KRONOS Quartet
Program Notes

Jlin (b. 1987)
Little Black Book (2018)
Arranged by Jacob Garchik (b. 1976)

Jlin, one of the most prominent electronic producers of the current generation, first appeared on Planet Mu’s second Bangs & Works compilation, which had a huge impact on electronic/club music. Though she is known for bringing footwork to a wider audience, Jlin doesn’t consider herself a footwork artist. Hailing from Gary, Indiana, a place close yet distant enough from Chicago to allow her to develop a different perspective on the genre, she has morphed its sounds into something entirely new. Released in 2015, her debut album Dark Energy’s innovative sound propelled it to the top of many of the year’s Best Of lists. Jlin’s sophomore album Black Origami was recently released to even greater critical acclaim and attention. In 2017, Jlin also composed the music for a major new dance work by Wayne McGregor, one of the UK’s best known choreographers.

About Little Black Book, Jlin writes:

“I chose the name Little Black Book because there is a black notebook that I own that I literally write down every creative idea I have in it. It is my book of absolute freedom. The book is very special to me, as it was given to me on my twenty-first birthday by my eldest cousin. When Kronos approached me about doing this project I was quite ecstatic, and immediately knew I wanted to take this on from a perspective of absolute freedom of sound. I didn’t care how crazy it sounded, I just wanted the instruments and choice of instruments to be free. Freedom was my goal no matter how left-field or unconventional. I love that Kronos decided to play this track as they deemed fit versus trying to follow what I did.”

Nicole Lizée (b. 1973)
Another Living Soul (2016)

Called “a brilliant musical scientist” (CBC), “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 of Music degree from McGill University. After a decade and a half of composition, her commission list of over 50 works is varied and distinguished and includes the 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, So 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 the Composer in Residence at Vancouver’s Music on Main from 2016–18. She is a Korg Canada and Arturia artist.

About Another Living Soul, Nicole Lizée writes:

“Another Living Soul is stop motion animation for string quartet. Considered one of the most complex and idiosyncratic art forms, stop motion demands imagination, craft, isolation, an unwavering vision, fortitude, and copious amounts of time. The act of beginning the process invites both angst at the daunting task that has just begun and a kind of zen acceptance of the labyrinthine road ahead.

“The earliest stop motion—those beings and worlds created by Harryhausen, Starevich, Clokey, et al—still impresses and inspires. Oozing creativity, their work has a rough-hewn beauty and a timeless enchantment.

“Throughout its evolution, the end result has always been incrementally imbuing vitality and life to something devoid of any such spark on its own. The close quarters, intimacy, and camaraderie of the people who work in this art form are mirrored by the scrutiny and care they afford their tiny subjects and the attention to minutiae required to render a work that is lifelike. The impossible becomes possible—souls emerge from where once there were none.”

Aruna Narayan (b. 1955)
Mishra Pilu (2020)
Arranged by Reena Esmail (b. 1983)

Born in Mumbai, India, Aruna Narayan Kalle plays the Sarangi, an ancient North Indian bowed instrument is considered one of the most difficult to master, and one of the more undeveloped instruments in both its physical and musical aspects. Its traditional role as an accompaniment instrument for vocal music kept it further in the background. Narayan’s father, renowned Sarangi maestro Pandit Ram Narayan, emerged as its messiah, and due to his efforts, the Sarangi is now well ensconced in the mainstream of the Indian performing arts.

Although Narayan began her music training at the rather late age of eighteen, she made fast progress studying intensively with her father for several years. She has fully captured her father’s disciplined, serious style, yet has also developed a unique voice for her instrument with a warm and generous musical temperament. Her playing is impressive in its subtlety, precision and grace as well as in its powerful and weighty bowing. As a recipient of Pandit Ram Narayan’s musical legacy, she has consistently worked towards maintaining a highly respectable profile for her instrument.

Narayan was recently a featured soloist in a unique presentation of the music of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, performed by Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. An hourlong documentary film about this project with an exclusive profile of her has been aired by the CBC and the Bravo channels on several occasions. Her music has been featured in several international and Hollywood films and she regularly teaches in the school system introducing young people to Indian music and the Sarangi. Her recordings are available on the Nimbus (UK) and Zig-Zag (France) labels. In addition to her international performances, she frequently appears in the National Programme of Music on Doordarshan (TV) and other networks in India. Presently she resides in Toronto, Canada where she teaches and performs.

