Friction Quartet, lauded for performances described as "terribly beautiful" (San Francisco Classical Voice), "stunningly passionate" (Calgary Herald), and "exquisitely skilled" (ZealNYC), is dedicated to modernizing the chamber music experience and expanding the string quartet repertoire. The quartet achieves its mission by commissioning cutting-edge composers, curating imaginative concert programs, collaborating with diverse artists, and engaging in interactive educational outreach.

Friction made their debut at Carnegie Hall in 2016 as participants in the Kronos Quartet Fifty for the Future Workshop. They returned in March of 2018 to perform George Crumb’s Black Angels as part of “The 60’s” festival and their performance was described as, “one of the truest and most moving things I’ve ever heard or seen.” (Zeal NYC)

Since forming in 2011, Friction has commissioned 43 works for string quartet and given world premiere performances of more than 80 works. They developed the Friction Commissioning Initiative in 2017 as a way to work together with their audience to fund specific commissions. The $14,000 raised to date has helped Friction commission a total of 12 new works, including six by young composers between the ages 16 and 21. They were awarded a 2019 Intermusic SF Musical Grant to develop a participatory educational program with composer Danny Clay that is designed to be accessible and sensory-friendly. The project is slated to premiere in the Fall of 2020 at the Pomeroy Recreation and Rehabilitation Center in San Francisco. Friction’s past grants include a grant from Chamber Music America that was used to commission a piano quintet from Andy Akiho, which debuted in November 2016, as well as project grants from Intermusic SF and Zellerbach Family Foundation supporting special projects involving the performance of commissioned works. 

While Friction has garnered international attention as commissioners and interpreters of new music, they are also devoted to performing masterworks of the string quartet repertoire at the highest level. They won Second Prize in the 2016 Schoenfeld Competition, they were quarter-finalists in the 2015 Fischoff Competition and placed second at the 2015 Frances Walton Competition

Friction has held residencies at the New Music for Strings Festival in Denmark, Interlochen Arts Camp, Lunenburg Academy of Music in Nova Scotia, Napa Valley Performing Arts Center, Old First Concerts, San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, and was the first ensemble in residence at the Center for New Music. 

Friction Quartet is dedicated to building new audiences for contemporary music through interactive musical enrichment programs. They are participating for the third consecutive year in the San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music program, visiting over 60 public schools annually.  They are Ensemble Partners with Young Composers & Improvisors Workshop, workshopping and premiering new works written by young composers in the Bay Area. They have also given presentations at Oakland public schools through KDFC’s Playground Pop Up program. In collaboration with Meridian Hill Pictures, they created a short documentary, titled Friction, that profiles their early educational outreach in Washington DC’s Mundo Verde Public Charter School. Their presentations regularly utilize Doug’s adventurous arrangements of Pop songs alongside excerpts from standard string quartet repertoire to help young audiences build connections to musical concepts. 

Friction appears on recordings with National Sawdust Tracks, Innova Records, Albany Records, Pinna Records, and many independent releases. They released their full-length debut album, resolve, in 2018 through Bandcamp. Friction has appeared on radio stations such as NPR, KALW, KING-FM, and KUT, among others.

Friction’s video of the second movement of First Quartet by John Adams was named the #2 video of the year in 2015 by Second Inversion. John Adams shared this video on his own homepage and called it “spectacular.” Their video for Andy Akiho’s In/ Exchange, featuring Friction and Akiho, was also chosen by Second Inversion for their Top 5 videos of 2016. The video was also featured on American Public Media’s Performance Today. 

Friction Quartet takes risks to enlarge the audience’s understanding of what a string quartet can be using arrangements of pop music, digital processing, percussion, amplification, movement, and additional media. Their multimedia and interdisciplinary projects have received critical acclaim. In 2017 they produced Spaced Out, an evening-length suite of music about the cosmos that utilizes surround sound electronics and includes a Friction Commission written by Jon Kulpa.  The San Francisco Classical Voice called it “accessible, yet surreal.” No matter where their musical exploration takes them, they never lose sight of the string quartet’s essence– the timeless and endlessly nuanced interaction of four analog voices.

