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BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC (BAM) 1995 NEXT WA VE FESTIVAL

EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT

THEKRONOSQUARTETPERFORMS TWO WORLD PREMIERES DMITRI YANOV-YANOVSKY'S CONJUNCTIONS AND ZHOU LONG'S THE ALTERNATIVES

SELECTIONS FROM 'S THE CA VE, A WORK BY FRANGHIZ ALI-ZADEH PLUS NEW YORK PREMIERES BY: , MARIO LA VISTA, P.Q. PHAN AND HARRY PARTCH

KRONOS QUARTET CONCERT, NOVEMBER 16, BAM CAREY PLAYHOUSE

KRONOS QUARTET CONCERT WITH THE PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA NOVEMBER 17 AND 18, BAM OPERA HOUSE

The Kronos Quartet will perform a concert on November 16 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) Carey Playhouse, during the 1995 NEXT WA VE Festival, sponsored by Philip Morris Companies Inc. As part of its ongoing exclusive New York residency at BAM, the quartet presents selections from Steve Reich's The Cm•e and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh's Mugam Sayagi and the New York premieres of Julia Wolfe's new work Dig Deep, of Mario Lavista's Musica para Mi Vecino, of P.Q. Phan's Cltildren's Games and Tragedy at the Opera and of Barstow: Eight Hitchhikers' Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California, composed by Harry Partch and arranged by Ben Johnston. The Wolfe, Lavista, Phan and Ali-Zadeh pieces were written and the Partch piece was arranged for the Kronos Quartet. In addition, the quartet, with the Orchestra (BPO) conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, will perform two world premieres, Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky's Conjunctions for String Quartet, Orchestra and Tape and Zhou Long's Alternatives for String Quartet and Orchestra both written for the Kronos Quartet, and Lou Harrison's New First Suite for Strings and Bela Bartok's Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin on November 17 and 18 at the BAM Opera House . Both the BAM Carey Playhouse and Opera House are located at 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y .

The Kronos Quartet, which is dedicated to the promotion and performance of contemporary music and to the development of the 2 string quartet repertoire, performs a range of new works by from the around the world . The Kronos Quartet has served as a sounding board for ideas that would hardly ever permeate the conventional quartet and has done much to alter the public perception of a string quartet's repertoire. Combining a unique musical vision with a fearless dedication to experimentation, the critically acclaimed Kronos Quartet has assembled a body of work unparalleled in its range and scope of expression, and in the process, has captured the attention of audiences world-wide. The Kronos Quartet is comprised of David Harrington and John Sherba, violins, Hank Dutt, viola, Joan Jeanrenaud, cello.

When the Kronos Quartet started in 1973, it was the only string quartet dedicated exclusively to 20th­ century music. Its recording, which recently have topped the Billboard classical charts, have explored contemporary music from the former Soviet Union and Africa as well as the United States and Europe, mixing the works of such blues and jazz figures as Willie Dixon, Omette Coleman and with post-minimalists Steve Reich, Terry Riley and new transcendentalists Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Part .

In 1986, the Kronos Quartet performed three different programs during the NEXT WA VE Festival which was the quartet's first major New York showcase . The concerts included the world premiere of Terry Riley's Salome Dances for Peace, Parts I and II and New York premieres of the Kronos Quartet's version of Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze, Philip Glass' Mishima Quartet, Thelonius Monk's composition Monk Suite and LaMonte Young's Five Small Pieces and other works . The quartet began its two-season exclusive New York residency at BAM in the spring of 1995, with concerts featuring works by George Crumb, Henryk Gorecki, Elliot Carter, Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, Brent Michael Davids, John Adams, , Don Byron and others.

Composer Steve Reich and video artist Beryl Korot's The Cave (which received its American premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 1993 NEXT WA VE Festival), is a visionary work combining opera, theater and video . The piece, whose title refers to the cave ofMachpela in the West Bank town of Hebron, which is reputed to be the burial place of Abraham and his wife -- and one of the few places where Jews and Muslims can pray together -- is based on a set of videotaped interviews with prominent citizens in West and East Jerusalem and America. As in earlier works of Reich, much of the piece's material comes from recorded interviews -- from fragments of speech, rarely exceeding a short sentence -- which are repeated in musical form by instruments and voices. Translating language into music, Reich takes dictation from the speakers, imitating their reflections, repeating rhythms, motifs and harmonies which are revealed in individual voices . By doubling the speech fragments, he creates an almost ceremonial style of biblical chanting, presenting the spoken word in its various melodies.

