Kronos Quartet

Beyond the Golden Gate is a multimedia exploration of how Chinese Americans have harnessed the US legal system to define and expand civil and immigrant rights in America. This modular piece is rooted in the work of San Francisco community activist David Lei, whose research focuses on the little-known but widely significant legacy of Chinese Americans in the courts, including historic civil rights cases such as Tape v. Hurley, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, Wong Kim Ark v. US, and Lau v. Nichols. Beyond the Golden Gate aims to provide context around these cases, bringing them to life for present-day audiences who may be unfamiliar with their significance—not only to members of the Chinese community, but to all Americans. Each performance of the work is built by a unique set of Kronos collaborators—composers, musicians, speakers, visual artists—all weaving various perspectives together into this larger story of resilience and activism in America.

Tonight’s presentation features storytelling by David Lei and visuals by knot artist Windy Chien alongside performances by Kronos Quartet and pipa virtuoso Wu Man. World premieres include Dai Wei’s Through the Paper Gate, Lei Liang’s Oceanic Migrants, and Victoria Shen’s The Same Rules Do Not Apply in The Outer Orbit. Rounding out the program are works by Jack Body, Philip Glass, and Wu Man.

Beyond the Golden Gate premiered at Kronos Festival 2024 and is being expanded upon as part of the upcoming Three Bones multimedia presentation. As we approach 2026 and the 250th anniversary of the United States, Kronos Quartet marks the occasion by sharing and celebrating three American stories. Realized on stage through music, video, and visual arts, they are stories of cultural transmission and preservation, of the struggle for human rights, and of learning by listening.

Beyond the Golden Gate was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man with support from Michael Hostetler and Erica Pascal, and Donald and Karen Evarts.

Nicole Lizée
Death to Kosmische
Nicole Lizée is a composer, sound artist, and keyboardist based in Montreal, Quebec. Her compositions range from works for large ensemble and solo turntablist featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, Simon and Merlin handheld games, and karaoke tapes. Lizée has received commissions from artists and ensembles such as l’Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, CBC, So Percussion, and Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society. In 2010, she was awarded a fellowship from the prestigious Civitella Ranieri Foundation based in New York City and Italy. Lizée has twice been named a finalist for the Jules-Léger Prize, most recently in 2007 for This Will Not Be Televised, scored for chamber ensemble and turntables, and was recommended among the Top Ten at the 2008 International Rostrum of Composers. In 2002, she received the Canada Council for the Arts Robert Fleming Prize, and in 2004, she was nominated for an Opus Prize.

About Death to Kosmische, Lizée writes:

“Death to Kosmische is a work that reflects my fascination with the notion of musical hauntology and the residual perception of music, as well as my love/hate relationship with the idea of genres. The musical elements of the piece could be construed as the faded and twisted remnants of the Kosmische style of electronic music. To do this, I have incorporated two archaic pieces of music technology (the Stylophone and the Omnichord) and have presented them through the gauze of echoes and reverberation, as well as through imitations of this technology as played by the strings. I think of the work as both a distillation and an expansion of one or several memories of music that are irrevocably altered by the impermanence of the mind. Only ghosts remain.”

Nicole Lizée’s Death to Kosmische was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Margaret Dorfman and the Ralph I. Dorfman Family Fund.

Victoria Shen
The Same Rules Do Not Apply in
The Outer Orbit (World Premiere)
Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco. Her work explores the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body, and features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls “chaotic sound” to oppose signal and information, using the physical activation of noise to interrogate and elude traditionally embedded meaning in the music we hear. Through the instruments she creates—appendages and extensions of the body—she interrogates the tensions that exist between control and chaos, the unique and the common, and the practical and the absurd.

