KRONOS Five Decades
Saturday, March 2, 2024, 8pm
Zellerbach Hall
Cal Performances is committed to fostering a welcoming, inclusive, and safe environment for all—one that honors our venues as places of respite, openness, and respect. Please see the Community Agreements section on our Policies page for more information.
From the Executive and Artistic Director
We continue our extraordinary 2023–24 season with a schedule of performances that would be the envy of any performing arts presenter in the nation. I’m especially proud that the legendary pianist Mitsuko Uchida will return to campus this month as Artist in Residence, for two special concerts—March 17 with tenor Mark Padmore in Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, and March 24 with the acclaimed Mahler Chamber Orchestra in piano concertos by Mozart and an orchestral work by Jörg Widmann—as well as additional opportunities for the campus and wider Bay Area community to engage with her singular artistry. We are also very excited to welcome the return of one of the crown jewels in American dance, The Joffrey Ballet, which this year celebrates the renewal of a multi-season residency at Cal Performances with its first full-length narrative ballet, Anna Karenina, at Zellerbach Hall (Mar 15–17).
The iconic Elevator Repair Service theater company visits from New York with Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (Mar 1–3), its lean and elegant production about a historic 1965 debate between the progressive queer Black writer and activist James Baldwin and the “Father of American Conservatism,” William F. Buckley, Jr. And, the Bay Area’s beloved Kronos Quartet celebrates its 50th year of reinventing the string quartet for our global, connected, contemporary world with a special concert featuring a world premiere commissioned from Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini, who will join the Kronos members onstage as a performer (Mar 2).
We’ll enjoy an artfully curated program by the brilliant young pianist Conrad Tao (Mar 3); the Cal Performances debut of a particularly exciting young string ensemble, the Isidore String Quartet (Mar 5); and the West Coast premiere of Ki moun ou ye (Who are you?), an immersive staged song cycle by composer, flutist, and vocalist Nathalie Joachim (Mar 7). Joachim’s piece is set on the remote Caribbean farmland where her family has lived for generations, and travels deeper into the Haitian heritage introduced on her Grammy-nominated Fanm d’Ayiti recording.
In other genres, the June Award-winning group OKAN demonstrates what can happen when you take a classically trained percussionist from Santiago de Cuba, add a one-time concertmaster from Havana’s Youth Orchestra, and stir in the sounds of Caribbean folkloric and dance music in the context of Toronto’s vibrant immigrant music community (Mar 8); and Wild Up, the dazzling Los Angeles contemporary music collective, reminds us how new a 50-year-old music score can sound with its presentation of Julius Eastman’s ecstatic, jubilant, and hypnotic Femenine. And finally, we can’t wait for the Cal Performances debut of Ema Nikolovska, a young mezzo-soprano on the rise and in demand in international opera houses and concert halls; born in North Macedonia, raised in Toronto, and based in Europe, Nikolovska visits with a program featuring songs by Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Debussy.
Even as all these remarkable performances take place on the UC Berkeley campus, the Cal Performances team is hard at work planning for the mid-April announcement of our 2024–25 season. Trust me when I promise that we have a truly exceptional schedule planned for you, an example of which was last month’s sneak-peak announcement of the Maria Manetti Shrem and Elizabeth Segerstrom California Orchestra Residency, when Cal Performances and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County will bring the world renowned Vienna Philharmonic, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and pianist Yefim Bronfman to California in March 2025.
Finally, thank you for joining us today at Cal Performances! We’re delighted to spend this time together, celebrating the very best in live music, dance, and theater.
Jeremy Geffen
Executive and Artistic Director, Cal Performances
We continue our extraordinary 2023–24 season with a schedule of performances that would be the envy of any performing arts presenter in the nation. I’m especially proud that the legendary pianist Mitsuko Uchida will return to campus this month as Artist in Residence, for two special concerts—March 17 with tenor Mark Padmore in Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, and March 24 with the acclaimed Mahler Chamber Orchestra in piano concertos by Mozart and an orchestral work by Jörg Widmann—as well as additional opportunities for the campus and wider Bay Area community to engage with her singular artistry. We are also very excited to welcome the return of one of the crown jewels in American dance, The Joffrey Ballet, which this year celebrates the renewal of a multi-season residency at Cal Performances with its first full-length narrative ballet, Anna Karenina, at Zellerbach Hall (Mar 15–17).
