Royal Purple

Issue date: 2/6/08 Section: Arts & Entertainment

The Euphoria Quartet was recently awarded a grant for $1700 to record a CD, which wil be released during their April performance in Maryland.

A group of four students at UW-Whitewater are on the verge of reaching what many consider a universal goal: fame.

On Jan. 28, The Euphoria Quartet, a saxophone quartet at UW-Whitewater, was invited to perform for the National Conference for Undergraduate Research in Maryland for three days, spanning from April 10 to April 12. On top of this, the quartet has been awarded a grant for $1,700 to fund the production of a CD.

"In order to get the grant, we had to submit a three-page proposal," soprano saxophonist and junior Alex Lopez said. "We went through a lot of revisions and had a lot of help from professor Matt Sintchak."

Sintchak helped facilitate the group's success by introducing the group to and guiding them through the grant application.

"We came into the group as freshmen," Lopez said. "We were put together at first [by Sintchak], but then chose to stay because it just kind of clicked," Lopez said.

The Euphoria Quartet had more help from others as well.

"Another quartet got the grant before, and we modeled our approach after them," tenor saxophonist and senior Pat Callen said. "After we got the grant, we applied for the invitation to perform for the NCUR. There was a regional performance we could've applied for, but we took the chance and applied nationally."

The CD, which will tentatively be released alongside the group's performance in Maryland, currently has three tracks, "Pitch Black," "Come Sunday Morning" and "Sax Sounds." The CD times out at 26 minutes as of now and took all of just 20 hours over the course of two days to record.

On a scale from one to one million, one being not excited at all and one million being lethally excited, the group is 900,000 excited for the CD's release, Lopez said. The Euphoria Quartet wasn't the first name chosen by the group. Originally, they were named the Sax Pack Quartet, on account of the word 'pack' having all of the group members' first initials.

"We changed the name to The Euphoria Quartet because it describes the way music makes one feel," Lopez said.

All of the members of the group, except Behl, started to play the saxophone 10 to 11 years ago, when they were in the sixth grade (Behl started in fifth).

"They make a great ensemble," Sintchak said. "They are all equally adept at their instruments and they all get along. They squabble, but they always work it through."

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