What’s in a name? Shakespeare’s question throws up all sorts of interesting answers when it comes to classical music ensembles. In many instances, it’s all pretty self-explanatory – the London Symphony Orchestra, for instance, or the Danish String Quartet. Others, such as the Hallé or Britten Sinfonia, name themselves after their founder or another celebrated musical figure.
And then there are those – usually at either the early or contemporary ends of the musical spectrum, for some reason – whose titles are altogether more obscure in origin. Some have a historical explanation, others are more randomly chosen. All catch the eye. Here are 15 of our favourites…
Unusual ensemble names
1 The Nash Ensemble
When Amelia Freedman, a student at the Royal Academy of Music, founded the Nash Ensemble in 1964, one can imagine concert-goers scratching their heads as to which famous musical figure the new group got its name from. Heddle Nash, the great English tenor? Unlikely, given this was a collective of instrumental players. In fact, the answer lay outside the world of music – Freedman took her inspiration from Buckingham Palace and Brighton Pavilion architect John Nash, whose magnificent terraces she used to walk past on her way to the Academy every morning.
2 Ensemble Bash
And then, in 1992, came Ensemble Bash. Ho ho. See what they did there? To be fair, the brand does exactly what it says on the tin – Britain’s Ensemble Bash is a four-person percussion outfit who have made their names commissioning and performing works from right across the world, often in the company of musicians such as pianist Joanna MacGregor and the Hilliard Ensemble. African music has become a speciality, and the players have spent extensive periods studying in Ghana.
3 Bang on a Can All-Stars
You might expect Bang on a Can All-Stars likewise to earn their crust hitting things. As it is, the six-player group, also founded in 1992, consists of just the one percussionist, plus a cellist, clarinettist, guitarist, double bassist and pianist. The All-Stars themselves are an offshoot of the Bang on a Can organisation begun five years earlier by composers Julia Wolfe, David Lang and Michael Gordon, with the aim of bringing contemporary music to new audiences in innovative ways. That name, we are told, is the result of an in-joke between the three founders that arose from making an early grant application.
4 Roomful of Teeth
Of all the parts of our body, the teeth are the longest to survive when we decay,’ explained Brad Wells, founder of Roomful of Teeth, in 2019. ‘I like the idea of the most permanent part of us compared with what we sing, which is gone the moment it is expressed.’ And there you have it. Pearly whites and all, Wells’s vocal ensemble – whose members include Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw – has won plaudits aplenty, plus a Grammy Award of its own, for its innovative approach and exceptional virtuosity.
5 Daniel’s Beard
Daniel’s Beard also went down the facial route for its name. The wonderful whiskers in question belong to Daniel Cottier, the pioneering 19th-century artist and designer of the interior of Cottier’s in Glasgow, where the chamber music group plied its trade, championing under-performed repertoire from the Classical era to the present day. Sadly, those performances appear to no longer take place, with the players recently going their own separate ways, but the artistic genius of the ensemble’s gloriously bushy hero can still be seen throughout Glasgow and beyond.
6 Persimfans
In 1922, the violinist Lev Tseitlin set up a new orchestra in Moscow that set out to do things differently from others. Specifically, it performed without a conductor, embodying in musical form the Russian Revolutionary ideal of equality between all its members. If the notion seemed ambitious, the orchestra itself proved a success, with soloists such as pianists Sergey Prokofiev and Vladimir Horowitz (one of the greatest pianists of all time) joining the orchestra on stage over its ten years in existence. Sounding a little like an air-conditioning installation company, its name is an abbreviation of Pervïy Simfonicheskiy Ansambl’ bez Dirizhyora – that is, First Conductorless Symphony Ensemble.
7 Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble
There’s not much call for air-conditioning in Belfast, where the weather forecast tends to range from light rain to heavy rain, with patches of other types of rain in between. That, though, is not the reason why the city’s Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble is so-named. Nor does it have anything to do with Bob Dylan’s famous 1962 song. ‘It may have been because at that time [2013] I was studying a lot of Takemitsu,’ replied founder Greg Caffrey when BBC Music Magazine pushed him for an explanation last year. ‘A number of his works deal with watery subjects.’