Shen has performed solo across North America, Japan, China, Mexico, Australia/NZ, the UK, and Europe; as a member of a turntable trio with Mariam Rezaei and Maria Chavez; and as a member of hip hop group 1 Above Minus Underground. Shen has also collaborated with groups such as Kronos Quartet, Matmos, clipping, Acid Mothers Temple, and Mike Watt and the Missing Men. Notable venues in which she has performed include Boston City Hall, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ISSUE Project Room NY, DOMMUNE Tokyo, Petreon Sculpture Park Cyprus, MUNCH Museum Oslo, Art Gallery of NSW Sydney, and Museo d’Arte Orientale Turin. Shen has also been an artist in residence at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm SE, WORM Rotterdam NL, Kurimanzutto New York US, the Royal Danish Academy Copenhagen DK, AUDIUM San Francisco US, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Omaha US, Headlands Center for the Arts US, and Audio Foundation Auckland NZ.

Shen currently works at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics Stanford and School of Visual Arts NY. She is also a serving member of the board of directors for The Lab in San Francisco.

In The Same Rules Do Not Apply in The Outer Orbit, Kronos Quartet and Shen push both the string quartet and the turntable outside their familiar circles. Shen’s custom-built turntables and handmade records are controlled by the quartet’s foot pedals, while the players’ bows, tipped with record needles, can draw sound not only from their strings but also from the spinning grooves. In this setup, the functions of instrument and playback device are decoupled and recombined; and either becomes capable of “playing” the other.

The work unfolds as a study in chance and improvisation. Turntables, unstable by nature, yield unpredictable textures, demanding that the quartet respond in the moment. The music hovers between playback and performance, collapsing distinctions between what is recorded and what is live, what is intentional and what is accidental.

Blending extended string techniques with the raw gestures of turntablism, the collaboration tests the boundaries of genre and form. The quartet becomes both performer and listener, in conversation with records that answer back. Here, freedom is not only possible but necessary, as time itself is stretched, reversed, and reshaped.

This project, made possible through a Creative Work Fund grant, reimagines what a string quartet can be when the same conventions no longer apply to sound and performance produced in the far reaches of music.

Traditional
Ya Taali’een ‘ala el-Jabal
Arranged by Jonathan Berger (b. 1954), after Rim Banna
“Ya Taali’een ‘ala el-Jabal” (“Oh, You Who Are the Mountains”) is a traditional Palestinian song dating from the Ottoman reign. During the British Mandate, Palestinian women would sing the song outside the prisons where their loved ones were incarcerated. The song uses imlolaah, a Pig-Latin-like insertion of an onomatopoeic word from the syllable ‘L’, followed by a vowel, which is repeated in order to mask the original word. Thus the text was unintelligible to the guards.

The voice is that of the inimitable Rim Banna, whose performance of “Ya Taali’een ‘ala el-Jabal”was never released publicly. It is used by permission of the Banna family.

Dai Wei
Through the Paper Gate (World Premiere)
Originally from China, Dai Wei explores a musical journey that navigates in the spaces between east and west, classical and pop, electronic and acoustic, innovation and tradition. Featured in the Washington Post’s “22 for 22: Composers and Performers to Watch this year,” Dai Wei served as a Young Artist Composer in Residence at Music from Angel Fire and Composer Fellow at Intimacy of Creativity in Hong Kong. Her chamber orchestra Invisible Portals, conducted by Marin Alsop, premiered at Carnegie Hall in March 2022. Other projects include commissions and collaborations with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, Curtis Symphony Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, and Aizuri Quartet. Dai Wei is currently pursuing her doctorate in music composition at Princeton University as a Naumburg Fellow. She holds an Artist Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music. After she finished her BA in music composition at the Xinghai Conservatory of Music in China, she came to the United States and earned an MM in music composition at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

About Through the Paper Gate, Dai Wei writes:

“Through the Paper Gate takes its title as a metaphor for the threshold of immigration: a passage that seems open, yet proves flimsy, conditional, and easily torn away by history.

