John Pickford Richards

Jim Dolan of ABC7 Eyewitness News says, “John Richards plays viola.” The New York Times has described him as “wholesome-looking.” Both remain accurate.

John Pickford Richards has spent more than two decades making a life in new music as a violist, teacher, collaborator, and builder of the institutions that support it. He has been the violist of JACK Quartet since co-founding the group in 2005, developing long-term relationships with composers and helping bring an enormous and occasionally unreasonable body of new music into the world.

Before JACK, John was a founding member of Alarm Will Sound. Over the course of his career, he has performed with artists including Björk and David Byrne and appeared as a soloist with the Pasadena Symphony, Armenian Philharmonic, Wordless Music Orchestra, OSSIA, and the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, where he performed Luciano Berio’s Chemins II under Pierre Boulez.

Teaching and mentorship have become an increasingly central part of John’s work. He serves on the faculties of the Mannes School of Music at The New School, where JACK is Quartet in Residence, and Manhattan School of Music’s Contemporary Performance Program. His work with young performers and composers centers on the practical and sometimes peculiar skills required to make new music: close listening, rhythmic and intonational clarity, experimentation, collaboration, and figuring out what to do when the notation looks impossible.

John studied at Interlochen Arts Academy and the Eastman School of Music with David Holland and John Graham. In 2026, Eastman honored him with its Distinguished Alumni Award.