Kronos Festival 2019 kicks off with a program that features the Bay Area premiere of Glorious Mahalia, a work by Chicago-based composer Stacy Garrop that celebrates legendary singer Mahalia Jackson through the words and spirit of oral historian and activist Studs Terkel. To create the piece, Garrop scoured the Chicago History Museum and WFMT’s Studs Terkel Radio Archive. Glorious Mahalia highlights two of Terkel’s broadcasts – a concert from 1957 and an interview from 1963 – that he recorded with Jackson. The San Francisco Girls Chorus, conducted by SFGC artistic director and Kronos Festival 2019 artist-in-residence Valérie Sainte-Agathe, joins Kronos to perform the requiem Exalted, composed for Kronos by Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon.

Writer Rebecca Solnit, spoken word artist and actor Michael Wayne Turner III, singer-songwriter Meklit and storyteller and folk musician Lee Knight read selected testimonies – speeches, letters, poems, songs, petitions, and manifestos – that bring to life the extraordinary stories of Americans who helped shape the country’s social movements. These readings are part of Voices of a People’s History, a national project inspired by Voices of a People’s History of the United States, the companion volume to historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Highlighting works from Kronos’ Fifty for the Future open access education initiative, the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts’ Dragon String Quartet opens the show with music by Rhiannon Giddens, and Kronos premieres Flashlight by Stanford University composer Mark Applebaum and Enthusiasm Strategies by composer and Luna Composition Lab mentorship program for female composers co-founder Missy Mazzoli. Kronos also performs experimental electronic music producer Jlin’s Little Black Book—the score and parts, recording and other learning materials for which are being released on Kronos’ website during the Festival.

Get a taste of the guest artists and composers who will be featured during Kronos Festival 2019 on Youtube or Spotify.

Reserved Seating / Robert N. Miner Auditorium
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