String Quartet Ethel Releases 'Persist' Album with Flutist Allison Loggins-Hull

Acclaimed string quartet ETHEL has released their eighth album Persist, for which the group reconvened with the dynamic flutist Allison Loggins-Hull (Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow to the Cleveland Orchestra and newly appointed Resident Artistic Partner with New Jersey Symphony).

Celebrating the courage, patience and resilience displayed by people in times of great difficulty, Persist captures the arc of personal and collective persistence elicited by new commissions from four brilliant young composers: Migiwa "Miggy" Miyajima, Xavier Muzik, Sam Wu, and 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist Leilehua Lanzilotti. Passionate, committed, hopeful and inspiring, each piece contributes to an experience which surpasses the sum of its parts.

Taking its title from Loggins-Hull's album opener, Persist presents the unique pairing of string quartet and flute as five entities coming to together to form one sound. "We cultivated an interconnectedness that really shows the level of trust we've achieved together. 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 among listeners and our fellow artists," says Ralph Farris, co-founder and violist of ETHEL.

Persist marks the fifth iteration of HomeBaked, ETHEL's commissioning program for early-career composers. The initiative, begun in 2010, has commissioned and debuted 20 works by 16 early-career artists. Loggins-Hull teamed with ETHEL to solicit, select, and collaborate with composers from historically underrepresented backgrounds. ETHEL's 25+ years working with Native American composers reintroduced ETHEL to the idea of utilitarian music - "music that serves purposes other than being just some cool or lovely thing to listen to. As the utilitarian inspirations of this album's musics were revealed, we were called to reckon with each story of persistence, each personal history, each moment of a young person's life they chose to celebrate or memorialize."

About ETHEL

Established in New York City in 1998, string quartet ETHEL sets the contemporary concert standard: "indefatigable and eclectic" (The New York Times), and "vital and brilliant" (The New Yorker). Composer-performers-Ralph Farris (viola), Kip Jones (violin), Dorothy Lawson (cello), and Corin Lee (violin)-fuse uptown panache with downtown genre mashup. ETHEL has performed across the United States and worldwide; released 10 feature albums; guested on 50+ recordings; won a GRAMMY Award with jazz legend Kurt Elling; and toured with Todd Rundgren & Joe Jackson. ETHEL champions the art and music of today, forging human connections across sound and style.

At the heart of ETHEL is a collaborative ethos - a quest for common creative expression, forged in listening and community. The quartet designs productions that inspire engagement, such as "The Red Willow," featuring Taos Pueblo flutist Robert Mirabal, and "Signature Sessions," a supercharged survey of the quartet's 25+ years of inspired music-making.

ETHEL has premiered over 250 works, many of them commissioned by the quartet; ETHEL members have themselves been commissioned by The Ringling Museum of Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Georgia Tech,
and the NEA. The quartet regularly performs music by such celebrated composers as Julia Wolfe, Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate, Jessie Montgomery, Andy Akiho, and Marcelo Zarvos. Other collaborators include Bang on a Can All-Stars, Vijay Iyer, Stewart Copeland, Raven Chacon, David Byrne, Annie-B Parson, Gina Gibney, Grant McDonald, Steve Cosson, and Annie Dorsen.

ETHEL has been featured at TED Conferences; on ABC Radio Australia, SiriusXM, Conan O'Brien, John Schaefer's New Sounds, Fred Child's Performance Today, Randy Cohen's Person Place Thing, NPR's Weekend Edition; and on the soundtracks of Dan In Real Life and HBO's Deadwood. From mid-2020 to early '22, ETHEL curated and produced Balcony Bar from Home, a virtual series hosted on The Metropolitan Museum's Facebook page which has garnered nearly two million views. ETHEL is Ensemble-in-Residence at Denison University, and Resident Ensemble at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Balcony Bar in the Great Hall. ETHELcentral.org

About Allison Loggins-Hull

Celebrated as a musical "powerhouse" (The Washington Post), Allison Loggins-Hull is a composer, flutist, and producer whose work defies genre, from symphonic music to film scores, chamber and electronic music. Her signature style of composing for orchestra is characterized by unique sonic effects that echo contemporary music production techniques. Her works are profoundly influenced by Black American music, creating a vibrant and kaleidoscopic sonic palette. Thematically, her compositions are deeply rooted in the experiences of community, culture, and life, offering a rich and evocative musical narrative. Her artistic reflections on Black stories, music, and experience, have led to works aligned with Afrofuturism, a movement that imagines alternate realities and a liberated future viewed through the lens of Black cultures. In her newest appointment, she will serve as Resident Artistic Partner to the New Jersey Symphony, for a term beginning in September 2024.

Loggins-Hull formed the groundbreaking duo Flutronix, and has performed as an accompanist to major pop acts including Lizzo and Frank Ocean. She has performed on multiple blockbuster film scores and composed the score for Bring Them Back, an award-winning documentary executive produced by Debbie Allen about the legendary dancer Maurice Hines. In 2023, she led an ensemble of flutists at the Met Gala, backing a performance by Lizzo.

This season marks Loggins-Hull's last of three years as the Lewis Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra, an engagement that focuses the narratives and history of Cleveland through the prism of one of the world's great orchestras, culminating in three world premieres. Loggins-Hull lives in Montclair, NJ with her family. She is represented by Pink Noise Agency, a BIG Arts Group company. 

About Sono Luminus

Located in the nearly 110-year-old former Emmanuel Episcopal Chapel in rural Boyce, VA, the Sono Luminus studios are a world-class recording facility and record label with a special focus on contemporary / early classical and acoustic music. Studio A boasts a 25-foot vaulted wood ceiling over a 35'x65' original heart pine floor, providing a beautiful natural acoustic. Sono Luminus specializes in the highest caliber of audio quality with the capability of recording 24 simultaneous channels of audio with sample rates up to DXD (Digital eXtreme Definition) 352kHz/24bit or DSD (Direct Stream Digital).