Jamael Smith is a performer and educator based in San Francisco. They are a member of San Francisco Contemporary Players, Quinteto Latino, the conductorless chamber orchestra One Found Sound and Avenue Winds. They have performed and recorded with the San Francisco Symphony and also perform regularly with Bay Area ensembles like the Santa Rosa Symphony, California Symphony, Opera Parallèle, Eco Ensemble and many others.

An advocate for music being written now, Jamael has premiered the works of artists including Meredith Monk, John Adams, and Herbert Mells. Dedicated to education, Smith has been a teaching artist for San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music program as well as the many education initiatives that Quinteto Latino services. They have attended summer festivals such as the Kent Blossom Summer Festival and the Pierre Monteux Festival. They completed graduate studies with Stephen Paulson and have also studied with Seth Krimsky and Bill Buchman. Jamael joined the San Francisco Contemporary Players in 2023.

Samuel Adams (b. 1985) is an American composer. Gramophone Magazine praised Adams as “among the most interesting composers of the millennial generation in his negotiation of the tensions that shape and define his musical narratives: between directness and implication, silence and resonance, emotion and its aftermath.”

Adams’s music has been hailed as “mesmerizing” by The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle, “transcendent” by The Chicago Tribune, and “beguiling” by The Strad magazine. He has been commissioned by a number of major ensembles, including the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and The Living Earth Show. He has also collaborated with many of today's leading artists, such as conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, Michael Tilson Thomas, Karina Canellakis, and David Robertson; pianists Conor Hanick, Emanuel Ax, Sarah Cahill, and Joyce Yang; and violinists Karen Gomyo, Anthony Marwood, and Jennifer Koh.

Adams’s orchestral work No Such Spring, commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony for pianist Conor Hanick and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, premiered in February 2023 to widespread acclaim. The Wall Street Journal described it as “bewitching… a major work as appealing as it is thought-provoking, and as heartfelt as it is inventive.” The San Francisco Chronicle called it “ingenious… a marvel… Adams’ formal logic is not only impeccable but accessible. You can feel the landscape becoming broader deep in your innards.” Musical America praised it as “scintillating and gloriously expansive… at once ingratiating, inventive, and structurally ambitious,” adding that No Such Spring is “one of those new works that leaves a listener wanting to hear it all over again right away.”

The 2025–26 season features a number of premieres and notable performances. A new work for the Marmen Quartet and percussionist Dominique Vleeshouwers will premiere at Het Muziekgebouw as part of the Amsterdam String Quartet Biennial, in an evening titled Time is How You Spend Your Love alongside Adams’s Sundial and works by Feldman, Miller, and Beethoven. Adams’s song cycle First Work—featuring poetry by Pádraig Ó Tuama, Malachi Black, and Tracy K. Smith—will receive its world premiere at the Aspen Music Festival, followed by performances from co-commissioners Oberlin Conservatory, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the USC Thornton School of Music.

In October 2025, Other Minds will present a portrait concert of Adams’s chamber works, showcasing some of his closest collaborations with pianists Conor Hanick and Sarah Cahill, violinist Helen Kim, Friction Quartet, and percussionist Haruka Fujii. Later in the fall, pianist Conor Hanick will give the world premiere of the complete, revised Impromptus at the Kaufman Center in New York City.

Adams will also be a featured artist with the Berkeley Symphony, with a marquee performance of his Chamber Concerto featuring violinist Helen Kim, and as curator of a chamber concert spotlighting percussionist Haruka Fujii. In the spring of 2026, a new recording of Adams’s third string quartet, commissioned and performed by the Alma Quartet, will be released on Challenge Classics.

As a committed educator, Adams regularly collaborates with young musicians. In 2015, he helped establish the Civic Orchestra New Music Workshop with the Negaunee Institute of Music, a program for emerging composers. He was also in residence with the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America in 2014, where he composed a work premiered under the baton of David Robertson. Adams has written two works for The Crowden School in Berkeley, CA, where he continues to mentor students.

Adams served as Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2015 to 2018 and as Composer-in-Residence with Het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam during the 2021-22 season. He has held residencies at Civitella Ranieri (Umbria, Italy), Music Academy of the West (Santa Barbara, CA), Spoleto Festival (Charleston, SC), Djerassi Resident Artists Program (California, USA), Ucross (Wyoming, USA), and the Visby International Centre for Composers (Gotland, Sweden). Adams lives and works in Seattle, WA.

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Marcelo Nisinman is an international composer and master performer of bandoneon. He currently resides in Basel, Switzerland.