“The first movement unfolds as a story of my own encounter with chop suey. Once the quintessential symbol of “Chinese food” in America, it has now nearly vanished from menus, folded into memory like an immigrant dream left in a take-out box. As I ate the chop suey, I wondered if its flavors, the most immediate trace of memory and history, were no longer preserved, would its place in cultural survival be forgotten as well.

“The second movement opens the paper gate into a fractured dialogue across time. Archival Edison cylinder recordings of Cantonese opera intertwine with my own voice sung in that tradition, creating an echo between erased histories and living memory. Within this dialogue, sampled kitchen sounds merge with the strings. Gradually fragments of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act are revealed, a history that still casts its shadow across the present.

“Heartfelt thanks to David, Gabriela, Ayane, and Paul. I am deeply grateful to Kronos Quartet for bringing this work to life and for transforming echoes of the past into living sound in the present.”

Dai Wei’s Through the Paper Gate was commissioned by the David Harrington Research & Development Fund.

Angélica Negrón
Marejada
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1981 and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Interested in creating intricate yet simple narratives that evoke intangible moments in time, she writes music for accordions, toys, and electronics as well as chamber ensembles and orchestras. Her music has been described as “wistfully idiosyncratic and contemplative” (WQXR/Q2) and “mesmerizing and affecting” (Feast of Music) while the New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise” and her “quirky approach to scoring.” She was selected by Q2 and NPR listeners as part of “The Mix: 100 Composers Under 40,” by Flavorpill as one of the “10 Young Female Composers You Should Know,” and by Paste Magazine as one of the 20 most innovative musicians working today.

Negrón has been commissioned by the Albany Symphony, Bang on a Can All-Stars, A Far Cry, MATA Festival, loadbang, the Playground Ensemble, and the American Composers Orchestra, among others. Her music has been performed at the Kennedy Center, the Ecstatic Music Festival, EMPAC, Bang on a Can Marathon, and the 2016 New York Philharmonic Biennial and her film scores have been heard numerous times at the Tribeca Film Festival. She has collaborated with artists including Sō Percussion, The Knights, Face the Music, and NOVUS NY and her music has been performed by TRANSIT Ensemble, Choral Chameleon, janus trio, Cadillac Moon Ensemble, Cantori NY, Face the Music, Iktus Percussion Quartet, ETHEL, NYU Symphony Orchestra, Montpelier Chamber Orchestra, Springfield-Drury Civic Orchestra, and the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra, among others. She has written music for documentaries, films, theater, and modern dance and frequently collaborates with the Puerto Rican experimental theater company Y No Había Luz, writing music for the company’s plays, which often incorporate puppets, masks, and unusual objects. A longtime member of the Puerto Rican underground music scene, she is a founding member of the electronic indie band Balún, where she sings and plays the accordion.

Negrón received an early education in piano and violin at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico, where she later studied composition under the guidance of composer Alfonso Fuentes. She holds a master’s degree in music composition from New York University, where she studied with Pedro da Silva and pursued doctoral studies at the Graduate Center (CUNY), where she studied composition with Tania León. Also active as an educator, Negrón is currently a teaching artist for the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program, and co-founded Acopladitos, a Spanish immersion music program for young children, with Noraliz Ruiz. She has contributed as a writer to the International Alliance of Women in Music Journal and the British magazine The Wire and has been featured as an Ableton artist. Negrón was a composer fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival 2011 and was the 2014–15 Van Lier Fellow at American Composers Orchestra.

Negrón was an artist in residence at National Sawdust for their 2018–19 season, focusing on a lip sync opera titled Chimera for drag queen performers and chamber ensemble exploring the ideas of fantasy and illusion as well as the intricacies and complexities of identity. As the first composer in residence at the New York Botanical Garden, she composed an immersive work for electronic soundscape and 100-voice chorus performed in the Thain Family Forest. Upcoming premieres include works for the New York Philharmonic (Project 19), Dallas Symphony Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra (a co-commissioned work for orchestra and organ), and San Francisco Girls Chorus. Negrón continues to perform and compose for film.