About Mishra Pilu, Aruna Narayan writes:

“This piece is based on Raag Mishra Pilu. Mishra means a mixture of a few different raags that are woven into a central theme. Raag Pilu has a textbook ascending and descending structure. However, because it allows for the inclusion of all twelve notes, it is generally conducive to a wider range of improvisation than the traditional discipline of a raag.

“Since the Kronos Quartet is known for their many successful collaborations with different genres of music, I felt that Mishra Pilu would be a perfect representation of an Indian classical music bouquet! I have maintained the usual format – the “Alaap” which is the first slow movement, followed by a “bandish,” a composition set to a 16-beat rhythm cycle called Teental. Several of these cycles are devoted to a few different raags, returning to the principal line in Pilu.”

Sky Macklay (b. 1988)
Vertebrae (2019)

The music of composer, oboist, and installation artist Sky Macklay is conceptual yet expressive, exploring extreme contrasts, surreal tonality, audible processes, humor, and the physicality of sound. Some of her pieces incorporate intermedia and extramusical narratives, addressing topics ranging from commuting times to the side effects of contraceptive and assisted reproductive technology. As a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, her next project is a chamber music album that will synthesize her work as a composer and her raucous, multiphonic-rich oboe performance practice.

Macklay has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chamber Music America (with Splinter Reeds and Left Coast Chamber Ensemble), the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University (with Ensemble Dal Niente), the Barlow Endowment (with andPlay), the Jerome Fund for New Music (with ICE saxophonist Ryan Muncy), and Kronos Quartet’s 50 for the Future project. Upcoming commissions include new works for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and Klangforum Wien. As a Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, she is also collaborating with French ensemble 2e2m.

Sky’s music has been recognized with awards and fellowships from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Civitella Ranieri, and ASCAP, and has been featured at international festivals such as Gaudeamus Muziekweek, The BBC Scottish Symphony’s Tectonics Festival, and the ISCM World New Music Days. Since being recorded on Spektral Quartet’s GRAMMY-nominated album in 2017, her iconic string quartet Many Many Cadences has been performed around the world by ten different quartets and is studied in dozens of university composition and theory classes.

As an installation artist, Sky has created and built a unique series of interactive harmonica-playing inflatable sculpture environments, which were supported by a New Music USA Project Grant and won the Ruth Anderson Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music. Harmonibots at the Waseca (MN) Art Center, MEGA-ORGAN at Judson Memorial Church in NYC, and Harmonitrees at Stetson University all use various flexible plastic shapes to channel air through deconstructed harmonicas, resulting in immersive microtonally-chorused triadic drones.

As an oboist, Sky has performed at Roulette, MATA, SPLICE Festival, the University of Louisville New Music Festival, and the Line Upon Line Winter Composer Festival. She is a founding member of the New York-based Ghost Ensemble, a group focused on collaborations with living composers and expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experiences. In their review of Ghost Ensemble’s 2019 album We Who Walk Again, Sequenza21 said, “her command of multiphonics and microtones on the oboe is prodigious.”

Originally from Minnesota, Sky completed her DMA in composition at Columbia University where she studied with George Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas, and Fred Lerdahl. She also holds degrees from The University of Memphis (MM) and Luther College (BA). An enthusiastic practitioner of creative music education, Sky taught for nine summers at The Walden School Young Musicians Program in Dublin, New Hampshire, an acclaimed summer school and festival for pre-college composers. From 2018 to 2020 she was Assistant Professor of Music at Valparaiso University. Her music published by Edition Peters.

About Vertebrae, Sky Macklay writes:

“Vertebrae are to a spine as notes are to a scale. Notes played by a prehistoric person on a xylophone of sun-dried bones.”

Peni Candra Rini (b. 1983)
Maduswara (2020)
Arranged by Jacob Garchik (b. 1976)

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), 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, a Doctoral Candidate for Musical Arts at the Indonesian Art Institute (ISI) in Surakarta.

