ABOUT
Nathan is a two-time GRAMMY Award-winning composer and violist of the Attacca Quartet. Nathan has collaborated, in the studio and on stage, with many of the great artists of today including Björk, James Blake, Sting, David Crosby, Becca Stevens, David Byrne, Just Blaze, Itzhak Perlman, and others. Nathan is a PhD student in composition at Princeton University and an Honorary Ambassador to the city of Chuncheon, South Korea.
Nathan has released two solo records of his own compositions, Nearsided and Oak and the Ghost, on Better Company Records and New Amsterdam Records, respectively. As a member of Attacca, Schram has released records on Sony Classical, GroundUP Music, Nonesuch, and New Amsterdam Records. Attacca’s records, Orange and Evergreen, won GRAMMY Awards for Best Chamber Music Performance in 2020 and 2023. His arrangement of Radiohead’s 2 + 2 = 5 written for Becca Stevens and Attacca Quartet was also nominated at the 2023 GRAMMY Awards.
Apart from performing, Nathan is the Founder and Artistic Director of Musicambia. Founded in 2013, Musicambia develops music education programs and performances inside prisons and jails throughout the United States. As a deep believer in prison abolition and the irrepressible power of music, Musicambia strives to humanize the criminal legal system of the United States.
ATTACCA QUARTET
The GRAMMY Award-winning Attacca Quartet is one of the most dynamic ensembles of their generation. Praised by The Strad for possessing “maturity beyond its members’ years,” they were formed at the Juilliard School in 2003 and made their professional debut in 2007 as part of the Artists International Winners Series in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. From 2011-2013 they served as the Juilliard Graduate Resident String Quartet, and for the 2014-2015 season they were selected as the Quartet in Residence by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As stated by The Washington Post, “Mastery like this is scarce enough in quartets that have played together for decades.”
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UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
Musicambia is a domestic initiative to bring a long-term, intensive, musical instrument curriculum to the prisons and jails of the United States. Musicambia is inspired by the virtues and immense success of Venezuela’s Fundación Musical Simón Bolivar, or El Sistema, which promotes, throughout the country, the symphony orchestra as a perfect analog for a functional society.
In the past 8 years El Sistema has been bringing this profound idea of music as a means for social change to incarcerated communities of their country. In October 2013 I was invited by El Sistema to be the first American to take a tour of the Venezuelan Prisons where their musical programs take place.
PRESS
"A viola solo that sounded almost devotional with its liquid intensity."
"We’re living in a golden age of string quartets...It’s hard to disagree when you hear the vibrant young players in New York’s Attacca Quartet."
“They may be a relatively young ensemble, but already they come very close to epitomizing the string quartet ideal...Mastery like this is scarce enough in quartets that have played together for decades.”
Photo by Shervin Lainez
I would love to help you with your recordings. Apart from performing classical music I have written and recorded string arrangements for a wide range of artists for well over 10 years. I am flexible working remotely in my home studio as well as in professional studios around NYC. Click below for more info!