Ghost Quartet

Award-winning composer Dave Malloy presents Ghost Quartet, a new song cycle about love, death, and whiskey. A camera breaks and four friends drink in four interwoven narratives spanning seven centuries: a warped fairy tale about two sisters, a treehouse astronomer and a lazy evil bear; a retelling of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher; a purgatorial intermezzo about Scheherazade and the ghost of Thelonious Monk; and a contemporary fable about a subway murder. Throughout these four stories, two women cross paths, sometimes as strangers, sometimes as sisters, sometimes as lovers, sometimes as mother and daughter. Ghost Quartet is a vibrant theatrical presentation of the ensemble’s debut album, also called Ghost Quartet.

Blurring the line between theater and contemporary music performance, Ghost Quartet will be staged in the round in an intimate setting within The McKittrick Hotel, with the musicians seated amongst the audience. The piece is scored for four voices, cello, guitars, dulcimer, autoharp, piano, keyboards and percussion, and is inspired by murder ballads, doo-wop, angular bebop, Chinese folk, Islamic adhan, and the music of Bernard Herrmann and George Crumb. Ghost Quartet premiered at The Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn in October 2014, to rave reviews.