About Maduswara, Peni Candra Rini writes:

“Javanese society’s consideration of what is in vogue has changed, and the decline of appreciation in the traditional arts has had a major impact on the existence of the female Javanese singer (sindhen); it has impacted both the singer and the audience. Today’s listeners of karawitan has become accustomed to the phenomena of nggantung rebab, which is found in the coasts of island Java far from the palaces (keraton). The phenomena of nggantung rebab is when people expect karawitan concerts to offer musical pieces (gending) with hard rhythms, songs that follow a fast tempo like those found in discotheques where visitors get drunk. The rebab is a subtle and old-fashioned instrument and is beginning to be eliminated, reflecting the move away from more delicate presentation gending. The impact is a generational gap where younger singers feel they do not need to study the classical vocabulary because it is rarely used.

“This discourse continues in contemporary karawitan, as found in campursari music, which plays the melodies of karawitan with MIDI instruments and electric keyboards. This is because those instruments are very practical, easy to carry, and also cheaper than a gamelan set. Campursari dominated the scene in the 90s and 2000s, pioneered by the late Manthous through CSGK (Campur Sari Gunung Kidul), and many commercial recordings were made and sold during that time. But many believe that campursari fails to represent the classical gamelan repertoire. Out of campursari came a generation of pesinden who were considered to have below average singing ability because the sound they produced were discordant in tone to and not in accordance with the rules of Javanese gamelan. Because of this, sindhen singing campursari are not taken seriously in art schools, a serious problem considering diversity is already lacking in those schools.

“The emergence of social media has given pesindhen access to self-promotion, which the singers now readily use. But what appears on social media often does not represent real life, and are not true achievements or true representations of the singer’s abilities. Sindhen now have the added pressure of celebrity culture, and are adored for beauty and ability to dance on stage, with flawless make-up and frenzied lights, and her duties as a singer and orator of the poetry of life takes second fiddle.

“Maduswara was arranged to encourage this generation of pesindhen to realize their duty as the conveyor of the universal values of life because, whether they are aware or not, these artists shape the spirit of the nation.”

Traditional
The House of the Rising Sun (arr. 2017)
Arranged by Jacob Garchik, after Everly Brothers

With its murky origins, stylistic pliability and irrepressible appeal over the course of a century, “House of the Rising Sun” is the quintessential American folk song. While many in the United States discovered the tune via the chart-topping 1964 version by The Animals, “Rising Sun” started circulating around Appalachia at least five decades before the British Invasion. Considering Kronos Quartet’s far-flung repertoire and ever-expanding web of international relationships, it shouldn’t be surprising that the ensemble has captured the roiling essence of a bedrock plank in the American vernacular.

“Rising Sun” has long haunted Kronos’ artistic director David Harrington’s imagination, inspiring an ongoing quest to find various interpretations. “I’ve loved that song ever since I remember first hearing it, and I’ve probably listened to most of the existing versions,” he says. Veteran journalist Ted Anthony chased down many of mysteries surrounding the song in his 2007 book Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of An American Song, but even he couldn’t answer the question of whether an actual house of prostitution (or gambling den, or prison) named Rising Sun inspired the lyric. First published in the pervasively popular pulp magazine Adventure in 1925, the lyrics reflect a “dissipation” trope found in the 16th century English broadside ballad tradition.

First recorded in 1933 for Vocalion Records by Tennessee medicine show banjo player Clarence “Tom” Ashley and harmonica ace Gwen Foster as “Rising Sun Blues,” the song took on viral momentum after budding musicologist Alan Lomax got his hands on it a few years later. He recorded 16-year-old Georgia Turner singing “The Rising Sun Blues” in Middlesboro, Kentucky in 1937, and duly entered it in the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Included in John and Alan Lomax’s 1941 book Our Singing Country with a transcription by composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, a flood of interpretations followed by the likes of Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Josh White, and most influentially Bob Dylan (at least until The Animals).

The incantatory melody is the primary draw, but the song’s timeless cautionary tale of ruination is as old as urban development itself. Claimed by African-American blues artists and old-time Appalachian and bluegrass players, “Rising Sun” exists in a protean state, equally effective when sung from a male or female perspective. Harrington was most deeply moved by the interpretation on the 1967 album The Hit Songs of the Everly Brothers, “a version that is incredibly beautiful,” he says. “They stretched themselves on it, with an unusual arrangement featuring a bowed bass.”