Mr . Reich's music draws on different techniques he has developed throughout his career, manipulating fragments of speech as in It' Gonna Rain ( 1965), punctuating sung sacred texts with sharp rhythmic thrusts and emphases, as in Tehillim (1981 ), and using speech as a musical source of rhythm and gesture as in Different Trains (1988) , which was composed for the Kronos Quartet.

Dig Deep, Julia Wolfe's latest work, is a manifestation of the urban spirituality of her compositions, influenced by speed metal, Appalachian folk music, and city noise and was written for the Kronos Quartet . Wolfe's work has sprung into the consciousness of the musical cognoscenti through a few startling individual compositions for the orchestra, string quartet, chorus and chamber ensemble, and she is

more. .. 3 now rightfully regarded as one of the key musical voices of her generation. Her appetite for music is wide­ ranging and voracious, including the late works of Beethoven, her passion for the rock band Led Zeppelin and her love for traditional American folk music, influences which can be heard in her work. Yet, her music is a pastiche of styles; disparate sounds and structures are put to new, unexpected uses.

Wolfe has recently received commissions from the Mary Flager Cary Charitable Trust (for the Bang on a Can All-Stars), the Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Orkest de Volharding, the Koussevitzky Foundation (for the Cassatt Quartet), Meet The /Reader's Digest Commissioning Program (for the Lark Quartet), the Rotterdam Arts Council, The Huddersfield Festival (for Piano Circus), and the Panamerican Chamber Players (Mexico City) . Her works have been performed at numerous concerts and festivals throughout the U.S. and abroad including the Holland Festival, the San Francisco Symphony Wet Ink Series, Tanglewood, Other Minds Festival (S.F.), and the South Bank's Meltdown Festival (U.K.) and will be toured in Europe this spring by Ensemble Modem .

Wolfe is currently recording a compact disc of recent works for Point Records . Other recordings of her work can be heard on Sony Classical, Argo/Decca, CRl and Newport Classics . In 1987, with composers Michael Gordon and David Lang, she founded 's Bang on a Can Festival where she is currently Co-Artistic Director. She is also co-founder of the Wild Swan Theatre in Ann Arbor . Dig Deep was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Nora Norden .

Mario Lavista was born in Mexico City in 1943. After studying with Carlos Chavez and Rodolffo Halffi:er, he was invited by the French government to continue his training at the Schola Cantorum with Jean Etienne Marie. This European influence was a major turning point for Lavista . In 1970, he formed the improvisation group Quanta, which explored simultaneous creation and interpretation and the relation of live music to the electro-acoustic . In addition to his numerous works for orchestra and chamber ensembles, Lavista has written operas, musicals and film scores .

Of Musica para mi Vecino, Lavista writes : "I wanted to define the limits within which I could compose the studies of the string quartet. This limit was defined in the initial phase of the creat ive process, when I composed one of the studies and saw that the procedure I employed for that particular segment could be extended to the entire piece .... each piece operates from these technical limits.

Musica para mi Vecino was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato , Mexico .

Composer P.Q. Phan was born in Vietnam in 1962. He became interested in music while studying architecture in the late 1970's, and taught himself to play the piano, compose and orchestrate. In 1982 Phan immigrated to the United States and began formal musical training . He graduated from the University of Southern California and received a Master's degree in Composition from the University of Michigan . Phan is currently an Assistant Professor in Composition at Cleveland State University .

Phan's music has been performed throughout the United States, Europe and Japan . His honors include several ASCAP awards and Meet the Composer Grants, residencies at the MacDowell Colony, and commissions from ensembles including the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and the Pittsburgh New Music more. .. 4 Ensemble. Phan was guest composer at the '94 New Music Festival at University of California-Santa Barbara and the '95 Asian Composers' Forum in Sendai, Japan. Phan's current focus in composing involves the integration of Southeast Asian and Western musical aesthetics. Tragedy at the Opera and Children Games are two solo string quartet movements from a four-piece work entitled Memoirs of a Lost Soul. The other two movements in the work include traditional Vietnamese instruments including the monochord zither, dan bau, and a three-string lute-like instrument, dan day.

Memoirs of a Lost Soul was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Hancher Auditorium /University of Iowa .

Arranged by Partch's student Ben Johnston, Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker's Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, Calif omia was composed in 1941 and became the opening section to Partch's cycle of American Pieces, The Wayward (1941-1943) .

Ben Johnston, who arranged Barstow: Eight Hitchh iker's and who studied with Partch, describes the powers of his cycle of Partch's music as following: 11 US. Highball was the first piece of Partch's I heard and it's still, in a way, the piece I value the most. That piece and Barstow date from the Depression , Partch's hobo days: a period in which Partch was 'on the rails'. In that way, these pieces are partly autobiographical and that's why they have so much punch. They came from the guts ."

