JACK Quartet

Home , Caroline Shaw, FLUX Quartet, JACK Quartet

��

�� JACK Quartet �� Christopher Otto & Ari Streisfeld, violins �� John Pickford Richards, viola ��Kevin McFarland, cello �� Wednesday, March 2, 2016, 7:30 p.m. �� Gartner Auditorium, the Cleveland Museum�� of Art �� Program �� Guillaume de Machaut Three Machaut�� Pieces �� (c. 1300–1377) (arranged by Ari Streisfeld) �� 1. Rose, Liz, Printemps, Verdure �� 2. Dame,�� de Qui Toute Ma Joie Vient �� 3. Inviolata Genitrix �� John Zorn The Remedy of Fortune (2014) (b. 1953) �� Cenk Ergün Celare �� (b. 1978) �� Intermission �� Cover�� image: Cenk Ergün’s program note for �� Celare�� and Sonore Claudio Monterverdi Selections�� from L’Orfeo, (1567–1643) arr. Kevin McFarland

Caroline Shaw Ritornello 2.sq.2.j (2014) �� (b. 1982) ��

�� Cenk Ergün Sonore �� NOTES ON THE PROGRAM thought to be one of the first great examples of opera (in which the music is more or less continuous as opposed to functioning interstitially between dramatic episodes) Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377) it seemed to me that the works by Monteverdi and Henry Three Machaut Pieces (arranged by Ari Streisfeld) are as united in ambition and spirit as they are in subject Notes will be announced from the stage matter. So, in this way, Monteverdi reflects the Henry, which motivated Twombly to inspire Pintscher, and a chain of influence is revealed. John Zorn (b. 1953) The Remedy of Fortune (2014) The excerpts from L’Orfeo presented tonight are all taken The Remedy of Fortune was composed for JACK Quartet from the fourth Act, in which Proserpina and Plutone, to premiere at The Cloisters Museum of the Metropolitan queen and king of the underworld, negotiate the terms by Museum of Art on May 30, 2015 as part of a program of the which Euridice is released from Hades to be reunited with music of Zorn. Orfeo to return to world of the living. Orfeo is instructed not to turn around as Euridice is to follow behind him as they escape the underworld, but startled by a noise he Cenk Ergün (b. 1978) turns around and she consequently vanishes. The spirits Celare and Sonore sing of how Orfeo’s passions have gotten the better of him The Cenk Ergün commission has been made possible by and sealed the lovers’ fates. the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew Due to some tricky issues with the viola scordatura (which W. Mellon Foundation, and the Chamber Music America is used by Pintscher in his works, and repurposed here to Endowment Fund. allow the instrument to emulate King Plutone) the order of events in tonight’s arrangements does not follow the dramatic art of the fourth act exactly. Moreover, the goal is to musically ruminate on this veil between life and death that serves as the backdrop (both literal and figurative) for tonight’s program. Claudio Monterverdi (1567-1643) Selections from L’Orfeo arr. Kevin McFarland —Kevin McFarland As Cy Twombly’s Treatise on the Veil was inspired by Pierre Henry’s Le Voile d’Orphée, a work of musique Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) concrète based on the Orpheus myth, I thought it would be Ritornello 2.sq.2.j (2014) fitting to arrange some of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo for string Ritornello is a long-term project, begun in 2008 with a quartet to serve as a kind of ancient ancestor to Matthias minor obsession with the Prologue of Monteverdi’s Orfeo Pintscher’s works on the program today. While Henry and the baroque ritornello aria form. The first real iteration may not have had Monteverdi’s work in mind specifically of Ritornello came about through a two-week residency when composing his electronic opus, it was nonetheless with Opera Cabal in Chicago, in January 2012, during conceived as part of a larger operatic form (entitled which I performed a 20-minute solo with film and a few Orpheus 53, composed in collaboration with Pierre 4 Schaeffer for the Donaueschingen Festival.) As L’Orfeo is 5 theatrical accessories. For two performances in October Haas’ String Quartet No. 3 In iij. Noct. “mind-blowingly 2013 I expanded the film to 30 minutes and wrote parallel good.” scores, one for 8 voices (Roomful of Teeth) and one for The recipient of Lincoln Center’s Martin E. Segal Award, string quartet (ACME). This performance is an abbreviated New Music USA’s Trailblazer Award, and the CMA/ASCAP (15’) version for quartet alone. Future iterations in different Award for Adventurous Programming, JACK has performed configurations are planned for 2015, with planned revisions to critical acclaim at Carnegie