Harrington suggested that Jacob Garchik use the Everly’s recording as a point of departure, and his arrangement tracks closely with the structure of their interpretation. “It’s a really intense recording, a hard-hitting piece with a great Wrecking Crew studio band,” Garchik says. “We tried to capture the shape of that recording, that form, with a string quartet.”

“House of the Rising Sun” premiered in Washington D.C. Dec. 2, 2017 as part of a concert celebrating NPR Music’s 10th anniversary.

Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of The House of the Rising Sun was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

Program note by Andrew Gilbert

Antonio Haskell
God Shall Wipe All Tears Away (1935)
Arranged by Jacob Garchik (b. 1976)

When Mahalia Jackson first recorded “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away” in 1937, she was relatively unknown, an aspiring artist who had migrated ten years earlier to Chicago from her New Orleans birthplace. The song—based on Revelation 21:4 in the King James Bible: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away”—was composed in 1935 by New Orleans native Antonio Haskell. The 25-year-old Jackson recorded her seminal version for the Decca Coral label on May 21, 1937, along with “God’s Gonna Separate the Wheat from the Tares,” “My Lord,” and “Keep Me Everyday.” The session was a commercial failure.

But seven decades later, well after Jackson became internationally renowned as the Queen of Gospel, and “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away” was ensconced as a gospel masterwork (recorded by Dorothy Love Coates & the Gospel Harmonettes, the Pilgrim Travelers, and many others), Jackson’s performance caught the attention of Kronos Quartet founder and artistic director David Harrington. “The song was on the first CD of a French box set of the complete recordings of Mahalia Jackson,” Harrington recalls, “and it totally jumped out at me—the tempo, the sound of the organ, the emotion in her voice—it was all astounding. I just loved this song.”

Jacob Garchik initially arranged “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away” for the quartet’s collaborations with the Malian ensemble Trio Da Kali—in concert and on the 2017 recording Ladilikan. With singer Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté delivering the vocal in an impassioned contralto akin to that of Jackson, the strings supplied the accompaniment that had been played on organ by Estelle Allen in 1937. Retooling the piece for Kronos’ performance repertoire came naturally. “I looked at the arrangement,” Harrington explains, “and realized that [violinist] John [Sherba] and [cellist] Sunny [Yang] and I could play all the chord notes—most of the time we’re playing double stops—and that Hank [Dutt] could play the melody on viola.”

All four musicians pored over the 1937 Mahalia Jackson recording. “It became like a score, really,” Harrington says. “Hank, in particular, studied Mahalia’s vocal vocabulary. The biggest challenge was getting the emotional message of the voice.” For Harrington, Sherba, and Yang to sound even more organ-like, Kronos employs a sound design originally developed for their interpretation of the Swedish folk song “Tusen Tankar”, on which, Harrington says, “we needed to approximate a harmonium.” With Dutt filling Mahalia Jackson’s lead role, the other three musicians use heavy, metal practice mutes that dampen the strings, and sound engineer Scott Fraser adds various effects, including an octave divider on the cello.

“It’s an extension of our work,” Harrington notes. “It’s very natural. The more I’ve played with Hank over the years, the more I’ve known that his sound and Mahalia’s deserve mention in the same sentence. The performance brings together something that belongs together.”

Program note by Derk Richardson

John Coltrane (b. 1926)
Alabama (1963, arranged 2017)
Arranged by Jacob Garchik (b. 1976)

John Coltrane isn’t usually the first artist that comes to mind when thinking about the politically outspoken improvisers who changed the course of jazz in the 1950s and early ‘60s. While vanguard bandleaders and composers such as Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins coupled their creative breakthroughs with powerful statements denouncing white supremacy and supporting the struggle for civil rights, Coltrane channeled his energy into spiritual masterpieces like A Love Supreme and Meditations. But no musician ever responded to an atrocity with more soulful, anguished humanity than Coltrane’s “Alabama,” a piece the saxophonist wrote in the aftermath of the infamous 1963 KKK bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four little girls. Released on the 1964 album Live at Birdland (Impulse!), but actually recorded in the studio just weeks after the bombing, the elegy features Coltrane’s classic combo with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones.