The iconic Elevator Repair Service theater company visits from New York with Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge (Mar 1–3), its lean and elegant production about a historic 1965 debate between the progressive queer Black writer and activist James Baldwin and the “Father of American Conservatism,” William F. Buckley, Jr. And, the Bay Area’s beloved Kronos Quartet celebrates its 50th year of reinventing the string quartet for our global, connected, contemporary world with a special concert featuring a world premiere commissioned from Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini, who will join the Kronos members onstage as a performer (Mar 2).
We’ll enjoy an artfully curated program by the brilliant young pianist Conrad Tao (Mar 3); the Cal Performances debut of a particularly exciting young string ensemble, the Isidore String Quartet (Mar 5); and the West Coast premiere of Ki moun ou ye (Who are you?), an immersive staged song cycle by composer, flutist, and vocalist Nathalie Joachim (Mar 7). Joachim’s piece is set on the remote Caribbean farmland where her family has lived for generations, and travels deeper into the Haitian heritage introduced on her Grammy-nominated Fanm d’Ayiti recording.
In other genres, the June Award-winning group OKAN demonstrates what can happen when you take a classically trained percussionist from Santiago de Cuba, add a one-time concertmaster from Havana’s Youth Orchestra, and stir in the sounds of Caribbean folkloric and dance music in the context of Toronto’s vibrant immigrant music community (Mar 8); and Wild Up, the dazzling Los Angeles contemporary music collective, reminds us how new a 50-year-old music score can sound with its presentation of Julius Eastman’s ecstatic, jubilant, and hypnotic Femenine. And finally, we can’t wait for the Cal Performances debut of Ema Nikolovska, a young mezzo-soprano on the rise and in demand in international opera houses and concert halls; born in North Macedonia, raised in Toronto, and based in Europe, Nikolovska visits with a program featuring songs by Schubert, Richard Strauss, and Debussy.
Even as all these remarkable performances take place on the UC Berkeley campus, the Cal Performances team is hard at work planning for the mid-April announcement of our 2024–25 season. Trust me when I promise that we have a truly exceptional schedule planned for you, an example of which was last month’s sneak-peak announcement of the Maria Manetti Shrem and Elizabeth Segerstrom California Orchestra Residency, when Cal Performances and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County will bring the world renowned Vienna Philharmonic, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and pianist Yefim Bronfman to California in March 2025.
Finally, thank you for joining us today at Cal Performances! We’re delighted to spend this time together, celebrating the very best in live music, dance, and theater.
Jeremy Geffen
Executive and Artistic Director, Cal Performances
About the Program
Sam Green (b. 1966)
KRONOS at FIFTY (2023)
Sam Green is a New York-based documentary filmmaker. He received his master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. Green’s most recent projects are “live documentaries” including his most recent film 32 Sounds, which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and is a live cinema collaboration with the legendary electronic musician JD Samson. Green’s previous live cinema works include A Thousand Thoughts, a collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller with the indie band Yo La Tengo. With all of these works, Green narrates the film in-person while musicians perform a live soundtrack.
Green’s 2004 feature-length film, the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground, tells the story of a group of radical young women and men who tried to violently overthrow the United States government during the late 1960s and ’70s. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on PBS and included in the Whitney Biennial, and has screened widely around the world.
Green is also a prolific maker of short documentaries, including: The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, lot 63, grave c, Pie Fight ’69 (directed with Christian Bruno), N-Judah 5:30, and The Fabulous Stains: Behind the Movie (directed with Sarah Jacobson). He has received grants from the Creative Capital, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. www.samgreen.to.
Sam Green’s KRONOS at FIFTY was made possible by a gift from the Bob and Jeanne Frasca Fund, with additional support from contributors to the KRONOS Five Decades Project.
Severiano Briseño (1902–1988)
El Sinaloense (The Man from Sinaloa) (1943/arr. 2001)
Arranged by Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1960)
This raucous, bawdy Mexican song about a drunken character from the western state of Sinaloa was actually written by a man who lived on the eastern coast, in the city of Tampico. Severiano Briseño, who performed in the 1950s with a popular trio called the Trio Tamaulipeco, reportedly began writing El Sinaloense at a bar in Mazatlán, in southern Sinaloa. The song was later made famous by Banda El Recodo de Don Cruz Lizarraga, one of the most well-known of the bandas sinaloenses. Banda El Recodo was founded in the 1930s by Lizarraga in the town of El Recodo, outside of Mazatlán, as a 12-member instrumental ensemble. By the time Lizarraga died in 1995, the banda had grown to 16 members, comprised mostly of brass players, with a complement of clarinetists, percussionists, and vocalists. (The band has survived the passing of its first generation of musicians, and continues to perform today.) It was a recording of this song by Banda El Recodo, with superstar singer/songwriter Juan Gabriel’s vocals, that inspired Kronos and record producer Gustavo Santaolalla to try to capture the bright timbre and virtuosity of the banda’s brass section.