He studied bandoneon with Julio Pane and composition with Guillermo Graetzer in Buenos Aires and Detlev Müller-Siemens in Basel Musik Akademie, Switzerland.

Marcelo Nisinman, as renown bandoneon soloist, performed with Martha Argerich, Gidon Kremer, Gary Burton, Fernando Suarez Paz, Assad Brothers, the WDR Big Band, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Belgrad, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Charles Dutoit & the Luzerner Simfoniorchester among others.
Composer in Residence in different Music Festivals as the Oxford Chamber Music Festival in 2008 and has been invited as Composer and Performer in the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival Finland, the Boswil Festival in Switzerland, the Stift Festival in Holland, the Obertöne Kammermusik Festival in Austria, Festival du Jura in Switzerland, the Zeitkunst Festival in Berlin and in Paris as in Sonoro Festival in Bucarest, Romania.

Nisinman has also composed a number of Orchestral works that includes the Bandoneon as «Dark Blue Tango» (Ricordi Editions) premiered in its small chamber version by Orchestra Musiques des Lumieres and in its full orchestra version by Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional Argentina, both premieres conducted by Facundo Agudin.

He collaborates constantly both as composer & performer in different musical projects and recordings with Daniel Rowland, Diana Ketler, Alberto Mesirca, Julia Schroeder, Anna Fedorova, Natacha Kudritskaya, Chen Halevi, Maja Bogdanovic, Felix Froschahmmer, Gareth Lubbe, Philippe Graffin, Helena Winkelman, Rui Lopes, Zoran Markovic, Alfredo Perl & the Baltic Neopolis Orchestra among others.

Taylor Joshua Rankin (b. 1991) is a filmmaker and composer of new music based in Los Angeles, CA.

Taylor’s music exists within the trend of contemporary classical composers who draw upon a depth of influences such as minimalism, avant-rock, experimental, micropolyphony, and tintinnabulation, inside of and extending beyond the world of new music. Taylor’s joy in making music is to express a sort of emotional zenith with sounds of a dense and undulating world, existing in a space between gossamer and cacophony.

Taylor Joshua Rankin is a 2025 Macdowell Fellowship recipient as well as a 2026 Yaddo artist residency recipient, and was recently named a finalist for the 2024 Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab and for the 2024 I-Park Composers + Musicians Collaborative Residency with Hub New Music.

Taylor finds a strong harmony between the composition process and the process of filmmaking. His collaborators include professionals that have worked on projects for Lucasfilm, Pixar, Disney, Universal, Paramount, Marvel, and the independent film scenes in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Taylor’s films have garnered a wide array of acclaim and festival praise.

Taylor’s recent short film The Snow Leopard has won multiple awards for its directing and original music, and has screened at film festivals including the 24th Beverly Hills Film Festival®. It also ranked in FilmShortage’s top 10 short films of 2024.

Taylor's music has been performed by ensembles across the United States, such as Grammy award winning ensemble Third Coast Percussion, The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and Friction Quartet.

Taylor's music has been programmed by the Hear Now Music Festival in Los Angeles, Current's concert series in Chicago, the Eastman School of Music, New York University, the University of Michigan, University of North Florida, University of Kentucky School of Music, Shenandoah University in Virginia, Pittsburg State University, the Tutti Festival at Denison University, Composers Inc., the Presidio Club, The San Francisco Conservatory of Music Orchestra, Abchordis Ensemble, California State University East Bay, Stolen Time Ensemble, and PoP Up Magazine’s 2018 season in DC, NY, LA, Portland, Toronto, and Chicago, as well as the 2016, 2017, and 2018 Hot Air Music Festivals.

Along with being a composer, Taylor also works in post-production as a creative video editor for some of the top orchestras in the country. While at the San Francisco Symphony, Taylor cut the digital Soundbox concerts for Nico Muhly, Julia Bullock, Essa-Pekka Salonen, Claire Chase, Destiny Muhammad, and Jeremy Denk, as well as Nico Muhly’s Throughline, and Ligeti’s Clocks & Clouds and Ramifications. Recently, Taylor worked with famed London-based opera director Netia Jones on an hour long, multimedia, narrative, concert-film of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale.

