“Duo Noire plays with a unique balance of American earnestness and worldly style. Flippin and Mallet are musicians of the older, better, sense: both are active composers as well as performers, bringing a creative artist’s vitality to all the music they perform—as if the music were being written before our very eyes.” (Raymond J. Lustig, composer, The Juilliard School, presenter)
\Duo Noire
classical guitar duo
Duo Noire was formed soon after Thomas Flippin and Christopher Mallett became the first two African-American guitarists ever admitted to the Yale School of Music (the duo’s name is French for both “black” and “quarter note”).
Now Christopher is on the faculty of the Longay Conservatory of Guitar in San Francisco, and Thomas is on the faculty at the Music Conservatory of Westchester in White Plains NY. Both are prizewinners at multiple national and international guitar performance competitions.
The duo has performed at prestigious settings such as the Norfolk Music Festival in Connecticut, and at the 92nd Street Y and the Times Center in New York City. Duo Noire was the featured guest artist at the premiere of the Blind Ear Music composer collaborative at The Juilliard School in New York, and have given the premiere performances of works by such noted American composers for guitar as Yale’s Benjamin Verdery and Juilliard’s Raymond Lustig.
The duo has also performed in masterclass at several major festivals including with Sharon Isbin at The Aspen Music Festival, with Manuel Barrueco at the Peabody Guitar Masterclass, and with Pepe Romero, Eliot Fisk, and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet.
Yale University awarded the duo one of its first round of Alumni Ventures grants, which was used to tour inner-city schools across New England in 2009, where they performed, lectured, and served as role models for thousands of students with little access to the classical arts.