Austin Wulliman: violin - performance - collaboration - instruction

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Violinist, composer and educator Austin Wulliman embodies the imagined and empathizes with the absurd through sounds both familiar and radical, telling stories with a limitless passion for tuning cries from every corner of the human capacity to hear. He is a member of JACK Quartet, called “the nation’s most important quartet” by the New York Times and has been praised as a “gifted, adventuresome violinist” by the Chicago Tribune. Through in-depth collaboration with performers and composers working in a panoply of aesthetic realms, Austin searches daily for the violin’s voice in today’s musical world.

As violinist in the JACK Quartet, Austin has played in such renowned venues as Wigmore Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Elbphilharmonie, Carnegie Hall, and the Wiener Konzerthaus, and featured on such festivals as Tanglewood, Ojai, Spoleto, Lucerne, and Foro Internacional de Música in Mexico City. Work with JACK has included premieres by John Luther Adams, Chaya Czernowin, Philip Glass, Georg Friedrich Haas, Clara Iannotta, George Lewis, Tyshawn Sorey and John Zorn, as well as collaborating with the likes of Barbara Hannigan, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Helmut Lachenmann, Igor Levit, Julia Wolfe, and leading a chamber orchestra of members of the Berlin Philharmonic. He has received awards from Musical America (“2019 Ensemble of the Year” JACK Quartet), University of Michigan’s “Emerging Artist Award”, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse Kranichstein Prize (with Ensemble Dal Niente, 2012), the 2022 Fromm Foundation Prize, and was presented with Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2019.

Equally in demand as an educator, Austin serves on faculty at the Mannes School of Music, where JACK is Quartet in Residence. Austin teaches a malleable violin technique in the service of a wide variety of musical goals, from virtuosic solo repertoire, to improvisation, and the refined set of tools needed to be a chamber music in today’s musical climate. He has taught violin and musicianship on faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Lucerne Festival Academy, New Music on the Point in Vermont, as well as the University of Chicago. Additionally, he has given guest instruction and master classes at such institutions as the Curtis Institute, Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, New World Symphony, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan.

Austin’s debut album as composer The News From Utopia was released in 2023 on the Bright Shiny Thing Label, which Austin wrote, recorded and mixed himself. His works have been performed in concert with pianist Conrad Tao at Miller Theater, by guitarist Alec Goldfarb at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse and Brooklyn’s Roulette Intermedium, and frequently by JACK Quartet. With JACK, his works have been performed at such venues as the Melbourne Recital Centre, Carnegie Hall Summer Stage, Lincoln Center, and the Pierre Boulez Saal with upcoming performances at Wigmore Hall, the Pittsburgh Microtonal Music Festival, and Musikkollegium Winterthur, among others.

Performing Xenakis at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. Photo credit Caroline Bittencourt.

He first forged his reputation in Chicago with the collective Ensemble Dal Niente, serving as the group’s Program Director and helping build its artist-driven culture. With Dal Niente he collaborated with composers such as Brian Ferneyhough and completed recording projects with the band Deerhoof in music of Marcos Balter. Austin has performed with Dal Niente at such venues as Harvard University and Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, Chicago. As an ensemble player, Austin has also been a guest artist with groups such as Eighth Blackbird, The Knights, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNow Ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and has led the Lucerne Festival Academy’s Orchestra as concertmaster under the baton of Heinz Holliger and Matthias Pintscher and section leader in a performance of Berio’s Sinfonia with Pierre Boulez conducting.

As soloist, he has performed Kaija Saariaho’s concerto “Graal Theatre” with the Aspen Festival and Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensembles, as well as collaborating with the composer on the American Premiere of her “Calices” for violin and piano. He recently recorded Elliot Carter’s infamous Duo for Violin and Piano for the Library of Congress with keyboard luminary Conrad Tao, with whom he also premiered his own Insurgentes Sur at Miller Theater. Austin has premiered violin concerti by Chris Fisher-Lochhead and Kirsten Broberg, as well as collaborating closely on solo pieces by composers Augusta Read Thomas and Lee Hyla, two essential mentoring voices in his early years in Chicago. His debut solo release, “Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight” was released in 2014. The album is a concert-length collaboration with the composer-improviser Katherine Young, using 4 scordatura and prepared violins and a viola in conversation with 8-channel electronics and a chamber orchestra. Wulliman worked closely with Young from the creation of materials to the completion of the work, including traditional notation and improvised material.

Austin was also a founding member of Spektral Quartet, serving as Ensemble in Residence (as well as Adjunct Instructor of Violin) at the University of Chicago from 2011-2016. Exploring both the classical string quartet repertoire beginning with Haydn and organizing a robust commissioning program, he also explored contemporary jazz styles with artists such as Miguel Zenon and Billy Childs. With Spektral Quartet, he has performed on series such as the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor and BargeMusic as well as giving educational residencies at the New World Symphony and Stanford University.

Austin received his Bachelor’s Degree summa cum laude from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Aaron Berofsky. He was an endowed scholar and assistant to Blair Milton at Northwestern University, where he earned his M.Mus. Further studies took Austin to the Lucerne Festival Academy and the Aspen Music Festival Fellowship in Contemporary Music, where he also studied privately with Paul Kantor.