ABOUT QUENTON XAVIER BLACHE

Quenton Xavier Blache is a cellist and composer based in Los Angeles where he is a senior at the University of Southern California (USC) Thornton School of Music. He is a double major in cello performance and music composition, with a minor in Chinese. He was born in San Diego, California and currently lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Quenton has performed in Carnegie Hall, South America, Europe, and Asia as a member of Sphinx Virtuosi, a professional string ensemble of Black and Latinx players, and National Youth Orchestra USA. He soloed the Dvorak Concerto with the Peninsula Symphony and won the USC Undergraduate Division Bach Competition in 2021. Serving as a cello hand double and background musician actor in the Blumhouse Productions 2020 Amazon Prime movie, Nocturne, allowed him to merge his love of music and film. In 2017 and 2018, Quenton won first place in the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. Talent Hunt Competition. 

As a composer, Quenton has written works for the Little Orchestra Society, North Carolina Chamber Music Institute, and more. In 2019, his composition for string quartet, Hunted, was performed in a masterclass with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw. He is especially passionate about composition for visual media and has scored for the Vanuatu documentary, No Part Too Small (2020), which was screened at the Pasadena International Film Festival. Quenton was also the composer for the Resilience Project, a climate change “art-ivist” performance series that is a part of the inaugural USC Arts and Climate Collective. In his spare time, he enjoys playing chess and aspires to be an International Master (IM). Quenton has studied composition under Grammy Award winning composer Andrew Norman and Grammy Award nominated composer Ted Hearne. He has studied cello under Jacob Wenger, co-founder of the North Raleigh School of Music, and Nathaniel Yaffe, recording engineer and cellist of the North Carolina Symphony. He currently studies composition under celebrated composer Frank Ticheli and cello under accomplished cellist Andrew Shulman.