About Marejada, Angélica Negrón writes:

“Marejada is a piece written for Kronos Quartet inspired by the pixelated landscapes of artist Justin Favela and the desire to escape to a place that feels and sounds like home. The piece combines field recordings from the waves in Seven Seas Beach in Fajardo, and birds from La Jungla Beach in Guánica, both located in Puerto Rico, along with undulating gestures in the strings reminiscent of the sound of waves.

“I wanted to capture the feeling of joy and calmness I feel when I’m in Puerto Rico, in these beautiful places, while also expressing the complexity of the diaspora experience for those who, like me, cannot be physically present in those places and close to their friends and family most of the time.

“When Kronos approached me in March 2020 to write a piece for them to rehearse and perform together during a difficult moment of social isolation, I wanted to create something playful and rhythmic yet flexible and malleable that would be fun to put together. Something that responded directly to the challenges during at the time of performing music together while not being able to be together in the same room. But also, something that took into consideration the limitations of the video communications platforms and use those challenges as compositional material and creative impulse. The natural delay, the canceling of sound frequencies, and the inability for everyone to fully play together at the same time and in perfect synchronization, are all challenges that I decided to embrace as unique elements that make this piece thrive even within the limitations of the medium.

“Marejada is an invitation to sonically escape from your room and to actively imagine and immerse yourself in a different place and time.

Angélica Negrón’s Marejada was commissioned as part of the Kronos Performing Arts Association’s Kronos Fifty for the Future, which was made possible by a large group of adventurous partners including Cal Performances and Carnegie Hall.

Philip Glass
Orion: China
Arranged by Michael Riesman
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Philip Glass is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School. In the early 1960s, Glass spent two years of intensive study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and while there, earned money by transcribing Ravi Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation. By 1974, Glass had worked on a number of innovative projects, creating a large collection of new music for the Philip Glass Ensemble and the Mabou Mines Theater Company. This period culminated in Music in Twelve Parts, and the landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, on which he collaborated with Robert Wilson.

Since Einstein, Glass has expanded his repertoire to include music for opera, dance, theater, chamber ensemble, orchestra, and film. His scores have received Academy Award nominations (Kundun, The Hours, Notes on a Scandal) and a Golden Globe (The Truman Show). His Symphony No. 7 and Symphony No. 8, along with Waiting for the Barbarians, an opera based on the book by J.M. Coetzee, premiered in 2005. In more recent years several new works were unveiled, including Book of Longing (Luminato Festival) and Appomattox, an opera about the end of the Civil War (San Francisco Opera). Glass’ Symphony No. 9 was completed in 2011 and was premiered by the Bruckner Orchestra in Linz, Austria on January 1, 2012 and his Symphony No. 10 received its European premiere in France in 2013. Teatro Real Madrid and the English National Opera commissioned Glass’ opera The Perfect American, about the death of Walt Disney, which premiered in January 2013 while the Landestheater Linz premiered his opera Spuren de Verirrten that same year.

Inspired by the challenge to create a work for a world audience on the occasion of the Athens Cultural Olympiad during the summer of 2004, Glass conceived an evening-length work that contemplates the Earth’s relationship to the constellations as interpreted by the world’s many cultures. Conceived in 10 movements, the original version of Orion featured the Philip Glass Ensemble in collaboration with seven of the world’s most esteemed composers/performers who performed live with the Philip Glass Ensemble. These guest performers were chosen for their unique mastery of a global musical tradition and worked in close collaboration with Glass to incorporate their individual perspective into the composition. Wu Man was one of the seven collaborators; her section, Orion: China, was subsequently arranged for pipa and string quartet.