Osvaldo Golijov grew up in an Eastern European Jewish household in La Plata, Argentina. He was raised surrounded by Western classical music, Jewish liturgical and klezmer music, and the new tango of Astor Piazzolla. He moved to Israel in 1983, where he studied with Mark Kopytman at the Jerusalem Rubin Academy and immersed himself in the colliding musical traditions of that city. Upon moving to the United States in 1986, Golijov earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied with George Crumb, and was a fellow at Tanglewood, studying with Oliver Knussen in the early 1990s. Golijov became personally acquainted with the Kronos Quartet at Tanglewood, and has since collaborated with the group on about 30 works. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, among many other awards. The recording of Golijov’s La Pasión Según San Marcos on Hänssler Classic received Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations in 2002. Also in 2002, EMI released Yiddishbbuk, a Grammy-nominated CD of Golijov’s chamber music, recorded by the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Kronos’ recording of Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind was released in 1997 on Nonesuch Records, with clarinetist David Krakauer.
—Sidney Chen
Osvaldo Golijov’s arrangement of Severiano Briseño’s El Sinaloense was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet and appears on the Nonesuch recording Nuevo.
Sofia Gubaidulina (b. 1931)
String Quartet No. 4 (1993)
Sofia Gubaidulina was born in Chistopol in the Tatar Republic of the Soviet Union in 1931. Until 1992, she lived in Moscow. Since then, she has made her primary residence in Germany, outside Hamburg. Gubaidulina’s compositional interests have been stimulated by the tactile exploration and improvisation with rare Russian, Caucasian, and Asian folk and ritual instruments collected by the Astreia ensemble, of which she was a co-founder, by the rapid absorption and personalization of contemporary Western musical techniques (a characteristic, too, of other Soviet composers of the post-Stalin generation that includes Edison Denisov and Alfred Schnittke), and by a deep-rooted belief in the mystical properties of music.
Her uncompromising dedication did not endear her to the Soviet musical establishment, but her music was championed in Russia by a number of devoted performers including Vladimir Tonkha, Friedrich Lips, Mark Pekarsky, and Valery Popov. Since 1985, when she was first allowed to travel to the West, Gubaidulina’s stature in the world of contemporary music has skyrocketed. She has received prestigious commissions from the Berlin, Helsinki, and Holland festivals, the Library of Congress, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and many other organizations and ensembles.
Gubaidulina is a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the Freie Akademie der Künste in Hamburg, the Royal Music Academy in Stockholm, and the German order “Pour le mérite.” Her awards include the prestigious Praemium Imperiale in Japan, the Sonning Prize in Denmark, the Polar Music Prize in Sweden, the Great Distinguished Service Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Living Composer Prize of the Cannes Classical Awards. In 2004, she was elected as a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Of String Quartet No. 4, Gubaidulina writes:
What interested me especially with this piece was how the “real” arises from the “unreal”: the “real” normal play of arco or pizzicato arising from the “unreal” transparent sounds of rubber balls on the strings; the “real” on-stage playing of the quartet arising from the “unreal” playing by the same musicians on a pre-recorded tape; the “real” colored lights arising from the “unreal” white and black (white and black, after all, represent the absence of light; color becomes “unreal” within them).
“As such, three trinities unfold: the sound of the quartet and its two recorded hypostases; the real form and its two recorded satellites; and the creative reality of the play of light and its two unreal protagonists of complete light and complete darkness.
“All the details of the piece—both its material essence and its compositional design—are derived from the basic idea that “real genuine” is born of the “unreal artificial” (and not the reverse). For me, this idea was best expressed in T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” I would be pleased if my composition were to be heard and perceived as a musical response to the creative world of that great poet.”
Sofia Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 4 was commissioned for Kronos by Mrs. Ralph I. Dorfman, the Barbican (London), and Théâtre de la Ville (Paris). Kronos’ recording of String Quartet No. 4 can be found on the Nonesuch recordings Night Prayers and Kronos Quartet: 25 Years. Gubaidulina’s String Quartet No. 2 appears on Kronos’ Nonesuch recording Short Stories.
