Bergamot Quartet is an NYC-based string quartet dedicated to the evolution of chamber music. They are sought-after interpreters of contemporary music who are expanding the definition of the string quartet genre by leveraging their skills as a classically trained ensemble with their enthusiasm for learning from and adapting to creative artists across a variety of genres. Bergamot maintains a full schedule of collaborations, residencies with educational institutions, appearances on series, recording sessions, and self-produced shows.
Bergamot recently launched “Project Resonance” with composer/performer Dan Trueman, a multi-tiered project fostering the creation and performance of new works for Bergamot playing a set of Hardanger instruments (traditional Scandinavian 9-stringed folk instruments). As educators, Bergamot serves on faculty at New Music On The Point and Arts Letters and Numbers Creative Music Intensive. They also operate the monthly concert series “Bergamot Quartet Extended” as a medium to showcase their many inspiring collaborators and present new work.
Based in New York City, Bergamot Quartet is Ledah Finck and Sarah Thomas, violins; Martine Thomas, viola; and Irène Han, cello. Bergamot Quartet was the inaugural Graduate String Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music 2020-2022, where they were mentored by the JACK Quartet.
Bio
Eli Greenhoe is a composer, producer, conductor and guitarist from Brooklyn, New York. His works have been commissioned and performed by loadbang, Ensemble Dal Niente, Bergamot Quartet, and Contemporaneous, among many others. He has received fellowships, residencies, and recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, I-Park, ASCAP, Bang on a Can, Beth Morrison Projects, and Yale University.
As a producer, he collaborates regularly with musicians from a wide variety of traditions. His recent record Orchids (with Hans Bilger) was released on Adhyâropa records in 2025.
Eli is currently a doctoral candidate (ABD) at the Yale School of Music.
Program Note
To be a person in the world, it seems, is to live and wrestle with one’s own contradictions; it is to be a set of opposing internal forces, a knot.
Holdfasts is a large-scale string quartet that lives at the center of those contractions. If we’re all knots, Holdfasts is about the sturdy things we affix ourselves too—ideas that thrill, fascinate, comfort, vex, and obsess us. It is a piece about the ideas that stick in the back of our heads and don’t change, even as we do.
Anchored around a nearly decade-old braid of melody that runs through the length of the work, each movement of the quartet takes as its material musical ideas from the past years of Greenhoe’s life that he couldn’t let go of, yet couldn’t seem to find musical homes for. As it flows through the work’s structure, the melodic braid encounters halls of mirrors, great boiling oceans of microtones, fragments of blues sung through clouds of fireflies, waterfalls rushing upwards towards the stars. The ideas themselves, in encountering these other musical images, begin to warp and dissolve. Sometimes the key to untying a knot is to firs loose it from its anchor.