Quince Ensemble

The Quince Ensemble is an American vocal quartet that specializes in contemporary music, often commissioning new works and establishing a fund aimed at enlarging the repertory for women's voices. The ensemble also collaborates with other leading new music groups. The Quince Ensemble was formed in 2010 in Bowling Green, Ohio, where the founding members were students at Bowling Green State University. Two of the members, Amanda DeBoer Bartlett and Kayleigh Butcher, met at a concert by Americana artist Neko Case. The pair added McKayela Collins-Hornor, Aubrey von Almen, and Liz Pearse, and the name "Quince" was suggested by the fact that the group at that time was a quintet. After von Almen and Collins-Hornor left the group, Carrie Henneman Shaw, formerly of the contemporary music group Ensemble Dal Niente, was added; the group remained a quartet but retained its original name, reasoning that "Quartz" did not fit well. The group has sometimes been billed as Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble. In 2014, the Quince Ensemble released its debut album, Realign the Time. It followed that up with Hushers in 2017, which appeared on the New Focus label; that album was positively reviewed by Opera News, which dubbed the group the "Anonymous 4 of new music" (referring to a famed early music quartet). After several years based in Chicago, the ensemble moved its headquarters to Minnesota's Twin Cities area, where several of its members are active. The Quince Ensemble has appeared widely in the U.S. and abroad, generally performing at events oriented toward contemporary music, such as the SONiC Festival in New York, the Outpost Concert Series at the University of California, Riverside, and the KODY Festival in Lublin, Poland. The group has performed music by both giants of contemporary music, such as Steve Reich and Morton Feldman, and rising figures, such as Jennifer Jolly, Kate Soper, and Missy Mazzoli; it launched the Quince New Music Commissioning Fund in 2019, aiming to increase the repertory available to women and treble singers. The Quince Ensemble has collaborated with such major contemporary music groups as Eighth Blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, and Ensemble Dal Niente, as well as avant-garde rock performer Laurie Anderson. The group released the album Motherland on New Focus in 2018, moving to Innova in 2021 for David Lang's love fail. The Quince Ensemble planned an all-download release, This a Changin' World, for 2024.
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