About the original version of Orion, Glass writes:

“Orion was commissioned by the 2004 Cultural Olympiad and premiered in Athens in June 2004, preceding the Olympic Games. For this special event, I assembled a group of renowned composer/performers to collaborate with me on an evening-length work that, in its multinational format, is intended to reflect the international character of the Olympiad itself. I collaborated with Mark Atkins (didjeridoo) from Australia, Wu Man (pipa) from China, Foday Musa Suso (kora) from Gambia, UAKTI (multiple instruments) from Brazil, Ravi Shankar (sitar) from India, Ashley MacIsaac (violin) from Nova Scotia, Canada, and Eleftheria Arvanitaki (vocals) from Greece.

“Since 1964 I have been actively engaged in musical encounters with composers from musical traditions different than my own. I began working with Ravi Shankar in 1964 as his music assistant on the film Chappaqua. Our friendship flourished and led to the musical recording Passages in 1989. … I completed an opera, Sound of a Voice, featuring Wu Man, which premiered at American Repertory Theater in Boston. Though we have known each other for years and often talked about working together, this was our first opportunity to do so.

“In the same way that civilizations are united by common themes, history, and customs, we singularly and together are united by the commonality of the natural world—rivers, oceans, the organic environment of forests and mountains. And the stars. Stargazing must be one of humanity’s oldest pastimes. It led to astrology, astronomy, measurement of the seasons, and the very beginnings of science. I think no single experience of the world speaks to us so directly as when we contemplate the infinity of space, its vastness and countless heavenly bodies. In this way, the stars unite us, regardless of country, ethnicity, and even time.

“Orion, the largest constellation in the night sky, can be seen in all seasons from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. It seems that almost every civilization has created myths and taken inspiration from Orion. As the piece progressed, each of the composer/performers, including myself, drew from that inspiration in creating their work. In this way, the starry heavens, seen from all over our planet inspired us in making and presenting a multicultural, international musical work.

Michael Riesman’s arrangement of Orion: China by Philip Glass was written for the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man.

Dai Wei
Through the Narrow Gate
Dai Wei writes: “In the summer of 2023, I received an unexpected yet thrilling email from David Harrington and Wu Man, inquiring if I would be interested in writing a piece. For inspiration, David sent me a link to Chinese records released by Thomas Edison in 1902, featuring various excerpts from Cantonese opera. Listening to these Cantonese excerpts recorded on those cylinders struck me as overturning a drawer full of historical moments: they instantly transported me back 120 years to San Francisco from New Jersey. And it was from there that Edison dispatched his recording engineer, Walter Miller, to San Francisco to capture these Chinese operas, which were subsequently brought back to New Jersey. The geographic coincidence, along with the untold stories of that time, deeply inspired me to employ these cylinders as material for a multi-dimensional dialogue spanning across time and space.

“On these cylinders, we can hear a brief yet fervent drumming with the Chinese gong at the outset of each piece, which is the Jie (intermedium)—a stage cue for movement, expression, scene transitions, and other elements in traditional Cantonese opera. I aim to reimagine these cues in a contemporary manner: having strings and pipa present a fresh interpretation of the Jie at the start of each movement, thereby highlighting the essence of these recordings. Additionally, I prerecorded multiple layers of my voice blending with the Cantonese opera and electronics. These operas were traditionally performed by female artists from Guangdong during an important period known as the Shi Niang period, spanning from 1862 to 1917 (the term Shi Niang refers to blind female performers). Time rewinds from the present to the past and back again, bridging the gap between then and now, all within the encompassing space of the present moment.

“As I listened to these ‘glitchy,’ ‘burr-ridden’ cylinder recordings, it felt as though I stood before a narrow gate. This gate is the entrance to a ‘theater,’ leaving me with a fleeting glimpse of the grandeur of the world stage; it is the gate where one discovers that the path to dreams is fraught with obstacles upon pushing it open; and it is through this gate that countless souls strive to pass, each exerting all their strength to secure a place to call home.

“I am deeply grateful to Kronos Quartet and Wu Man for bringing this work to life, and I am truly thankful that I can tell these untold stories through music. Today, more than a hundred years later, we have together encountered lives that should not be forgotten by history.”