Coltrane structured “Alabama” around the speech that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave in the church’s sanctuary three days after the bombing, moving from unfathomable sorrow to steely determination. Kronos commissioned Jacob Garchik to create an arrangement as part of Carnegie Hall’s winter 2018 festival “The ’60s: The Years that Changed America,” with the intention of premiering “Alabama” as an encore for that concert, “but we ran out of time,” David Harrington says. “Now we have this beautiful version, where each one of us gets to pay homage to the sound of John Coltrane.”

“Alabama” isn’t Kronos’ first Trane ride. Working with tenor sax great Joe Henderson, the quartet performed a Jimmy Heath arrangement of Coltrane’s sublime ballad “Naima” back in the ‘80s, a collaboration that went undocumented. But Harrington only discovered “Alabama” recently after Songlines editor Jo Frost wrote about listening to the piece on the same day that white supremacists marched in Charlottesville. Coltrane’s music is timeless, but “Alabama” is infuriatingly timely once again. Harrington quickly sought out the recording and was struck again by Coltrane’s elemental power, “one of the most central sounds in American music,” Harrington says. “Minutes later I was in touch with Jacob.”

For Garchik, the assignment came as something of a surprise. Though the jazz trombonist is widely respected on the New York scene, his work for Kronos usually involves arranging “all kinds of music I’m not familiar with from faraway places,” he says. “This was close to home. I tried to capture the subtly and simplicity of ‘Alabama’ with an arrangement that lets the quartet concentrate on the beautiful lines that Coltrane created. I kept the melody intact, but focused on the recitation part at the beginning, and accentuated its intensity. It’s a very striking and mysterious piece, unlike anything else that Coltrane wrote.”

Program note by Andrew Gilbert

Abel Meeropol (1903–1986)
Strange Fruit (1939, arranged 2016)
Arranged by Jacob Garchik (b. 1976)

Best known from Billie Holiday’s haunting 1939 rendition, the song Strange Fruit is a harrowing portrayal of the lynching of a black man in the American South. While many people assume that the song was written by Holiday herself, it actually began as a poem by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher and union activist from the Bronx who later set it to music. Disturbed by a photograph of a lynching, the teacher wrote the stark verse and brooding melody under the pseudonym Lewis Allan in the late 1930s. Meeropol and his wife Anne are also notable because they adopted Robert and Michael Rosenberg, the orphaned children of the executed communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Strange Fruit was first performed at a New York teachers’ union meeting and was brought to the attention of the manager of Cafe Society, a popular Greenwich Village nightclub, who introduced Billie Holiday to the writer. Holiday’s record label refused to record the song but Holiday persisted and recorded it on a specialty label instead. The song was quickly adopted as the anthem for the anti-lynching movement. The haunting lyrics and melody made it impossible for white Americans and politicians to continue to ignore the Southern campaign of racist terror. (According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, between 1882 and 1968, mobs lynched 4,743 persons in the United States, over 70 percent of them African Americans.)

The lyrics read, in part: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Adapted from notes by Independent Lens for the film Strange Fruit.

Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

Irving Berlin (1888–1989)
Campaign Songs #1 (God Bless America) (2020)
Arranged by Michael Gordon (b. 1956)

Campaign Songs #1 is the first in a series of Campaign Songs developed by Kronos and Michael Gordon as part of Kronos’ ongoing efforts to get out the vote ahead of the U.S. presidential election of November 2020. Each song presents a new take on a traditionally patriotic tune, distorting it to reflect the tumultuous time in which it was arranged. Conceived and created during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, the original releases were recorded individually from home by Kronos, and feature original video by Joshua Higgason.

About Michael Gordon:

Over the past 30 years, Michael Gordon has produced a strikingly diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for high-energy ensembles to major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio. Transcending categorization, this music represents the collision of mysterious introspection and brutal directness. His interest in exploring various sound textures and adding dimensionality to the traditional concert experience has led him to create numerous works for film, traditional orchestra, theater, opera, dance, and chamber works, including Potassium, The Sad Park, and Clouded Yellow for the Kronos Quartet.

Born in Miami Beach in 1956, Gordon holds a Bachelor of Arts from New York University and a Masters of Music from the Yale School of Music. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can.

