Anjelica Lindsey Releases Oklahoma Woman Quartet, the First Known String Quartet by a Cherokee Woman Composer
Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Anjelica Lindsey Releases Oklahoma Woman Quartet, the First Known String Quartet by a Cherokee Woman Composer
TULSA, Okla. — Composer, violinist, and recording artist Anjelica Lindsey has released the studio album OKLAHOMA WOMAN QUARTET, now available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Amazon Music UK, YouTube Music, Bandcamp, and all major streaming platforms.
Oklahoma Woman Quartet is recognized as the first string quartet composed by a Cherokee woman. The 45-minute work is an 11-song cycle for string quartet and voice, presented here in its first full studio recording.
Composed and orchestrated by Lindsey, the recording features her as vocalist alongside Ronnamarie Jensen, violin; Paulo Eskitch, violin; Ethan Landis, viola; and Ashley Allison, cello.
The album was recorded at Wild Mountain Studios in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Production, recording, engineering, mixing, and mastering were completed by Mark Kuykendall.
An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Lindsey composes contemporary classical music for chamber ensembles, orchestra, choir, and voice.
The release precedes performances from Oklahoma Woman Quartet at the Good Medicine Indigenous Music Festival in Houston on October 2-3, 2026, where three songs from the cycle will receive their Cherokee-language premiere performed by soprano Lara Lignitz.
An Artist Talk event celebrating the album will be held Wednesday, September 2, 2026 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. at Palomino Books & Music in Tulsa. Lindsey will be joined by producer and engineer Mark Kuykendall and Palomino co-owner Agalisiga "Chuj" Mackey for a conversation about the album, the Cherokee language, and Cherokee music.
Physical editions of Oklahoma Woman Quartet are forthcoming through newly launched YIELD RECORDINGS, an independent label within the Wild Mountain Studios and Unknown Tone Records family. The release will include CD editions in jacket and jewel case formats, as well as traditional black vinyl and a special edition picture disc vinyl release. YIELD RECORDINGS’ mission is “Telling Oklahoma Stories through Sound.”
Album Credits
Violin I Ronnamarie Jensen
Violin II Paulo Eskitch
Viola Ethan Landis
Cello Ashley Allison
Voice Anjelica Lindsey
Recorded August, 2025 at Wild Mountain Studios in Tulsa, Oklahoma
Produced by Anjelica Lindsey
Co-Producer, Engineer, Mix and Mastered by Mark Kuykendall
Copyright, Anjelica Lindsey (All Rights Reserved)
Co-Produced by Carolyn Neal
Co-Produced by Daniel Felsenfeld
Album photography by Western Doughty
Album art by Anjelica Lindsey and Mark Kuykendall
Dedicated to Caleb John Reed
Anjelica Lindsey is a proud citizen of the Cherokee Nation.
YIELD RECORDINGS, Oklahoma Story through Sound
license
Copyright 2025-6 | All rights reserved
Full Resolution Press Images including album cover available at this link.
Album Liner Notes
Oklahoma Woman Quartet is a song cycle for voice and string quartet by Cherokee composer Anjelica Lindsey. At a time when much Western classical music depicting Indigenous subjects emerged from the Indianist movement, comparatively little has been authored by Indigenous composers themselves, and fewer still by Indigenous women. Conceived, composed, orchestrated, notated, and written entirely by Lindsey, the work offers a distinctly feminine Cherokee perspective expressed through the language of contemporary classical music.
Across eleven interconnected songs, Oklahoma Woman Quartet establishes the Oklahoma Woman as a recurring American archetype, one whose journey through work, faith, mortality, and transcendence reflects both personal experience and larger cultural questions. The cycle reflects on life in Oklahoma's Bible Belt, where religion is often presented as solace amid the demands of modern life, while questioning the distance between inherited belief and lived experience. Songs such as I Write So Thunderous confront hypocrisy, while Am I A Madman? explores the disorienting experience of discovering profound spirituality in nature only to have those experiences dismissed by others. Later movements turn toward displacement, grief, and death before concluding with Remote View, an introspective meditation that quietly suggests the spiritual continuity the narrator had sensed all along.
Rather than drawing upon romanticized images of Indigenous identity, Lindsey writes from lived experience. Her music stands within the traditions of Western chamber music while speaking in an unmistakably contemporary voice shaped by a distinctly American inheritance, with family roots in the Cherokee Nation, England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Like many Cherokee families, her own history reflects generations of adaptation and intermarriage, offering a contemporary Cherokee perspective rooted in lived experience rather than historical idealization.
Oklahoma Woman Quartet expands the presence of Indigenous authorship in classical music, contributing a rare and fully realized artistic statement created from the perspective of a Cherokee woman and staking a lasting place for that perspective within the evolving history of the concert tradition.
About Anjelica Lindsey
Anjelica Lindsey is a composer, violinist, recording artist, and enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work is concerned with language revitalization, cultural reclamation, and the sonic expression of identity through contemporary classical music. She has premiered original works with her Oklahoma Woman Ensemble and produced projects through her production headquarters, Wild Mountain Studios. Her work has also been developed through private readings at Juilliard and guest engagements at institutions including the University of Tulsa.
Lindsey is a Voting Member of the Recording Academy. Her projects include the Oklahoma Woman Quartet album and GRAMMY® Award consideration campaign, as well as her Fall 2026 symphonic debut at the Good Medicine Indigenous Music Festival with Houston Cougar Camerata Symphony Orchestra. In 2025, she became the first Cherokee woman composer to premiere a string quartet and was named a Public Fellow of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. She is a 2024 recipient of the Artists Creative Fund grant and a 2026 recipient of the First Peoples Fund Yéego Action grant.
Lindsey studied composition, scoring to picture, and advanced orchestration through Juilliard Extension under the mentorship of Dr. Daniel Felsenfeld. Her childhood studies with renowned Cherokee artist Shan Goshorn helped shape her artistic voice. She continues to develop new works for full orchestra, chamber ensemble, voice, and film, including REQUIEM, believed to be the first requiem composed in the Cherokee language, and Symphony No. 1, believed to be the first full-scale five-movement symphony by a Native American woman composer.
