🎷 Henry Vidaver — Via Appia | 18 years old and a PRISM/Walden School Student Commissioning Award winner

Plus Emily Cooley's Dissolve from our newest release on XAS Records.

Tickets are pay-what-you-wish!

Teddy Poll Timothy McAllister Matthew Levy Zach Shemon Conn Selmer Henri SELMER Paris Saxophones Symphonic Distribution Black Tea Music The Walden School

05/25/2026

Check out a bit of the score of Emily Cooley's Dissolve — then come hear it live.

Cooley wrote the piece in 2018 as the inaugural winner of PRISM's Robert Capanna Commissioning Award. She describes it as beginning with "an angular, urgent melody that bounces from player to player" — one that gradually warps, layers, and dissolves into silence, before a second movement arrives as a quiet hymn, nostalgic rather than desolate.
Cooley has since become a licensed attorney working in legal aid. Dissolve stands as a vivid marker of what her music does: question narrative convention, and sit honestly with vulnerability.

Philadelphia · June 6 / New York City · June 7

Info/tix in PQ FB events of wsite

Timothy McAllister Matthew Levy Zach Shemon The Walden School Conn Selmer Henri SELMER Paris Saxophones

05/21/2026

Meet the artist behind Dissolve 🎶 Before our PREMIERES concerts in Philly (June 6) and NYC (June 7), we’re spotlighting our final featured composer, Emily Cooley!

Emily’s music explores power, vulnerability, and complex emotions through harmony. But her story doesn't stop there. After teaching music in Pennsylvania prisons, Emily felt a calling to social justice, leading her to a whole new career. She graduated law school, passed the bar, and now works as a legal aid attorney fighting for disability and public benefits! ⚖️

Dissolve—which won PRISM’s inaugural Robert Capanna Commissioning Award—is also our latest release on XAS Records.
Don't miss the Philadelphia and NYC premieres! Pay-what-you-wish tickets are going fast. Save your spot at the link in our bio! 🎟️✨

📍 June 6 (Philly): Settlement Music School (Germantown)
📍 June 7 (NYC): Christ & St. Stephen's Church
🔗 Secure your spot: Check PRISMQuartet.com for tickets and info.

05/20/2026

Get a behind-the-scenes look at Teddy Poll’s There/Back, coming to Philadelphia on June 6 and NYC on June 7 on PRISM’s PREMIERES concerts.

THE MUSIC: In There/Back, Teddy Poll draws parallels between musical and literary forms, noting that different lengths offer different challenges and opportunities. He writes: “There/Back is an abbreviation, rather cheekily, of Tolkien’s meta-title for The Hobbit, ‘There and Back Again.’ The music itself refers in no way to Tolkien or his work; rather, this title refers to the classic classical form, ABA. Almost as old as written music, this form describes a structure featuring one section of music, followed by an often contrasting second section, followed by a return to the first section. I’ve always thought ‘There and Back Again’ refers to this experience so aptly: the listener embarks, finds new territory, and returns, forever changed. In this piece I’ve scrambled/enjoined a series of interlocking ABAs, focusing on musical ideas that both interrelate and contrast, giving brief but hopefully complete moods. I’ve settled on an approach that averages the ‘poem’ and the ‘novel’: create a series of distilled ideas that vividly contrast and yet are so deeply interrelated that they leave a singular and complete impression, where, like The Hobbit, we depart, arrive, and return again, but with changed ears.”

Teddy is the 2025 winner of the PRISM Quartet’s Robert Capanna Commissioning Award.

You won't want to miss this performance!

📅 June 6 (Philadelphia) & June 7 (New York City)
🎟️ Grab your tickets at the link in our bio!

Teddy Poll Timothy McAllister Matthew Levy Zach Shemon The Walden School Conn Selmer

05/19/2026

Ahead of PRISM Quartet's PREMIERES concerts on June 6 in Philadelphia and June 7 in New York City, we're taking an in-depth look at each commissioned work on the program. Next up is Teddy Poll's “There/Back.”

More on that soon, but first, about Teddy!

