Anjelica Lindsey Premieres Oklahoma Woman Quartet at the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, 10/1/25
All photographs by Mark Kuykendall, 10/1/25
About the HISTORIC Premiere
On October 1, 2025, composer and Cherokee Nation citizen Anjelica Lindsey premiered her original orchestrations of Oklahoma Woman Quartet at the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities in Tulsa. The performance, featuring The University of Tulsa’s Hurricane Quartet, marked a historic moment: as of 2025, Lindsey is the first Cherokee woman composer to premiere a string quartet.
The evening brought together Lindsey’s distinct voice as both composer and performer, bridging neo-classical composition and narrative song through a sound world of emotional clarity, cultural reflection, and feminine depth. Drawing from her ongoing body of work Oklahoma Woman, the quartet explores memory, reclamation, and transformation where voice and string ensemble meet in intimate dialogue.
Program Notes courtesy Dr. Daniel Felsenfeld,
The Juilliard School
Anyone who teaches music composition knows that the impact you have is often more akin to a spiritual assist, a sherpa walking the willing up a mountain, a guide for the perplexed who is, themselves, always equally perplexed. Those same people know that there are students who need to be taken back to formula, and then there are others—and those are rare—who have what they need inherently and may just need some calm, smiling egging on.
Anjelica Lindsey is that exact student—arriving virtually in my course at the Juilliard School more fully formed than she imagined.
When it became professionally necessary to take another look at her searchingly beautiful and elegantly forceful song cycle Oklahoma Woman Quartet, my first and best thought was for her to take hold of the piece and rescore it to her own specific vision. The history of music is full of artistic decisions born of practical constraints, and I knew—knew—she could take it on, not a lateral move but an honest iteration of this work the way it was meant to be.
Over the course of several months I watched her fully engage with her own material in a novel way, winding the harmonies and textures into the emotional span of a piece you are about to hear. Every note hers, every note true. Call me a dazzled sherpa.
Program
OKLAHOMA WOMAN QUARTET
by Anjelica Lindsey
I Have a Feeling
I Write So Thunderous
Backwards
Le Final
Remote View
Production Consumption
Go On
Lullaby
Am I a Madman?
The End
Program Credits
OKLAHOMA WOMAN QUARTET
Composed and Arranged by Anjelica Lindsey
Citizen of the Cherokee Nation
World Premiere
October 1, 2025
Oklahoma Center for the Humanities
101 Archer, Tulsa, Oklahoma
Performed by The University of Tulsa’s Hurricane Quartet
Mitchell Kallman – Violin I
Rebekah McCarty – Violin II
Emma Bax – Viola
Ethan McFarland – Cello
Anjelica Lindsey – Voice
Special thanks to The University of Tulsa and the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities for presenting this concert as part of Anjelica Lindsey’s Public Fellowship.
Director, Oklahoma Center for Humanities, Dr. Sean Latham
Associate Director, Oklahoma Center for Humanities, Dr. Nicole Bauer
Videography by Evan Clayburg
Photography & Audio Engineering by Mark Kuykendall
Feather Cape by Jules Daugherty
About the Composer
ANJELICA LINDSEY is a neo-classical composer, violinist, and recording artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her work is rooted in cultural reclamation, language revitalization, and the sonic expression of identity through immersive and emotionally resonant composition.
Lindsey has premiered original works with her Oklahoma Woman Ensemble and developed projects through Wild Mountain Studios, her independent production headquarters. She has presented works in private readings at The Juilliard School and as a guest composer at the University of Tulsa.
In 2025, she became a Public Fellow of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities. Her compositions explore themes of romantic minimalism, cultural memory, and Native storytelling, blending contemporary classical structures with voice, electronics, and lived experience.
Lindsey studied music composition and scoring to picture through The Juilliard School, under the mentorship of Dr. Daniel Felsenfeld. Her early artistic training was guided by Cherokee artist Shan Goshorn, whose teachings continue to shape her creative voice. She is the 2024 recipient of the Artists Creative Fund grant, and is currently developing new works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, and film—including REQUIEM, the first ever composed in the Cherokee language.