Archival Audio: “A Wise Man in the Snow” and “To Persuade a King” from “Edison Gold Moulded Records catalog, Asiatic selections.” Sourced from the UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive (Allen G. Debus collection, Lynn Andersen collection).

Dai Wei’s Through the Narrow Gate was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man by Anthony B. Creamer III.

Traditional, from the Yi
Long-ge
Arranged Jack Body
Jack Body studied at Auckland University, in Cologne, and at the Institute of Sonology, Utrecht. During 1976–77, he was a guest lecturer at the Akademi Musik Indonesia, Yogyakarta, and since 1980, he has lectured at the School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington.

His music covers solo and chamber music, orchestral music, music theater, music for dance and film, and electroacoustic music. He has also worked in experimental photography and computer-controlled sound-image installations. A fascination with the music and cultures of Asia, particularly Indonesia, has been a strong influence on Body’s work. As an ethnomusicologist, his published recordings include music from Indonesia and China. One of Body’s recent publications is South of the Clouds, instrumental music of the minorities of southwest China (Ode Records).

Body has been commissioned by the New Zealand String Quartet, the NZ Symphony Orchestra, and many other groups, and has written three works for Kronos Quartet. His opera Alley was premiered to wide acclaim at the 1998 NZ International Festival of the Arts. This work incorporated Chinese instruments in a Western ensemble and featured Chinese singers, including two authentic folksingers from Gansu, northwest China. In 2003, he was a featured composer at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, and with the Atlas Ensemble at the 2004 Holland Festival.

Recordings of his music include Suara (Ode), electroacoustic compositions using field recordings from Indonesia; Sacred and Profane (Ode), three large-scale works for voices; and Pulse (Rattle), a series of five works based on transcriptions from traditional non-Western musics, which won the 2002 NZ Music Award for Best Classical CD. Waiteata Music Press released a Composer Portrait of his music in 2003.

Long-Ge reflects Body’s expansive interest in traditional ethnic music from around the world and is the first part of a larger work, Three Transcriptions, which comprises music from China, Madagascar, and Bulgaria. This piece was inspired by a recording of the long-ge, a jaw harp with three blades played by the Yi nationality in southern China. The melody is formed on the upper partials, and on the instrument, the player is able to create two-part counterpoint.

Jack Body’s Long-Ge was written for Kronos and appears on Kronos’ Nonesuch recording Early Music (Lachrymæ Antiquæ).

Traditional
“Namu Amida” from Early Chinese Music
Arr. Wu Man and Kronos Quartet
Early Chinese Music represents a continuation of the steps taken by Kronos in 1995 during the recording of Early Music. That album, which featured composers from many different eras and traditions, sowed the seeds for Kronos’ expanding interest in Chinese music, as well as for a deeper collaboration with Wu Man. Not only did Wu Man perform on the album (playing zhong and da ruan, which are alto and tenor short-necked lutes, on John Dowland’s Lachrymae Antiquae), but Kronos also recorded a piece called Long-ge, which was an arrangement by Jack Body of traditional Yunnan courting music. Since that time, over the course of a decades’ worth of conversation, Kronos’ artistic director David Harrington and Wu Man have discussed how to best delve into the incredible diversity of Chinese music. Said Harrington, “The musical goal of the Early Music album was to envelop the listener in music of the past and the present, in order to create a web of musical timelessness. We’re trying to further that idea with the Early Chinese Music project.”

For Wu Man and Kronos, the word “early” can suggest many things. In some cases, it is meant in the most literal sense of “very old”—for the arrangements of classic works such as the Buddhist chant “Namu Amida “(c. 605 AD), Wu Man worked closely with Rembrandt Wolpert, Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Arkansas, who reconstructed the original historical Chinese manuscripts and translated them into Western notation.