Peni Candra Rini (b. 1983)
Segara Gunung (2023)
Arranged by Jacob Garchik (b. 1976) and Andy McGraw (b. 1974)
Peni Candra Rini is the daughter of a master puppeteer from East Java, Indonesia, and one of few female contemporary composers, songwriters, poets, and vocalists who performs sinden, a soloist-female style of gamelan singing. Strongly committed
to preserving and sharing the musical traditions of her country, Candra Rini has created many musical compositions for vocals, gamelan, and karawitan, and has collaborated with various artists worldwide, including Katsura Kan, Noriko Omura, Aki Bando, Kiyoko Yamamoto (JP), Found Sound Nation New York, Elena Moon Park (USA), Ali Tekbas (Turkey), Mehdi Nassouli (Morocco), Asma Ghanem (Palestine), and Rodrigo Parejo (Spain), among many others.
Candra Rini has collaborated with various gamelan groups from all over the world, and has performed at major festivals including Mascot SIPA Solo International Performing Arts 2016, TEDx Ubud 2019, Big Ears Festival 2019, Mapping Melbourne 2018 Multicultural Art Festival, International Gamelan Festival 2018 Surakarta, Indonesian Tong–Festival Festival 2018 in The Hague, Holland Festival 2017, WOMADelaide festival 2014 in Adelaide, Spoleto Dei Duo Mondi Festival 2013, and Lincoln Center White Light Festival 2011. Her recorded albums include Ayom (2019), Timur (2018), Agni (2017), Mahabharata – Kurusetra War (2016), Daughter of the Ocean (2016), Bhumi (2015), Sekar (2012), and Bramara (2010).
In 2012, Candra Rini completed an artist residency at the California Art Institute with funding from the Asian Cultural Council. During that time, she appeared as a guest artist at eight American universities and participated in master classes with vocal master Meredith Monk. In addition to this extensive work as a performer, Candra Rini is also a lecturer in the Karawitan Department, an Aga Khan Laureate, and a former Fulbright Scholar. In 2021, she earned a doctorate in musical arts from the Indonesian Art Institute (ISI) in Surakarta.
About Segara Gunung, Peni Candra Rini writes:
This music is about the mountains and the sea, and the respect we have for them in Indonesia. Mountains symbolize the unity of humans and the divine and are thought to be the abode of the Gods. The sea is a woman, the spring of springs and a source of all life.
Indonesia is also a ring of fire, encircled by active volcanoes and frequently shaken by earthquakes. The mountain brings both destruction and life. The ash from frequent eruptions has created some of the most fertile soil in the world. Villages are damaged by the eruptions but then reap the boon of the harvest.
But the traditional respect and reverence of the land and sea has eroded in my country—in your country—pushed aside by greed. Mountains become the backdrop for tourist photos and tourism erodes the environment. Waters are rising, washing villages into the sea.
Ultimately, we must remember that mother earth will clean house: burning us up and washing us clean. Ready or not. Segara Gunung is my response to these changes.
The second movement of this piece is titled Udan, or “rain.” Rain holds a special place in the childhood memories of all Indonesians. Rain is honored as a celebration of growth, returning buds to the tips of dry branches. Thunder and lightning inspire awe, alongside the joy of refreshing showers. The earth responds with the delicious aroma of water hitting parched soil and the perfume of flowers bursting in bloom, shaking off their withered leaves. Our childhood memories of rain are suffused with a sense of hope and rebirth.
But now those joyful childhood memories are being replaced by an unsettling fear. Our rhythms of monsoon and dry season have become irregular and unpredictable. Rains come with such force they wash away villages, like a never-ending sobbing, eroding hope. Nostalgia and fear transform into a fierce protectiveness, to ensure that we protect our environment and never again take it for granted.
Shadow Theater developed by:
Peni Candra Rini (Indonesian Institute of Arts Surakarta)
Andy McGraw (University of Richmond)
Ranang Agung Sugihartono (Indonesian Institute of Arts Surakarta)
Midiyanto (University of California, Berkeley)
Leslie K Gray (Triumvirate Pi Theatre, Los Angeles)
Wejo Seno Yuli Nugroho (Indonesian Institute of Arts Surakarta)
Students and faculty from the Institut Seni Indonesia Surakarta, including: Aries Budi Marwanto, Sri Marwati, Koko Is Prayogo, Pendi Puji Nugroho, Dayung Lampahsae, Hanif Gilang Arwika, and Ryvaldo Mahendra Putra
Peni Candra Rini’s Segara Gunung (Ocean-Mountain), arranged by Jacob Garchik and Andy McGraw, was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet in celebration of its 50th anniversary by Aga Khan Music Programme, Andrea A. Lunsford, and Kirsten & Gilad Wolff. Additional commissioning support was provided by KRONOS Five Decades Lead Partners Cal Performances/University of California Berkeley, Carnegie Hall, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Portland Friends of Chamber Music, and Stanford Live, and by Partners Arizona Arts Live/University of Arizona, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, Green Music Center at Sonoma State University, The Royal Conservatory of Music, and Washington Performing Arts.