Self-taught as a theorist , living on the margins of society and ignored by most musical institutions, Harry Partch sought musical inspiration and materials outside the European tradition and came to be recognized as one of the most innovative iconoclastic and genuinely American composers of our century . Partch's lifelong effort - begun in 1920 - was to create a monophonic music that returned to what he believed was the primal, ritualistic, corporeal state that music had long ago abandoned : a music arising from human speech and the natural acoustic musical intervals generated by sounding bodies, a concept he called "corpo-reality" .

Born in 1901 in Oakland, California, Partch's childhood was spent in California, New Mexico and Arizona. Along with his early introduction to the local Mexican and Y aquil Indian music in southeastern Arizona, Partch's parents, former Presbyterian missionaries in , shared with him Chinese folk songs and lullabies. In 1920 Partch briefly enrolled in the University of Southern California's School of Music, but left it after a couple of years to move to San Francisco where he frequented Mandarin theaters .

Giving up both private music teachers and music schools, he began to read about music in public libraries and to compose without academic restrictions. Partch's rejection of European concert music and its system of twelve-tone equal temperament, led him to use a scale with forty-th ree tones to the octave, which in tum forced him to invent new musical instruments . Partch's decisive break with European musical tradition came in 1930 when he burned fourteen years worth of his own music.

His works from 1930-40 used his own instruments in small-scale, intimate bardic settings of Chinese poems, biblical verses, scenes and songs from Shakespeare and American hobo texts . As he invented original percussion and string instruments, Partch turned in the l 950's and l 960's to large-scale theatrical and dramatic compositions that extended his concept of "corpo-reality ." Though Partch was met with enthusiasm from audiences, music departments generally remained hostile and unsupportive and his more ... 5 composing, instrument building and music promotion relied upon sales of subscriptions for his recordings, various temporary employment, and the assistance of friends and supporters .

Ben Johnston was born in Macon, Georgia in 1926 and attended the College of William and Mary Richmond, Virginia. After Navy service in World War II, he received his masters degree in music from Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. His self-professed "fascination with sound from a scientific point of view" was manifested in an accelerating interest in acoustics . After reading Partch's book "Bitter Music", Johnston struck up a correspondence and eventua11ymoved to California to study with him. Johnston worked with Partch for six months in 1950 and performed for his recordings . Through Partch, he met Darius Milhaud at Mitts College in Oakland, where he later received a second masters degree. Johnston went on a position in the dance program at the University of 111inois,and for five years he also acted as Chairman of the University's Festival of Contemporary Arts.

This arrangement of Barstow : Eight Hitchhikers' was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Hancher Auditorium/University of Iowa .

Franghiz Ali-Zadeh was born in Azerbaijan, a republic of the Soviet States . She first came to prominence as a composer and performer while still a student of the celebrated composer Kara Karayev . Her compositions draw from the vocabulary of modern European classical music, including the Second Viennese School, and incorporate the sounds of mugham (the main modal unit of Arabic music), music traditional to Azerbaijan. As a pianist, she performs at international festivals, playing programs that include the works of Crumb, Messiaen and Schoenberg, composers she has popularized for Eastern audiences. She is recognized as a master interpreter of works by 20th century European and American composers, the Soviet avant garde, and traditional Azerbaijanian and Armenian composers .

Of Mugam Sayagi, Ali-Zadeh writes : "Kronos encouraged me to use the Azeri musical tradition of Mugami - a secret language used in the 16th century to disguise emotions discouraged in Islam. It begins as a meditation, in darkness, only the cello is lit, trying to wake the world with the call to prayer. The cello is the composer's voice -- a woman. Nothing changes, and you don't believe it can. It goes on and on, then suddenly, it explodes, in a flash! Concealed passion breaks out in wild dancing, or in virtuosic cadenzas. The violin plays an unbounded song oflove where the soul flies high into the sky. Then comes the finale, and an end. The cello is alone again, intoning the sunset prayer. The sound of the triangle echoes a myriad of stars."

Mugam Sayagi was commissioned for Kronos by Nora Norden and appears on Kronos' Elektra/Nonesuch recording, "Night Prayers" .

Lou Harrison was born in Portland , Oregon, in 1917. In 1926 his family moved to California, where he lives overlooking the Pacific in a flat, rambling, ranch-style house.