Hall (USA), Lincoln Center to the film.It’s hard to explain all of the little notions (USA), Wigmore Hall (United Kingdom), Suntory Hall that fuel Ritornello. I suppose one could say it’s my own (Japan), Salle Pleyel (France), Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ exploration of the idea of the refrain. It is also about (Netherlands), La Biennale di Venezia (Italy), the Lucerne memory, simplicity, forgetting, functional harmony (as one Festival (Switzerland), Bali Arts Festival (Indonesia), friend said, “that piece is all like V-I-V-I-V”), the strangeness Reykjavik Arts Festival (Iceland), Festival Internacional of familiarity, as well as Rip Van Winkle, Nietzsche, Terrence Cervatino (Mexico), Kölner Philharmonie (Germany), Malick, and a small pile of other things. It’s also, as Donaueschinger Musiktage (Germany), and the Wittener implied by the name, a musical project that I find myself Tage für neue Kammermusik (Germany). returning to again and again. It’s not a fixed piece, no one commissioned it, and nobody really knows what it is yet. Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, I’m looking forward to living with some of this material violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Kevin McFarland, for a very long time. Many thanks to the JACK Quartet for JACK is focused on the commissioning and performance playing this “.j” version of Ritornello 2.sq.2. of new works, leading them to work closely with composers John Luther Adams, Derek Bermel, Chaya —Caroline Shaw Czernowin, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough, Beat Furrer, Georg Friedrich Haas, Vijay Iyer, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, Steve Mackey, Matthias Pintscher, Steve Reich, ABOUT THE ARTISTS Roger Reynolds, Wolfgang Rihm, Salvatore Sciarrino, and John Zorn. Upcoming and recent premieres include works JACK Quartet by Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Toby Twining, Georg Friedrich Haas, Simon Holt, Kevin Ernste, and Simon Bainbridge. The JACK Quartet electrifies audiences worldwide with “explosive virtuosity” (Boston Globe) and “viscerally JACK operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated exciting performances” (New York Times). David to the performance, commissioning, and spread of new Patrick Stearns (Philadelphia Inquirer) proclaimed their string quartet music. The quartet has led workshops with performance as being “among the most stimulating young performers and composers at Princeton University, new-music concerts of my experience.” The Washington Yale University, Harvard University, New York University, Post commented, “The string quartet may be a 250- Columbia University, the Eastman School of Music, year-old contraption, but young, brilliant groups like the Oberlin Conservatory, Manhattan School of Music, June JACK Quartet are keeping it thrillingly vital.” Alex Ross in Buffalo, New Music on the Point, and at the Darmstadt (New Yorker) hailed their performance of Iannis Xenakis’ Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. complete string quartets as being “exceptional” and The members of the quartet met while attending the “beautifully harsh,” and Mark Swed (Los Angeles Times) Eastman School of Music and studied closely with the called their sold-out performances of Georg Friedrich Arditti Quartet, Kronos Quartet, Muir String Quartet, and members of the Ensemble Intercontemporain. 6 7 Caroline Adelaide Shaw spent a life-changing summer playing chamber music at Kinhaven Music School in Vermont, which is probably why Caroline Adelaide Shaw (b. 1982) is a New York-based she would prefer to perform barefoot whenever possible. musician appearing in many different guises. Trained Caroline loves the color yellow, avocados, otters, salted primarily as a violinist from an early age in North Carolina, chocolate, kayaking, Beethoven opus 74, Mozart opera, the she is a Grammy-winning singer in Roomful of Teeth and smell of rosemary, and the sound of a janky mandolin. in 2013 became the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for her enigmatic composition Partita for 8 Voices (also nominated for a Grammy for Best Classical Cenk Ergün Composition). She will make her solo violin debut in 2015 Cenk Ergün (b.1978, Turkey) is a composer and improviser with the Cincinnati Symphony (MusicNOW). She is the based in New York. His music has been performed by inaugural musician in residence at Dumbarton Oaks in the artists such as Sô Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Wet Ink, fall of 2014, and she will be the Composer in