This fall, the Detroit-based Akropolis Reed Quintet will enter into its 16th season with all five of its founding members: oboist Tim Gocklin, clarinetist Kari Landry, saxophonist Matt Landry, bass clarinetist Andrew Koeppe, and bassoonist Ryan Reynolds. These days, it’s not so often one encounters the phrase “chart-topping” on the same line as an ardent champion of contemporary classical music, particularly one with non-standard instrumentation and a strong dedication to remaining unbound by categorization.
Nonetheless, in April 2024 Akropolis landed at #2 on the Classical Billboard Charts with their sixth studio album, Are We Dreaming the Same Dream? The album, which features the work of Grammy nominated jazz composer and pianist Pascal Le Boeuf and drummer Christian Euman, feels like a perfect synthesis of Akropolis’ genre-obscuring sensibilities, with jazz-influenced language and instrumentation.
Based in Detroit, Akropolis plays a prominent role in its community as an educator, with numerous residencies in area high schools, a summer music festival called Together We Sound, and a 10-day mentorship and artist training program called The Akropolis Chamber Music Institute. The group has attracted numerous prizes including the 2015 Fischoff Educator Award and seven consecutive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In the 2024-25 season, Akropolis will continue to navigate this groove of excellence with ongoing residencies and performances in universities and venues ranging from Petroskey, MI to Los Alamos, NM and as far north as Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The ensemble’s success in funding also presses forward with a matching grant of $75,000 from Paul M. Angell Family Foundation that will spur substantial organizational growth and sustainability.
Akropolis Reed Quintet — Photo by Jason Walker
Looking back at the earliest steps Akropolis took toward coming together as an ensemble, how did your sense of adventure and innovation start to take shape?
Akropolis really began right away fostering imagination, artistic growth, fun, and friendship among the five of us. It’s hard to believe after forming in 2009 as undergraduates at the University of Michigan, Akropolis is still made up of our five original members 15 years later. But as soon as we started playing together, we had an inkling Akropolis was something special. We were all driven by really great music making, but beyond that, we felt connected to going on this adventure together.
Looking back on those early years, we must have had that perfect mix of young and over adventurous, because on paper, we had a lot of obstacles to overcome. The reed quintet was still an unknown instrumentation and there was very little music available to us. This need is actually what drove us in the beginning. We were so motivated to make the reed quintet into a modern staple within classical music, and we wanted to be the people to do it. Right away, we began commissioning our fellow students, putting on concerts, playing in schools, fundraising, recording, publishing music, and doing competitions. Our innovation and sense of adventure was born out of not only necessity, but a magnetizing shared goal that was bigger than ourselves.
Your non-standard instrumentation, including saxophone and bass clarinet, offers a wonderful palette of sonorities, but doesn’t necessarily lend itself to canonical repertoire. Was the creation of new music with living composers always at the core of the group’s ambition?
Yes! From the beginning, Akropolis has always felt like this little factory for experimentation and artistic exploration. Even our very first album released in 2012, High Speed Reed, was made up of all original music. Not having a classical canonical repertoire may seem daunting or limiting, but it was such a blessing for us. It forced us to figure out who we were as artists and made collaboration with living composers the beating heart of our ensemble. Working with composers who are alive today truly means you can make art that reflects our world. Because of this, we’ve not only been able to commission over 150 works for the reed quintet, but we’ve been able to make music that has involved small business owners, metal fabricators, scientists, authors, historians, singers, dancers, Detroit high school students, jazz artists, poets, and countless other instrumentalists and ensembles. This makes everything we do feel personal, and that’s because we work with people we care about.
I loved listening to Are We Dreaming the Same Dream?, particularly the inference of jazz-like spontaneity and improvisation in the drums and piano. Were there any improvised moments, and how involved was the ensemble in adapting this language to your performance practice?
Thank you! This album is something we’re exceedingly proud of and took many years of planning before we were finally able to release it this past April. Are We Dreaming The Same Dream? is a 60 minute album of a hybrid ensemble comprised of Akropolis, pianist/composer Pascal Le Boeuf, and drummer Christian Euman that blurs the lines between classical, jazz, and contemporary music. The album is an examination of what Ralph Ellison calls “the unity of American experience,” where composer Pascal Le Boeuf deconstructs the fabric of his American experience by recognizing the strands of his musical DNA—Geri Allen, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, and Leonard Bernstein.