The development of this work was supported by Jagad Sentana Art Music Production, Suryadi Nugroho, Andy McGraw & Idud Sentana Art, Indonesian Institute of Arts Surakarta, University of Richmond, University of California Berkeley, and the Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology.
Environmental sounds recorded in Borneo, courtesy of Yoga Nugraha Usmad.
Steve Reich (b. 1936)
Triple Quartet (1999)
Steve Reich has been recognized internationally as one of the world’s foremost living composers. Starting in the 1960s, his pieces It’s Gonna Rain, Drumming, Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, Different Trains, and many others helped shift the aesthetic center of musical composition worldwide away from extreme complexity and towards rethinking pulsation and tonal attraction in new ways. He continues to influence younger generations of composers and mainstream musicians and artists all over the world.
Born in New York, Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell University and studied at Juilliard with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. After receiving his MA in music from Mills College, Reich studied drumming at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana and traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures in New York and Jerusalem. Reich founded his own ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, which since 1971 has frequently toured the world, performing at venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall and the Bottom Line cabaret.
Reich’s 1988 piece Different Trains, written for Kronos, marked a new compositional method, rooted in It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, in which speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments. In 1990, he received a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition for Different Trains as recorded by Kronos on Nonesuch. He has gone on to win Grammy Awards for his piece Music for 18 Musicians and an album of his percussion works by Third Coast Percussion. His Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.
He received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge award in Madrid, the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, and the Gold Medal in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and awarded honorary doctorates by the Royal College of Music in London, the Juilliard School in New York, and the Liszt Academy in Budapest, among others.
About Triple Quartet, Reich writes:
Triple Quartet is dedicated to the Kronos Quartet. It is for three string quartets. For Kronos or any other single string quartet to perform the piece they must prerecord quartets two and three and then play the quartet one part along with the prerecorded tape. Alternately, the piece can be played by 12 players with no tape.The piece is in three movements: fast–slow–fast. It is organized harmonically on four dominant chords in keys a minor third apart: E minor, G minor, B-flat minor, C-sharp minor, and then returning to E minor to form a cycle. The first movement goes through this harmonic cycle twice with a section about one minute long on each of the four dominant chords. The result is a kind of variation form. Rhythmically, the first movement has the second and third quartet playing interlocking chords while the first quartet plays longer melodies in canon between the first violin and viola against the second violin and cello. The slow movement is more completely contrapuntal with a long slow melody in canon in all 12 voices. The third movement resumes the original fast tempo, maintains the harmonic chord cycle but treats all the previous material in the piece more freely.
Biography reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, David A. and Evelyne T. Lennette, Patricia Unterman and Tim Savinar, and Meet the Composer/Arts Endowment Commissioning Music/USA, which is made possible by generous support from The Helen F. Whitaker Fund, and The Catherine Filene Shouse Foundation.
Michael Gordon (b. 1956)
gfedcba (2023)
Michael Gordon is known for his monumental and immersive works. Decasia, for 55 retuned spatially positioned instruments (with Bill Morrison’s accompanying cult-classic film) has been featured on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Minimalist Jukebox Festival and at the Southbank Centre. Timber, a tour-de-force for percussion sextet, played on amplified microtonal simantras, has been performed on every continent, including by Slagwerk Den Haag at the Musikgebouw and Mantra Percussion at BAM. Natural History, a collaboration with the Steiger Butte Drum of the Klamath tribe, was premiered by the Britt Festival Orchestra and Chorus on the rim of Crater Lake (Oregon) by conductor Teddy Abrams and is the subject of the PBS documentary Symphony for Nature. Gordon’s vocal works include Travel Guide to Nicaragua, an autobiographical choral work for The Crossing; the opera What to wear with the legendary director Richard Foreman; and the film-opera Acquanetta with director Daniel Fish. For the 2023–24 season, the Kronos Quartet premieres Gordon’s new work of miniatures for string quartet featuring video-vignettes. Gordon and Kronos Quartet have a collaborative partnership extending over decades. Their most recent collaboration, Campaign Songs, featured songs from the canon of American patriotic music in abrasive new arrangements that reflect the issues and division of American life in the 2020s. Campaign Songs was released this summer on Cantaloupe Music. Other Kronos collaborations have included Clouded Yellow (2010), Exalted (2010), The Sad Park (2006), and Potassium (2000).