"Exotic" is an adjective commonly applied to the music of Lou Harrison ; and correctly, too, when one considers his many works whose inspiration comes from the East. This affinity is only one part of Harrison's creative personality. His music ranges from the ecclesiastically archaic to the delicacies of scales in pure, non-tempered intonation and microtonal divisions of utmost sensitivity.

more. .. 6 Two of Lou Harrison's important teachers were Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg; his earliest musical interests included Ives, Ruggles, Cowell and Riegger . Like John Cage (also a student of Cowell), he became fascinated by strange and unorthodox sonorities, and incorporated such curious sounds as those vibrating from automobile brake drums, lengths of plumber's pipes, and galvanized washtubs . He has immersed himself in Frescobaldi, Rameau, Couperin and Handel. He has been fascinated by the possibilities of serial techniques and dissonant counterpoint. He has delved profoundly into the primitive source materials of music and into ethnic folk patterns .

The physical structure of The New First Suite For Strings can be seen as a journey from Western music to Eastern and back again. The concept of the key signature is a Western one and Harrison makes use of it in the first movement, which is in F major. He shifts in the second movement to C major, and thereafter slowly digresses from the Western system. The third movement, which contains one sharp and one flat ( the key of which is unidentifiable), reflects an attempt to approximate a non-Western intonational system. The fourth movement represents a return to the original system with the key ofD major.

Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, (then part of the Soviet Union) and is the son of distinguished composer and professor Felix Yanov-Yanovsky. Yanov-Yanovsky studied composition and instrumentation with his father, graduating from the Tashkent State Conservatoire in 1986. As a young composer, Yanov-Yanosky was exposed to the music of contemporary European and American composers including John Cage, George Crumb and Charles Ives. He has been deeply influenced by the ancient musical and cultural traditions of Central Asia where he lives. Having taken part in composers' competitions, festivals and concerts of modem music since age 20, Yanov-Yanovsky's works have received several honors, including first prize for his String Quartet in the 1985 All-Union Competitions of Young Composers in Moscow . Conjunctions was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by David and Evelyn Lennette .

Zhou Long is a native of , China. He was the Composer-in-Residence with the China Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra after graduating from the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music in 1983. Zhou came to the United States in 1985 and received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree from in 1993, where he studied composition with Chou Wen-chung, and George Edwards. He is now the music director of Music From China in New York City.

Dr. Zhou has won many prizes, commission awards and fellowships, such as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation in 1994, a grant from The Aaron Copland Fund For Music in 1994, a commission award from Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University in 1993, a composer fellowship from National Endowment for the Arts (USA) in 1993, a Meet The Composer/Reader's Digest Commission Award for the Shanghai, Chester and Ciompi String Quartets in 1993, a Composer/Choreographer Project Commission Award for Chen and Dancers from Meet The Composer in 1993, a commission award from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress (USA) for the New Music Consort and Music From China in 1993, a commission from Inter-Artes, London in 1993, a commission from Taiwan Symphony Orchestra in 1993, commissions from the Kronos Quartet and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble in 1992. He took first prize in the 5th International Composition Competition in d'Avray, France in 1991, the Rapaport Prize from Columbia University in 1991, and first prize in the Ensemblia Composition Competition, Monchengladbach , Germany in 1990, and many others.

more ... 7 Zhou's compositions have been performed at Carnegie Hall, , the 92nd Street Y, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Merkin Concert Hall in New York City, as well as in Europe, Asia and China, broadcast on National Public Radio in Washington D.C., WNYC in New York , WDR in Germany, BBC in England, CCTV and radios throughout China. Recordings of his collected orchestral and Chinese instrumental works have been made by the China Record Company and Delos. Composers Recordings Inc. in New York will release a CD of his chamber music which will be distributed worldwide.

The Alternatives was commissioned for the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra and the Kronos Quartet by the National Endowment for the Arts . It is a four movement work inspired by the writings of four poets of the Tang dynasty .

Bela Bartok was born in 1881 in Nagyszentniklos, in Southern Hungry (modem day Romania), and died in New York City in 1945. The Miraculous Mandarin was his third and final stage work. After the success of his ballet The Wooden Prince (1917), and the opera Bluebeard's Castle {1918), the failure ofthis one­ act pantomime-ballet must have come as a disappointment to the composer. From its inception in 1918, the work was beset by difficulties. Bartok put the project aside during the tumultuous years of the Great War. It was not until 1923 that he finished the orchestration . It was another three years before the ballet was produced for the first time in Cologne . At its premiere such a storm of protest arose over its "immorality" that the mayor banned further performances . After a second unsuccessful production in Prague in 1927, Bartok withdrew The Miraculous Mandarin from the stage . To rescue some of the music and insure its dissemination, he extracted an orchestral suite for concert performance, and it is in this form that The Miraculous Mandarin has become best-know .

