Composer’s Note —Bryce Dessner

The music in Frame of Mind is an original composition by Bryce Dessner and in 2018, will be accompanied live by the Australian String Quartet.

In 2009, David Harrington asked me to write a piece for Kronos Quartet for a Australian String Quartet performance in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. I live just two blocks from the park and spend For over 30 years, the Australian String Quartet has created unforgettable many mornings running around it. The park for me symbolizes much of what I love performances for national and international audiences. Dedicated to musical about New York, especially the diversity of Brooklyn with its myriad cultures and excellence with a distinctly Australian character, their purpose is to create chemistry communities. My father’s family, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia, also lived and amplify intimacy through experiences that connect people with string quartet near the park for many years in the 1940s and 1950s before moving to Queens. music.

Aheym means ‘homeward’ in Yiddish, and this piece is written as musical evocation of From home base at the University of Adelaide, Elder Conservatorium of Music, ASQ the idea of flight and passage. As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with reaches out across Australia and the world to engage people with an outstanding my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could program of performances, workshops, commissions and education projects. Their only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective distinct sound is enhanced by a matched set of 18th century Guadagnini instruments, imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to handcrafted by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini between c.1743 and 1784 in Turin and the past. Piacenza, Italy. These precious instruments are on loan for exclusive use through the

generosity of UKARIA. Aheym eventually became the title track of my collaborative record with Kronos

Quartet. The album features four of my original compositions performed by Kronos Quartet, three of which you will hear in Rafael Bonachela’s Frame of Mind.