Teddy Poll is an American/German conductor and composer. He joined the Houston Grand Opera in 23/24 as Resident Conductor, making his debut in performances of Madama Butterfly. In previous seasons, he has appeared as a guest artist at the Juilliard School, as well as in performances and workshops with Opera Philadelphia, the Glimmerglass Festival, Bare Opera, and the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. He has been on music staff as an Assistant Conductor at the Glimmerglass Festival and San Francisco Opera. Teddy was a Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Versatile as a composer, he has written concert, vocal and film music that has been commissioned by PCMS and the Presser Foundation, and has won an ASCAP Morton Gould award. He is also a member of the BMI Lehman Engel Workshop and is currently composing an American Comic Opera based on Terrence McNally’s “The Ritz,” in collaboration with the McNally Estate and director Peter Kazaras. Teddy holds a BA and an MSW from Columbia University, an MM from Mannes College of Music and the Artist Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music. Like Teddy is a former student of the Walden School!

Save your spot — you won't want to miss this world premiere! 'ink to 'ment info/tix.

Teddy Poll Timothy McAllister Matthew Levy Zach Shemon The Walden School
Conn Selmer

05/15/2026

New music. Two cities. Pay what you wish.

PRISM Quartet presents PREMIERES — an all-new program of works written for the ensemble.

📍 June 6, 7 PM — Germantown Branch, Settlement Music School, Philadelphia
📍 June 7, 4 PM — Christ & St. Stephen's Church, New York City

On the program:
🎷 Don Byron — Quartet for Saxophones (world premiere) | Rome Prize winner, Pulitzer finalist, Blue Note recording artist
🎷 Grant Stewart — Kind Mothers | DownBeat Critics Poll winner, founder of the Tribeca Jazz Institute
🎷 Teddy Poll — There/Back | Robert Capanna Commissioning Award winner; former resident conductor, Houston Grand Opera
🎷 Henry Vidaver — Via Appia | 18 years old and a PRISM/Walden School Student Commissioning Award winner

Plus Emily Cooley's Dissolve from our newest release on XAS Records.

Tickets are pay-what-you-wish — 'ink in 'ment

Teddy Poll Timothy McAllister Matthew Levy Zach Shemon Conn Selmer Henri SELMER Paris Saxophones Symphonic Distribution Black Tea Music The Walden School

05/13/2026

PRISM Pick!

This Sunday, our friends at Network for New Music are presenting an extraordinary wide-ranging program called SOLOS IN SOLIDARITY.

Spread the word!

Sunday, May 17, 2026
3:00 PM
Settlement Music School - Germantown
6128 Germantown Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19144

NNM writes: Join us for our season closer! As Philadelphia approaches its 250th anniversary, Solos in Solidarity becomes both celebration and reflection: a musical portrait of a city shaped by many voices, histories, and communities. Through intimate, virtuosic, and deeply personal works, the program captures the spirit of Philadelphia not as a single narrative, but as a rich, evolving chorus, where each solo performance stands alone, yet resonates as part of a larger, shared identity.

Featuring works by Erin Busch, Curt Cacioppo, Avner Dorman, Allison Loggins-Hull, Steven Mackey, Nick Millevoi, Thomas Schuttenhelm, and George Walker performed by a host of Network friends, new and old!

Info/Tickets: networkfornewmusic.org

About Network for New Music:
Recognized for their dynamic performances of contemporary compositions by both emerging and established composers, Network for New Music continues to be Philadelphia's "premier new music organization" (Philadelphia Inquirer). Founded in 1984, the flexible ensemble has presented over 700 works and recorded four CDs for Albany Records and on the Innova label. In addition to presenting "tomorrow's music today", the Network Ensemble has had educational residencies at the Mann Center (All-City-Orchestra-Summer-Academy), the Curtis Institute, University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Swarthmore College, West Chester University, and since 2007, it has maintained an ongoing residency at Haverford College.

Tell them Matt, Tim, Zach, and Taimur sent you!