Residence Yarn/Wire, Ensemble Laboratorium, and Joan Jeanrenaud. for two years (through 2016) with Vancouver’s Music on As an improviser, he performs electronics in groups with Main. Caroline has also performed with ACME (American Alvin Curran, Jason Treuting, and Grey McMurray. Venues Contemporary Music Ensemble), the Trinity Wall Street that have featured Ergün’s music include New York’s Choir, Alarm Will Sound, the Mark Morris Dance Group Carnegie Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, The Roulette, The Stone; Ensemble, the Knights, Victoire, the Yehudim, and many Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw, Zurich’s Tonhalle, and others. (And she has appeared incognito as a backup singer Istanbul’s Babylon. Some events Ergün has participated in or violinist, on Saturday Night Live with Paul McCartney, are Gaudeamus Music Week, MATA Festival, Bang on a Can on Letterman with The National, on the Tonight Show with Marathon, WNYC’s New Sounds Live, Peak Performances at the Roots.) Caroline was virtually unknown as a composer Montclair University, Stanford Lively Arts, and San Francisco before the Pulitzer announcement in 2013, having written Electronic Music Festival. His first solo composition record, only a handful of pieces. While committed to maintaining a Nana, was released in 2014 on Carrier Records. Other busy freelance career as a violinist and singer, performing releases include The Art Of The Fluke with Alvin Curran and primarily contemporary classical music, she has taken Sô Percussion’s Cage 100 Bootleg Series. Ergün’s music has commissions to create new work for the Carmel Bach been described as “haunting,” “ominously throbbing” (NY Festival, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Guggenheim Times), “psychedelically meditative” (New Music Box), and Museum (FLUX Quartet), The Crossing, and the Brooklyn “conceptual rigor” (The Wire). Youth Chorus. Other personal projects include the development of an evening-length theater work, Ritornello, and a slowly-evolving ambient electronic album. Caroline John Zorn studied for fifteen years with Suzuki violin pedagogue Drawing on his experience in a variety of genres including Joanne Bath before working with Kathleen Winkler at jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, klezmer, film, cartoon, Rice (B.M. violin) and Syoko Aki (M.M. violin) at Yale, and popular and improvised music, John Zorn (b. 1953) has she is currently a doctoral candidate in composition at created an influential body of work that defies academic Princeton. She has been a Rice Goliard Fellow (busking and categories. A native of New York City, he has been a central fiddling in Sweden) and a Yale Baroque Ensemble fellow, figure in the downtown scene since 1975, incorporating and she was a recipient of the infamous Thomas J. Watson a wide range of musicians in various compositional Fellowship, to study historical formal gardens and live out formats. He learned alchemical synthesis from Harry Smith, of a backpack for a year. As a teenager many years ago, she structural ontology with Richard Foreman, how to make 8 9 art out of garbage with Jack Smith, cathartic expression at Sluggs and hermetic intuition from Joseph Cornell. Early inspirations�� include American innovators Ives, Varèse, �� Cage,�� Carter and Partch, the European tradition of Berg, Stravinsky, Boulez and Kagel, soundtrack composers �� Herrmann,�� Morricone and Stalling as well as avant-garde �� theater,�� film, art and literature. �� CREDITS �� JACK�� Quartet appears by arrangement with �� Colbert Artists Management, Inc. �� 307 Seventh Avenue, Suite 2006 | New York, NY 10001 �� UPCOMING PERFORMANCES �� Dervish �� Friday, March 11, 7:30 p.m. �� Gartner�� Auditorium �� Built upon the hauntingly charismatic vocals of Cathy �� Jordan and the virtuosity of instrumentalists Tom Morrow �� (fiddle), Liam Kelly (flute), and Shane Mitchell (accordion), �� Dervish�� has a solid foundation in legendary pub sessions �� and�� is one of Ireland’s preeminent traditional music groups. �� $53–$69, CMA members $48–$62 �� cma.org/dervish�� Qasida �� Wednesday,�� March 16, 7:30 p.m. �� Gartner Auditorium

Flamenco meets Persian Classical music in this extraordinary�� musical encounter between�� the young Sevillian�� cantaora Rosario “La Tremendita” and her Iranian peer Mohammad Motamedi. In Qasida the singer explores the�� roots of flamenco in the richly varied�� poetic songs and improvisations�� of�� Motamedi, the� young rising star of Iranian classical music. $53–$69, CMA members $48–$62 cma.org/qasida 10 ��

��