Alex Ross of the New Yorker Magazine has written of Taylor’s creative editing work for the SF Symphony as “an astounding feat of editing”. Taylor’s work for the San Francisco Symphony has been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the SF Chronicle and SF Classical Voice, and has led to a Grammy Nomination for the SF Symphony (Muhly, Throughline). Other notable clients include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The New World Symphony where he worked with world renowned conductor and artistic director Michael Tilson Thomas, and Berkeley Symphony.

Taylor recently received an honorable mention for his piece Touch/Still for cello and piano, by the Charles Ives Concert Series in Danbury, Connecticut. Taylor’s piece Half Light, was performed by Third Coast Percussion at the Tutti Festival in Denison University, Ohio, in March of 2019, and in Chicago at Constellation for their annual Currents concert series.

In 2010, during Taylor's undergraduate studies with Dr. Frank La Rocca, Taylor was awarded the annual Glen Glasow Fellowship Award for his overall body of work, and commissioned to produce a piano trio for the Redshift Ensemble. In 2015, Taylor was accepted on scholarship to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to pursue his Masters Degree in Music Composition under the apprenticeship of Grammy award winning composer, Mason Bates.

Mason Bates has praised Taylor as having a “great ear for harmony and texture”, and demonstrating “strong and compelling skills”. In 2016 Taylor began serving as a producer for the 2017 Hot Air Music Festival, a day long marathon of new music that operates annually at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In March of 2017 Taylor was awarded second place in the coveted Highsmith Orchestral Composition competition for his three movement work for orchestra: California Nocturnes.

In 2018 Taylor joined the list of composers for Pop-Up Magazine, an organization that tells stories with musical accompaniment live on tour across the country, performed by members of Magik*Magik Orchestra. With Pop-Up, Taylor has written and arranged music for storytellers such as Song Exploder’s Hrishikesh Hirway and film composer Jeff Beal.

Recently, Taylor worked on a series of transcriptions with composer Ted Herne, for an opera by Damon Davis currently being workshopped by the new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound.

In 2019 Taylor self-released his debut album of chamber compositions, titled Palettes. Comprised of 6 pieces, the debut album is a blend of mixed-genre, contemporary-classical music with post-minimalist influences, ranging from acoustic to electro-acoustic works for chamber groups.

Taylor’s newest album Sun, Will Grow (released in 2023) mixes complex acoustic writing of varied instrumentation while pushing the electronic and sonic capabilities of the modern recording studio. The album is part instrumental Contemporary-Classical music, part ambient, part electronic, and is chock-full of all sorts of processed sounds and evocative imagery. Taylor had the pleasure of collaborating with renowned collage artist Najeebah Al-Ghadban on a full series of collage art for each individual track on the album. Sun, Will Grow has garnered a wide array of accolades and press across the United States and overseas.

Taylor studied composition with Dr. Frank La Rocca (composer in Residence for the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music) and earned a M.M. degree in Composition from The San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he studied with composer Mason Bates.

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Taylor now calls Los Angeles his home.

Juri Seo (b. 1981.12.31) is a Korean-born American composer based in Princeton, New Jersey. She seeks to write music that encompasses extreme contrast through compositions that are unified and fluid, yet complex. She merges many of the fascinating aspects of music from the past century—in particular its expanded timbral palette and unorthodox approach to structure—with a deep love of functional tonality, counterpoint, and classical form. With its fast-changing tempi and dynamics, her music explores the serious and the humorous, the lyrical and the violent, the tranquil and the obsessive. She hopes to create music that loves, that makes a positive change in the world—however small—through the people who are willing to listen.

Her composition honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and the Andrew Imbrie Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, the Ilshin Composer Prize, and the Otto Eckstein Fellowship from Tanglewood. She has received commissions from prominent organizations including the Fromm Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Goethe Institut, and Tanglewood. She has released four portrait albums: Obsolete Music with the New Amsterdam Records, Toy Store with Carrier Records, and Mostly Piano and Respiri with Innova Recordings. She holds a D.M.A. (Dissertation: Jonathan Harvey's String Quartets, 2013) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she studied with Reynold Tharp. She is Professor of Music at Princeton University.

Juri lives in Lawrenceville, just outside of Princeton, with her husband, percussionist Mark Eichenberger and a little mutt named Roman.

*Note on pronunciation: In North America, my name is pronounced [Jew-ri Suh].