gfedcba is a modular suite of several short movements and interludes that takes inspiration from Haydn’s scherzos to bring humor, fun, and laughter to the concert hall. Individual movements are accompanied by an optional video element, and can be presented alone, in various groupings, or as a complete collection, depending on the setting. Gordon’s gfedcba travels through a kaleidoscopic world of humor, wit, and pulse.
Video for String Quartet B by Laurie Olinder.
Video for Interlude 1 courtesy of Funda Yildiz, The Life of Leo Cat.
Michael Gordon’s gfedcba was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet in celebration of its 50th anniversary by Andrea A. Lunsford and Kirsten & Gilad Wolff. Additional commissioning support was provided by KRONOS Five Decades Lead Partners Cal Performances/University of California Berkeley, Carnegie Hall, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts/University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Portland Friends of Chamber Music, and Stanford Live, and by Partners Arizona Arts Live/University of Arizona, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, Green Music Center at Sonoma State University, The Royal Conservatory of Music, and Washington Performing Arts.
Nicole Lizée (b. 1973)
ZonelyHearts (2022)
Called “a brilliant musical scientist” (CBC) and “breathtakingly inventive” (Sydney Times Herald, Australia), and lauded for “creating a stir with listeners for her breathless imagination and ability to capture Gen-X and beyond generation” (Winnipeg Free Press), award-winning composer and video artist composer Nicole Lizée creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Alexander McQueen, thrash metal, early video game culture, 1960s psychedelia, and 1960s modernism. She is fascinated by the glitches made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them, and integrates them into live performance.
Lizée’s compositions range from works for orchestra 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, omnichords, stylophones, Simon™, vintage board games, and karaoke tapes. In the broad scope of her evolving, oeuvre she explores such themes as malfunction, reviving the obsolete, and the harnessing of imperfection and glitch to create a new kind of precision.
In 2001, Lizée received a master’s degree in music from McGill University. After a decade and a half of composition, her commission list of over 50 works is varied and distinguished and includes Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Proms, the San Francisco Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Banff Centre, Bang On A Can, Sō Percussion, and numerous others.
Lizée was recently awarded the prestigious 2019 Prix Opus for Composer of the Year. In 2017, she received the SOCAN Jan V. Matejcek Award. In 2013, she received the Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. She is a two-time JUNO nominee for Composition of the Year. She is a Lucas Artists Fellow (California) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow (Italy). In 2015, she was selected by acclaimed composer and conductor Howard Shore to be his protégée as part of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards. This Will Not Be Televised, her seminal piece for chamber ensemble and turntables, placed in the 2008 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers’ Top 10 Works.
Lizée was Composer in Residence at Vancouver’s Music on Main from 2016–18. She is a Korg Canada and Arturia artist.
About ZonelyHearts, Lizée writes:
Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone: a singular series brimming with imagination and creativity that left an indelible impression on its audience. The tone and messaging inherent in the series were powerful, unrelenting, and often controversial but wholly relevant; and it remains relevant—arguably more than ever—today.
ZonelyHearts does not sample content from the series but rather takes its cue from the tone and certain subject matter and messages—namely: mind control, censorship, surveillance, brainwashing, and revisionist history through altering and banning books. (These issues have a personal importance.) Perhaps its strongest message is freedom of expression and freedom to take artistic risks—both of which resonate strongly with me.
The sounds and visual elements from the Twilight Zone series have become iconic. From a compositional perspective, these elements are as appealing to me as any traditional member of the orchestra. Even Rod Serling’s voice in his narrations and introductions imparts a unique timbre and musical inflection. In ZonelyHearts, specially created sounds and custom-made devices are integrated to mirror and embody the spirit of the series in my own way. Part of the joy of experiencing the TV series is its ability to surprise, and I look to convey this element in my own work.”
Nicole Lizée’s ZonelyHearts was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Andrea Lunsford and the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English Centennial.