Your donation of any amount helps support The Overlook’s activities, including collaborations, community outreach, and helping us to travel further afield sharing the repertoire about which we are deeply passionate. We just need your support to make it all happen!

With our deep gratitude,
- Monica, Ravenna, Angela and Laura

About Us:

The “breathtaking,” “paradigm-shifting” (New York Music Daily) quartet The Overlook is a unifying, community-building force, whose dedication to a more representative musical tradition reverberates throughout their industry.

The quartet has recently been heard live in New York City at Lincoln Center, United Palace, Kaufman Music Center, and Wave Hill, in a virtual performance presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art that has been streamed nearly 70,000 times, further afield in Montauk, Bethesda, MD and Albuquerque, NM, and countless other performances since its inception in June 2020.

The Overlook formed from a simple need to make and share music with others during the pandemic shutdown. The longtime friends, some of New York’s most accomplished string players, gathered to play outdoors in parks and on street corners in upper Manhattan, and their community stopped to listen. Through these casual outdoor performances, they built a following in person and on social media, connected with local businesses and residential enclaves, and partnered with important neighborhood cultural centers for their first official performances. They witnessed firsthand the power of music to unite and inspire - all without playing a single note of the string quartet repertoire that has been held up as “standard” for hundreds of years.

In less than two years, the quartet has built a body of repertoire that includes both masterworks from the past by Florence Price, Samuel-Coleridge-Taylor, and Chevalier de Saint-Georges, as well as new works by living composers Trevor Weston (who re-dedicated his piece “Juba” to the ensemble), Eleanor Alberga, Carlos Simon, Jessie Montgomery, Shelley Washington, Leila Adu, Daniel Bernard Roumain and many more. To support their work, the quartet has been awarded grants by the Eastman School of Music, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Bronx Council on the Arts and Local 802’s Music Performance Trust Fund.

Through active collaborations with some of the most vital composers and creators of our time, building relationships with composers and championing new work, re-thinking the concert experience to include nontraditional spaces, mindful meditation and more, and engaging with communities, The Overlook upholds its mission to create a more representative and relevant musical practice.

The Overlook:

Violinists Monica Davis and Ravenna Lipchik

Violist Angela Pickett

Cellist Laura Metcalf

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By The Overlook

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Team Members