Stacy Garrop (b. 1969)
Sometime I feel like a motherless child from Glorious Mahalia (2017)

Stacy Garrop is a freelance composer whose music is centered on dramatic and lyrical storytelling. Garrop has received the Barlow Prize, a Fromm Music Foundation grant, three Barlow Endowment commissions, and the Sackler Music Composition Prize, along with prizes from competitions sponsored by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Omaha Symphony, New England Philharmonic, Boston Choral Ensemble, Utah Arts Festival, and Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Theodore Presser Company publishes her chamber and orchestral works; she self-publishes her choral pieces under Inkjar Publishing Company. She is a recording artist with Cedille Records with pieces on nine CDs; her works are also commercially available on ten additional labels. She is currently serving as Composer-in-Residence with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra, sponsored by New Music USA and the League of American Orchestras. For more information, please visit her website at www.garrop.com or her all-things-composition blog at www.composerinklings.com/

About Glorious Mahalia, Garrop writes:

“Louis ‘Studs’ Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and oral historian, hosted a daily nationally syndicated radio broadcast show from Chicago’s WFMT station from 1952 to 1997. Studs’ curious, inquisitive nature led him to interview people from all walks of life over the course of his career. For WFMT alone, he conducted over 5,000 interviews. Before he worked for WFMT, Studs had a radio program called ‘The Wax Museum’ on WENR in Chicago. It was on this radio network that Studs first featured the glorious voice of Mahalia Jackson.

“Studs heard Mahalia sing for the first time around 1946. He was in a record store in Chicago when Mahalia’s voice rang out over the store’s speakers. Studs was captivated; he had to meet the woman who possessed that remarkable voice. At that time, Mahalia was gaining fame as a singer of gospels and spirituals in black churches both within Chicago and out of it, as she did a fair amount of touring around the country. Outside of these black communities, however, Mahalia wasn’t yet known. With a little sleuthing, Studs discovered where she regularly sang, at the Greater Salem Baptist Church on the South Side of Chicago. Studs went to the church, introduced himself to Mahalia, and invited her to sing on his radio program. Studs and Mahalia developed a close friendship over the ensuing decades, and they occasionally worked together professionally. As Mahalia rose to international fame and became known as the greatest gospel singer of her time, she and Studs never lost contact.

“In researching WFMT’s Studs Terkel Radio Archive, I found several broadcasts when Studs featured Mahalia Jackson and her recordings on his show. Two broadcasts in particular stood out. The first broadcast occurred in 1963, when the pair sat down for a conversation that covered a wide range of topics, including Mahalia’s experiences of working in the South, the continuing hardships she faces being a woman of color, and the civil rights efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and many others (including Mahalia, who was a staunch supporter of Dr. King). The second broadcast dates from 1957; it features Mahalia performing a number of gospels and spirituals for a live audience at a hotel in Chicago. In crafting my composition, I decided to highlight many of the salient points of Studs’ and Mahalia’s 1963 discussion, with a musical performance from the 1957 concert featured prominently in the work.

“Glorious Mahalia consists of five movements. In movement 1, Mahalia discusses the origin and meaning of the spiritual Hold on. In Stave in the ground (movement 2), she and Studs talk about the work she did when living in the South, and the continuing prejudice she faces. This is followed by a more heated discussion between Studs and Mahalia in Are you being treated right (movement 3). The fourth movement features Mahalia’s soulful performance of the spiritual Sometime I feel like a motherless child. The piece concludes with This world will make you think (movement 5), in which Mahalia speaks of her hope that we can unite as one nation.

“Kronos Quartet commissioned Glorious Mahalia for Carnegie Hall’s The 60’s: The Years That Changed America concert series. I wish to thank Kronos Quartet’s violinist David Harrington for suggesting Mahalia Jackson’s interviews with Studs Terkel as the topic for the piece, as well as Tony Macaluso, Director of the WFMT Radio Network and the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, and Allison Schein, Archivist for the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, for their help in locating and securing my chosen broadcasts within the Archive.”

Voice of Studs Terkel courtesy of the Estate of Studs Terkel. Voice of Mahalia Jackson courtesy of the Estate of Mahalia Jackson. Studs Terkel Radio Archive, courtesy Chicago History Museum and WFMT Radio Network.