8 Fires of London
The American pianist Stephen Pruslin was a savvy type. When, in 1971, his Pierrot Players ensemble decided to change its name following the departure of Harrison Birtwistle, Pruslin suggested Fires of London as an alternative. The ‘London’ needs no explanation, while ‘Fires’ suggested that this was the place to head for incandescent performances. It worked a treat, and press reviews were soon adorned with all manner of fiery metaphors.
9 Eighth Blackbird
Another ‘Pierrot ensemble’ – a group whose instrumental line-up is based on Arnold Schoenberg’s musical melodrama Pierrot lunaire – Eighth Blackbird's name was inspired by its then violinist Matt Albert’s literary tastes. ‘After one rehearsal when we were all still at college, we agreed that the next day we’d each come back with an idea for a name,’ its sometime clarinettist Michael Maccaferri told BBC Music.
‘Names such as “Red Wheelbarrow” and “Tastes Like Chicken” were suggested. However, Matt had been reading Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, the eighth stanza of which has an oblique musical reference. It’s an odd name for an ensemble, but it really sticks in people’s heads!’
10 The Revolutionary Drawing Room
This enterprising string quartet’s name is an indication of the period of music they specialise in, with a little leeway at either end. For ‘Revolutionary’, think of the tumultuous age between the fall of the Bastille in 1789 and the pan-European uprisings of 1848 – so, late Haydn, Spohr, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and all. The ‘Drawing Room’ part, meanwhile, refers to where said music would be typically heard.
11 Solomon’s Knot
To be pedantic, a Solomon’s knot is not, in fact, a knot. It is, rather, two closed loops that are linked together in a criss-cross fashion that makes them look like a single entity. All of which, says the Solomon’s Knot vocal and instrumental collective, makes it an ideal representation of their music-making:
‘Like the singers and the instrumentalists, the interweaving loops of Solomon’s Knot are inextricably linked, just as our players work very hard on the “text” of their individual lines, and the singers on communicating as if part of a string quartet.’ Founded in 2008, the ensemble was initially called The Solomon Choir and Orchestra in homage to the oratorio Solomon by Handel, with the ‘Knot’ bit added later.
12 Sō Percussion
Though it’s tempting to imagine this percussion quartet called themselves after the fifth note of the solfège (do re mi) scale, we have to look much further afield for the explanation. Suggested by the sister of one of the players when the quartet formed in 1999, the Japanese suffix ‘-sō’ has a range of meanings, including ‘to play an instrument’, ‘to be successful’ and ‘to determine a direction and move forward’. Sō… now we know.
13 Fibonacci Sequence
Time, now, for a little maths. Dating back to the 13th century, the Fibonacci Sequence is one in which, beginning with 0 and 1, each two numbers are added together to form the next – so, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on.
The relationship between any two numbers in the sequence (after 2) is close to the Golden Ratio which, when applied to visual art, music and much besides, has been shown to be particularly harmonious. What better name, then, for a British chamber ensemble that since 1994 has been providing aesthetic pleasure via music from the Baroque to the present day?
14 The Sixteen
And while we’re on the subject of maths… one imagines that The Sixteen must have grown used to seeing audience members at their concerts counting the fingers on their hands with a slightly puzzled look. Yes, as often as not, the number of singers on stage doesn’t match the group’s hexadecimal title. And, depending on the repertoire in question, there can be fewer or considerably more of them. However, when conductor Harry Christophers’s now-famous choral group gave its first concert in 1979, there were indeed exactly 16. Problem solved.
15 JACK Quartet
Just as confusing a name as The Sixteen’s is America’s JACK Quartet. The explanation of the group’s title was very simple – just take the first letter of each of the players’ names. A nice idea, yes, when John Pickford Richards, Ari Streisfeld, Christopher Otto and Kevin McFarland decided to combine their talents in sweet harmony at Eastman School of Music back in 2005. But then in 2016 Ari and Kevin left, to be replaced by Austin Wulliman and Jay Campbell. JACJ Quartet anyone? Sensibly, they stuck with the original.
And to finish....
Here's David Lyttelton's full illustration, featuring all 15 unusual ensmble names. Can you match each image to each group?