It’s truly a tour-de-force of a composition and an artistic project that stretched the seven of us to new heights artistically. There is beautifully composed material that weaves seamlessly in and out of improvised passages by Pascal and Christian. Pascal and Christian had worked together on several other projects, but when the two of them got together for this record, it was just pure magic. While some of what the quintet is doing may sound improvised, Akropolis is performing Le Boeuf’s composition “by the ink” on the whole record, with only a few improvisatory passages for the winds. To make this all feel and sound so organic, we spent a great deal of time with Pascal in the workshopping phase of the composition. He came out to Detroit, MI and we tried many small fragments and ideas to see what felt and sounded the absolute best. We love doing in-depth grunt work like this with our composers and collaborators, as this is really the secret sauce for getting the best out of everyone we work with.
Your celebrated education initiatives range from high school composition workshops to residencies at prestigious universities. Is there any contrast in your approach between these settings and the values you impart?
We’ve always seen young people as collaborators. They have an amazing and different skill set and we don’t look at them as less trained or less experienced. Quite the opposite; we see them as very trained and experienced in their own way of looking at the world. This is why we love working with students everywhere and find that some of our most meaningful music making comes from collaborating with students.
For example, Akropolis has been In-Residence at three high schools in Detroit since 2017—Cass Technical High School, Detroit School of Arts, and M.L.K., Jr. Sr. High School — where we visit each school around 20 times throughout the year and work with 10-20 students to compose music. This has resulted in over 50 of the most fun and creative works you could imagine, and our YouTube recordings of these pieces have helped several students go on to pursue music and music composition in college.
Our goal with all of our educational initiatives is to have this level of depth and impact no matter if we come across a student once or 100 times. Even if we are only working with a music entrepreneurship or chamber music class at a university once, we want to be as present, candid, and as encouraging as possible. We think this boils down to transparency and being really open and honest about our own journey, helping budding artists see that success cannot be defined by anyone else but ourselves. We’ve found this rings true no matter if you’re in third grade or 30 years old.
Northern Lights at the Third Akropolis Chamber Music Institute, 2024 — Courtesy of artist
You’ve got an exciting and busy season lined up! Are there any new music collaborations that stand out and excite you the most? What can we expect beyond 2025 from Akropolis?
We are super excited for our 24/25 season! We kicked it off with a 5-day residence at Bravo! Vail and our third Akropolis Chamber Music Institute in Petoskey, MI. We’re not sure if we can promise it next summer (haha), but on the last day of our institute, our participants were treated to a stunning display of the Northern lights.
Concert highlights throughout the year include performances for ORCMA Chamber Music Series, Calgary Pro Musica, Shenandoah New Music, Chamber Music in Yellow Springs, Los Alamos Concert Association (LACA), and RED NOTE New Music Festival. We’ll also be performing Are We Dreaming the Same Dream? at both the Patricia Valian Reser Center in OR and Williams Center for the Arts in PA, in addition to residencies at University of Calgary, Shenandoah University, University of Michigan, Lafayette College, The Colburn School, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Tennessee Knoxville, and University of Oregon.
We’re also excited to be sharing new world premieres by Harriet Steinke, Ryan Lindveit, Jonathan Newman, and performances of recent commissions by Augusta Read Thomas, Derrick Skye, Stephanie Ann Boyd, Omar Thomas, and Oswald Huỳnh.
As far as what you can expect from Akropolis beyond 2025?! We have some very exciting large-scale commissions in the works for 2026-2028, and hope to continue releasing as much of this new music as we can, with our 7th album on the way in 2025/2026. Lastly, thanks to a $75,000 matching challenge grant from the Paul M. Angell Family Foundation for significant organizational growth, we recently hired our first non-quintet staff member, Operations and Development Manager Deanna Sirkot, marking another milestone in the Akropolis’ 16th season.
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