The Kronos Quartet records exclusively for Nonesuch Records . Their recordings include: Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass (1995), their first full-length collaboration featuring four string quartets, Night Prayers (1994), Bob Ostertag's All The Rage (1993), At The Grave of Richard Wagner (1993), Morton Feldman's Piano and String Quartet (1993), Henryk Gorecki's String Quartets# 1 and #2 (1993), Short Stories (1993), Pieces of Africa (1992) . Gorecki's Already It Is Dusk (1991), Astor Piazzolla's ( 1991), Kevin Volans' Hunting: Gathering ( 1991) , Witold Lutoslawski's String Quartet ( 1991), Black Angels ( 1990), which received a Grammy Nomination for Best Chamber Music Performance, Salome Dances for Peace (I 989), which received a Grammy Nomination for Best Contemporary Compositions , Different Trains (1989) , Winter Was Hard (1988), White Man Sleeps (1987), which received a Grammy Nomination for Best Chamber Music Performance and Kronos Quartet (1986) .

The Kronos Quartet performs annually in many cities including San Francisco and Los Angeles, and tours extensively with more than I 00 concerts each year in concert halls, clubs and at jazz festivals throughout the Unites States, Canada, Europe, Japan, Mexico, South America, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Australia . Recent tours have included appearances at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Kennedy Center, Montreux Jazz Festival, Carnegie Hall, Sydney Opera House , Tanglewood, London's Royal Festival and Orchestra Hall in Chicago .

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The Kronos Quartet with works by Steve Reich, Julia Wolfe, Harry Partch, Mario Lavista, P.Q. Phan and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh to be presented in a concert on November 16 at 8 :00pm at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Carey Playhouse, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn . Conducted by Dennis Russell Davies with the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO), the Kronos Quartet will perform on Novemer 17 and 18 at 8 :00pm at the BAM Opera House. Tickets are $30, $25, $20 and $15 and may be purchased after September 11 at the BAM Box Office located at 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn or by calling TicketMaster at (212) 307-4100 . For subscription, general information or reservations on the BAMBUS, call (718) 636-4100.

Since 1958, Philip Morris Companies Inc. has supported a broad spectrum of cultural programs that reflects the corporation 's commitment to innovation and creativity. Philip Morris' support of the arts focuses on contemporary and multi-cultural visual and performing arts, and is among the most comprehensive corporate cultural programs in the world . The leading corporate sponsorship for the NEXT WA VE Festival since 1985, Philip Morris is also the Founding Sponsor of the NEXT WA VE Forward Fund

The 1995 NEXT WAVE Festival is sponsored by Philip Morris Compani es Inc .

The Brooklyn Academy of Music gratefull y acknowledges the generous support from donors of the following special funds which have been established for The Campaign for BAM :

NEXT WA VE Forward Fund Philip Morris/Founding Sponsor "Supporting the Spirit oflnnovation" The Boben Foundation

Michael Bancroft Goth Endowed Annual Performance Fund The Charles and Valerie Diker Dance Endowment Fund

1995 NEXT WA VE Festival Supporters : New York City Department of Cultural Affai rs, National Endowment for the Arts , The Ford Foundation, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Inc., The Harkness Fou~dations for Dance, The Boben Foundation, Robert W . Wilson , The Howard Gilman Foundation , Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York, The Chase Manhattan Bank , New York State Council on the Arts , The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, British Airways , Lufthansa , Swatch , New York Magazine , European American Bank, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Germany , Chemical Bank, Bowne of New York , PAPER Magazine, Natural Heritage Trust , The William and Mary Greve Foundation , Inc., Mercedes-Benz , Mid Atlantic Arts Foundat ion, Mary Livingston Griggs and Mary Griggs Burke Foundation , Meet The Composer , Capezio/Ballet Makers Dance Foundation Inc ., Dance Ink, BAM Producers Council , BAM Associates and Friends of BAM.

The Andrew W . Mellon Foundation has made a three-year grant to support artistic collaborations at BAM . International presentations are supported by The Rockefeller Foundation .

BAM's Producers Council and Associates provid e annual private patronag e for BAM's NEXT WA VE Festival and also sponsor exhibitions and special events for the Festival throughout the year.

The BAM Facility is owned by the City of New York and its operation is made possible , in part , with public funds provided through the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs with support from the Brooklyn Delegation of the NewYork City Council and BrooklynBorough President Howard Golden . 11/16/95 ###