The Early Chinese Music arrangements by Kronos Quartet and Wu Man were commissioned by David A. & Evelyne T. Lennette and the Carnegie Hall Corporation, with additional funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Lei Liang
Oceanic Migrants (World Premiere)
Lei Liang is a Chinese-born American composer whose works have been called “hauntingly beautiful and sonically colorful” by the New York Times, and as “far, far out of the ordinary, brilliantly original and inarguably gorgeous” by the Washington Post.

Winner of the 2011 Rome Prize, Lei Liang is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Aaron Copland Award, a Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto Xiaoxiang (for saxophone and orchestra) was named a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music. His orchestral work A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams won the prestigious 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.

Lei Liang studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (BM and MM) and Harvard University (PhD). A Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, he held fellowships from the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships. Lei Liang taught in China as a distinguished visiting professor at Shaanxi Normal University Colege of Arts in Xi’an; and served as an honorary professor of composition and sound design at Wuhan Conservatory of Music and a visiting assistant professor of music at Middlebury College. He is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego, where he served as the chair of the composition area and Acting Chair of the Music Department. Since 2018, Lei Liang has served as Artistic Director of the Chou Wen-chung Music Research Center in China. Lei Liang’s catalogue of more than 100 compositions is published exclusively by Schott Music Corporation (New York)

About Oceanic Migrants, Lei Liang writes:

“Humpback whales have been singing in the ocean for perhaps over a million years. Humans were not aware of their evocative music until the 1950s. Using hydrophones placed on the seafloor, our collaborators captured a continuous 14-hour performance of a humpback as it passed through the Southern California Bight, offshore island province. When whales come together, they converse in aggregate, as in a chamber music performance. In fact, the ocean is their concert hall. The song in this recording was captured at a site 1,300 meters deep, where it takes about two seconds for the sound to travel to the seafloor and make a round trip over this distance. That determines the length of the echo, which seems to set the pacing and tempo of the whale’s singing, as the ocean becomes its karaoke box. The humpback is dialoging with the ocean, and this composition is, in turn, my dialogue with it. Oceanic Migrants was commissioned by Kronos Quartet.”

Lei Liang’s Oceanic Migrants was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man by the ProtoStar Foundation.

Wu Man
Two Chinese Paintings
Realized by Danny Clay
Wu Man’s biography will be found in the About the Artists section, beginning on the next page.

About Two Chinese Paintings, Wu Man writes:

“After two decades of collaborating with Kronos Quartet, I am finally beginning to understand Western string instruments. With the group’s encouragement and support, I was able to create these—my first works for string quartet.

“Two Chinese Paintings…resemble a set of portraits of traditional cultures from around China. In Chinese traditional music, instrumental pieces often have poetic titles to express their content and style. I decided to continue this tradition with this collection. The inspiration for these suites came from styles of traditional music in China familiar to me, including Uyghur Maqam of Xinjiang province, a pipa scale from the 9th century, and the Silk-and-Bamboo music, or teahouse music, from my hometown of Hangzhou.

“‘Ancient Echo,’ the first movement of Two Chinese Paintings, is based on a scale found among the oldest tunes for pipa. The second movement, ‘Silk and Bamboo’ is a variation on the tune ‘Joyful Song’ (Huanlege) from the collection of Silk-and-Bamboo.

“I feel quite grateful to be able to bring these old styles of traditional music—Uyghur Muqam, Jiangnan Silk-and-Bamboo music, and ancient pipa music—into the repertoire of Western string ensembles. The left-hand portamento, or sliding, technique, called for here is quite distinct from the types of expression found in Western music. I hope that audiences will come to better understand the richness and diversity of music from China through these stories.

“I’d like to thank the members of Kronos for their trust and encouragement, for letting me be a part of their Fifty for the Future project, and for giving me this opportunity to share my musical experiences with young string quartets around the world.”

Wu Man’s Two Chinese Paintings was commissioned as part of the Kronos Performing Arts Association’s Kronos Fifty for the Future, which was made possible by a large group of adventurous partners including Cal Performances and Carnegie Hall.