Network for New Music

05/12/2026

Ahead of PRISM Quartet's PREMIERES concerts on June 6 in Philadelphia and June 7 in New York City, we're taking an in-depth look at each commissioned work on the program. Next up is Henry Vidaver's “Via Appia.”

More on that soon, but first, some background!

Henry is a Boston-based composer, pianist, and cellist who has written for ensembles including Friction Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, The Walden School Players, and now PRISM Quartet. During the year, Henry is a member of the choir at Trinity Church Boston, plays cello in the chamber orchestra at Belmont High School, and performs as a pianist in the composer chamber music group at the New England Conservatory Preparatory School. Henry spends his summers at the Walden Young Musicians Program, where he continues making music through composing, singing, and performing. Henry currently studies composition with Rodney Lister.

Henry is the 24th winner of the PRISM Quartet/Walden School Student Commissioning Award, initiated in 2000 and presented annually to a current or recent student of the Walden School.

Way back in the early 1990s, PRISM Quartet conducted its first of three residencies at Walden, a music composition camp in Dublin, New Hampshire serving students from ages 8 to 18. Walden is an institution like no other: students come together from across the country and from every walk of life to study with an extraordinarily talented and dedicated composition faculty under the leadership of Executive Director Seth Brenzel. (Seth's name may be familiar. He also serves as the chair of PRISM Quartet's board of directors.) Part school, part camp, and part festival, Walden has developed its own holistic curriculum that integrates improvisation and notated composition, and brings in many of the nation's best ensembles and professional composers to work with its students.

Save your spot — you won't want to miss this world premiere! Info in PRISM Events!

05/10/2026

DELIVERED! Grant Stewart's Kind Mothers

Ahead of PRISM Quartet's PREMIERES concerts on June 6 and 7 in Philadelphia and New York City, we're taking an in-depth look at each commissioned work on the program. Grant Stewart's Kind Mothers grew from a shared experience of loss and remembrance. Stewart accepted the commission soon after losing his mother; his friend and commissioner Ken Pace (an accomplished saxophonist himself) had also lost his mother recently. Twenty-four years earlier, PRISM’s tenor saxophonist Matthew Levy, also a dear friend of Ken, lost his mom. The piece is dedicated to these three mothers.
Stewart writes that the phrase “kind mothers” comes from a Buddhist concept: “that birth, death, and rebirth have occurred so many times since beginningless time that everyone you meet has, at some point, been your kind mother.”

He notes that “the work is essentially a free association—a celebration of and meditation on mothers, on life, and on the increasingly dreamlike quality it takes on the further along you get in the journey. The entire piece is generated from the three multiphonic chords heard in the postlude. All of the musical material is derived from rows and rotations of these chords."

Movement I Prelude reflects on our “conception and the beginnings of life. This resulted in a triptych inspired by microscopic imagery of fertilization. Movement II: Motility represents the turbulent, tail whipping, restless motion and the intense kinetic energy involved. Movement III: De l’Acrosome depicts the swarming, murmuring breakdown through enzymatic activity of the egg’s outer boundary. Movement IV: Fusing represents the merging and transfer of genetic information.”

In Movement V: Kind Mothers, “cascading rotations of the rows represent the endless cycle of rebirth, while the slow, relatively stationary melody reflects the illusion of a permanent self. Movement VI is a chorale, a sort of eulogy.”

“Movement VII was the seed from which the entire piece grew. As a child of the 1970s, my earliest memories are of distant train whistles, wind at the back door, a telephone off the hook, and the test signals of television stations after midnight. The dyads produced by many of the multiphonics brought those sounds back to me. This movement attempts to convey the loneliness of memory, the breaking down of the “TV show set of your life,” and ultimately the realization that, as Cicero wrote, “The life of the dead is placed in the memories of the living. The love you gave in life keeps people alive beyond their time. Anyone who was given love will always live on in another’s heart.”

Save your spot — you won't want to miss this world premiere! Link to concert info/tix in profile.

Timothy McAllister Zach Shemon Matthew Levy

PRISM Quartet

06/01/2026

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05/25/2026

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05/20/2026

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