Classic craft.

Modern imagination.

Beo String Quartet was founded in 2015 by brothers Jason and Sean Neukom with a simple conviction: the string quartet remains one of the most powerful ways to tell human stories.

From the beginning, we were drawn equally to the enduring architecture of Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Shostakovich and to the creative possibilities of music being written today. Rather than treating these as separate worlds, we have spent the last decade exploring what happens when they are placed in conversation with one another.

That philosophy shapes everything we do.

Every Beo performance is built as a complete artistic journey. Pairing works that differ in style, era, and genre creates conversations across time. A work written 200 years ago can illuminate one written two years ago and vice versa. These unexpected relationships create experiences we believe are worth sharing. In turn, they foster conversations between performers and audiences that can happen in any concert hall, museum, university, house, cottage, or amphitheater. It is through these shared experiences that we hope to invite audiences into an intimate, deeply human performance.

Our work has led us well beyond the traditional concert stage.

Alongside performances of the core quartet repertoire, we regularly collaborate with living composers and create original multimedia productions that combine chamber music with film, electronics, live sound processing, spatial audio, and storytelling. Projects such as triggerLand, Projection I: Triple Quartet, and El Balcón reflect our belief that tradition is not something to preserve behind glass but is something to participate in, question, and continue.

This balance between craft and imagination has become an epicenter of Beo's projects and performances.

Our performances have taken us throughout the United States and Europe, including our New York debut at The Morgan Library & Museum. We have presented more than 140 concert works, including over 65 world premieres, and have been privileged to collaborate with composers including Missy Mazzoli, Richard Danielpour, Marc Mellits, Lawrence Dillon, Joel Hoffman, Charles Nichols, and many others.

Along the way, critics have recognized not only our technical precision but the expressive unity of our performances. Reviews in The New York Classical Review, The New York Concert Review, and Fanfare have praised the quartet's warmth of sound, thoughtful programming, and ability to bring historical and contemporary repertoire into meaningful dialogue.

Education has always been as important to us as performance.

Rather than approaching outreach as something separate from concert life, we see both as expressions of the same artistic philosophy: meaningful participation. Through residencies, workshops, school performances, composition initiatives, and long-term educational partnerships, we invite students not simply to learn about music, but to experience it through listening, collaboration, curiosity, and discovery. To date, Beo has worked with thousands of students ranging from elementary classrooms to university composition studios.

That same desire for artistic independence led us to build our ability to self produce.

Our in-house projects (comprising engineering, mastering, video production and more) have afforded us the freedom to shape many aspects of the artistic experience ourselves. This independence has allowed us to create recordings and multimedia projects that extend naturally from our work on stage while remaining unconstrained by genre or traditional industry expectations.

Today, Beo continues to evolve.

We remain committed to the great quartet repertoire while actively developing educational initiatives, exploring emerging technologies, and creating original projects that expand what a string quartet can communicate. Though the mediums continue to grow, our purpose has remained remarkably consistent since 2015:

To create performances that invite people into a deeper relationship with music—and with one another.

Looking for our official biography?

This page tells the story of Beo. For official short and long biographies, press materials, technical information, and promotional resources, please visit our Electronic Press Kit.