Discover ancient and forgotten musical instruments, performed by music historians whose
work with instruments seldom seen outside of museums. The magical thing
about Medusa Quartet is that these historians also create the loveliest and most haunting
music with these instruments, and show how the strange and sometimes-dismissed can
intertwine with the ordinary to produce something profound and beautiful.
Medusa Quartet—Saskia Tomkins, Marta Solek, Geo Hathaway, and Lea Kirstein—introduce
instruments with names like knee-fiddle, suka, nyckelharpa, and plock fiddle. These are
instruments found in archaeological digs, museums, and even trash heaps of old. According to
their official website, “Medusa the band aims to [bring back] what has been cast out…they
resurrect…near-forgotten traditional folk fiddles with disreputable connotations, rejected and
[sometimes literally] buried in their home countries of Poland and Sweden.” These
strange-looking instruments play beautifully alongside the more familiar and modern viola,
fiddle, and cello, and conjure up haunting melodies from Ireland, Eastern Europe, the
Mediterranean, Appalachia, and Scandinavia.
The award-winning performers of Medusa Quartet have made it their mission to lift up that
mythical Gorgon Medusa, “wielding a sound that would turn classical music scholars to
stone…Medusa tempts us to redefine what is beautiful.”