Stacy Garrop’s Glorious Mahalia was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Carnegie Hall, with support from David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

Zachary James Watkins (b. 1980)
Peace Be Till (2017)

Zachary James Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, he received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College, where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. Watkins has received commissions from Documenta 14, Kronos Quartet, The Living Earth Ensemble, sfsound and the Seattle Chamber Players, among others. His Suite for String Quartet was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition, and has subsequently been performed at The Lab’s 25th anniversary celebration (San Francisco), the Labor Sonor Series at kunsthaus KuLe (Berlin), and as part of the Town Hall New Music Marathon (Seattle) featuring violist Eyvind Kang.

In 2008, Watkins premiered a new multi-media work entitled Country Western as part of the Meridian Gallery’s Composers in Performance Series, which received grants from the American Music Center and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. An excerpt of this piece is published on a compilation album entitled The Harmonic Series. He recently completed Documentado / Undocumentado, a multimedia interactive book in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez Peña, Gustavo Vasquez, Jennifer Gonzalez and Felicia Rice. ARTLIES described his sound art work Third Floor::Designed Obsolescence as ” a metaphor for the breakdown of the dream of technology and the myth of our society’s permanence.”

Watkins has performed in numerous festivals across the United States, Mexico and Europe. His band Black Spirituals opened for pioneering Drone Metal band Earth during their 2015 European tour. He releases music on the labels Sige, Cassauna, Confront (UK), The Tapeworm and Touch (UK). Novembre Magazine, ITCH, Walrus Press and the New York Miniature Ensemble have published his writings and scores. Watkins has been an artist in resident at the Espy Foundation, Djerassi and the Headlands Center for The Arts.

About Peace Be Till, Watkins writes:

“My compositions are interested in questions most of which I have yet to define. One clear concern is high vibration resonance. This can be understood any way you wish, as each of the three words have complex meanings. For me this phrase represents an interest in imagining radical energy exchange / transformation. Composing relationships that have potential to excite, resonate, grow, energize.

“Over time my output for new through-composed works has focused on site specificity, individuals, economy of resources. I often attempt single-page scores and I always try to write for specific individuals and rooms if at all possible. Strategies designed to investigate high vibration resonance.

“Peace Be Till written for the Kronos Quartet is my first truly substantial commission. When David Harrington contacted me in early 2017, I was absolutely beside myself. We met soon after and he proposed a vision that involved an important historical time and place: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream Speech” during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. David shared an inspiring moment during this speech when Mahalia Jackson, artist and close friend of Dr. King, shouts: “Tell them about the Dream! Tell them about the Dream!” This instinctual cry to action is understood to have inspired Dr. King to stray from his prepared speech and launch into an improvised version of “I Have a Dream” that comrade Clarence Jones played a role in drafting.

“Peace Be Till is about the legacy of America’s Civil Rights Movement, the important role artists play in critical Social Justice movements and the necessary dreams today. As an American born in 1980 of mixed raced African and European American heritage, I feel that I am a direct result of this struggle. A family that believed that we are one and that America is capable of embracing diversity. From day one I have always experienced racialized America and yet feel a privilege being male and heterosexual. Times are still tough. This piece pays homage to the artist’s instinct to inspire and activate, as well as our ability to wrestle with the sensitive nature of things. In my case I deal with the physics and potential power of sound. 

“In the Spring of 2017, David Harrington and I met with Dr. King’s personal lawyer and speechwriter Dr. Clarence B. Jones at the Women’s Audio Mission in San Francisco. We placed microphones in a room and recorded a conversation that focused on Dr. Jones’s own upbringing, his love of music, how he met Dr. King (a life-changing event which he calls “the making of a disciple”), the powerful “I have a Dream” speech, as well as sharing ideas about current realities. These recorded stories became my blueprint for this composition. The role of Mahalia in our human story is equally substantial and I invited a close friend and collaborator Amber McZeal to contribute by resonating her energy and voice sympathetically throughout the accompanying sound collage. This work explores simultaneous threads that weave in and out of each other with an intention to nurture and breathe.

“I want to deeply thank the Kronos Quartet for believing in me; Dr. Clarence B. Jones for his power and service to each of us; Amber McZeal for her love, depth and inspiration during this intense process; Mahalia Jackson for her unbelievable artistry and strength; and lastly Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for living, breathing, sacrificing for love and social justice.”

Zachary James Watkins’s Peace Be Till was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Carnegie Hall, with additional support from the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.