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41st Performance of the 135th annual Season51st annual Chamber arts Series

Photo: Hank Dutt (left), Joan Jeanrenaud, David Harrington, and John Sherba at Mills College (oakland, California), ca. 1980.

u M S P r e S e n t S

KronoS QuartetDavid Harrington, ViolinJohn Sherba, ViolinHank Dutt, ViolaSunny yang, Cello

Brian T. Scott, Lighting SupervisorBrian Mohr, Audio Engineer

Friday Evening, January 17, 2014 at 8:00Power Center • Ann Arbor

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Krzysztof PendereckiQuartetto per archi

John OswaldSpectre*

Geeshie Wiley,Arr. Jacob Garchiklast Kind Words+

Thelonious Monk,Arr. Randall Woolf’round Midnight+

Richard Wagner,Arr. Aleksandra Vrebalovtristan und isolde (excerpt)

Prelude+

Laurie Anderson,Arr. Jacob GarchikFlow+

Steve ReichWtC 9/11

9/11/012001WTC

i N T E R M i s s i O N

P R O G R A M

Friday and Saturday evening’s performances are supported by the Renegade Ventures Fund, a multi-year

challenge grant created by Maxine and Stuart Frankel to support unique, creative, and transformative

performing arts experiences within the UMS season.

This evening’s performance is sponsored by the University of Michigan Health System and the Candis J. and

Helmut F. Stern Endowment Fund.

George CrumbBlack angels

thirteen images From the Dark landi. departure Threnody i: Night of the Electric insects Sounds of Bones and Flutes Lost Bells Devil-music Danse Macabre

ii. Absence Pavana Lachrymae Threnody ii: Black Angels! Sarabanda de la Muerte oscura Lost Bells (Echo)

iii. Return God-music Ancient Voices Ancient Voices (Echo) Threnody iii: Night of the Electric insects

For Black Angels:Laurence Neff, Lighting and Stage DesignerBrian Mohr, Sound DesignerCalvin Ll. Jones, Technical Director

* Written for Kronos / + Arranged for Kronos

Following this evening’s concert, please feel free to remain in your seats and join us for a post-performance Q&A with members of the Kronos Quartet.

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Media partnership provided by WGTE 91.3 FM and WRCJ 90.9 FM.

Special thanks to Emily Barkakati for her support of and participation in events surrounding tonight's concert

by the Kronos Quartet.

Kronos Quartet appears by arrangement with David Lieberman Artists’ Representatives.

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Quartetto per archi (1960/68) Krzystof PendereckiBorn November 23, 1933 in Debica, Poland

Kronos revisits a group milestone — the quartet’s first ever-staged production (designed by Larry Neff), Live Video (1986) — in this reprise performance of Penderecki’s early work for string quartet. One in a series of early-1960s pieces that would garner the young Polish composer an international reputation, the Quartetto per archi overflows with musical events and textures. Layers of lightly tapping bows give way to the crackle of plucked strings, barely audible bowed harmonics, sudden low-register growls, and more. This is tantalizing music, the sound of intriguing extremes: high and low, gentle and harsh, explosive and hushed. Mr. Penderecki also brought this fearlessly inventive approach to writing for strings to his large-ensemble works of the period, including 1959’s critically acclaimed Anaklasis (featuring 42 strings) and the harrowing Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1959–61), a 10-minute piece for 52 strings that remains one of the most popular of his works throughout the world. It was also with the Threnody that the composer debuted a new form of optical notation for his work. Like so many inventions, this one was born of necessity:

I had to write in shorthand, something for me to remember, because my style of composing at that time was just to draw a piece first and then look for pitch…. I just wanted to write music that would have an impact, a density, powerful expression, a different expression…. I used to see the whole piece in front of me — Threnody is very easy to draw. First you have just the high note, then you have this repeating section, then you have this cluster going, coming — different direction from the one note, 12, and back — using different

shapes. Then there is a louder section; then there’s another section, then there is the section which is strictly written in 12-tone technique. Then it goes back to the same cluster technique again, and the end of the piece is a big cluster, which you can draw like a square and write behind it ‘fortissimo’…. I didn’t want to write in bars, because this music doesn’t work if you put it in bars.

Born in Debica, near Krakow, in 1933, Krzysztof Penderecki was introduced to music at an early age by his father, a lawyer and violinist. Enrolling at the Krakow Conservatory at the age of 18, he graduated in 1958 and was soon appointed professor at the Musikhochschule. In 1959, Penderecki’s works Strophes, Emanations, and Psalms of David won first prizes in the second Warsaw Competition of Young Polish Composers of the Composers’ Union. Following the subsequent successes of Anaklasis and Threnody, Penderecki went on to compose such major works as the multiple award-winning St. Luke Passion (1966) and the opera The Devils of Loudon (1967), based on Aldous Huxley’s book of the same title. His extensive body of work now boasts four operas and seven symphonies, including 1996’s Seven Gates of Jerusalem (also known as Symphony No. 7), commissioned by its namesake city for the “Jerusalem–3000 Years” celebrations. The recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, Mr. Penderecki numbers among his most recent honors a 1998 Foreign Honorary Membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the 2000 Cannes Classical Award for “Living Composer of the Year”; the 2001 Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts; and the 2002 Romano Guardini Prize of the Catholic Academy in Bavaria.Video by Alexander V. Nichols, Larry Springer, and Dan D. Shafer.

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Spectre (1990)John OswaldBorn May 30, 1953 in Kitchener, Ontario

Canadian composer John Oswald is well known for his development of “audioquoting” techniques, which have challenged contemporary notions of artistic ownership. In 1990, Mr. Oswald’s notorious recording Plunderphonic had to be destroyed as a result of legal action taken by Michael Jackson. In 1991, a sequel was released, featuring thoroughly reworked soundtracks by musical artists as diverse as the Doors, Carly Simon, and Metallica. Discosphere, a retrospective of dance soundtracks, was released in 1992 followed by Plexure, the third album of the Plunderphonic series. A retrospective CD box set of Plunderphonic works has been called “mind-numbingly amazing” by Peter Kenneth in Rolling Stone, and made SPIN magazine’s “Top 10” in 2001. A Governor General Media Arts Laureate, Ars Electronica Digital Musics, and Untitled Arts Award winner, as well as the fourth inductee into the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Alternative Walk of Fame, Mr. Oswald has also been nominated to third place in a list of the most internationally influential Canadian musicians, tied with Céline Dion. He serves as Director of Research at Mystery Laboratory in Canada. Mr. Oswald composed three string quartets commissioned by Kronos in the early 1990s: Spectre (for 1001 string quartet reflections), preLieu (after Beethoven), and Mach (for string and heavy metal quartets), followed by a fourth quartet, entitled Fore. In Spectre, Mr. Oswald interweaves Kronos playing in concert with multiple overdubs of his recordings of Kronos. In this sense, Spectre is written for a thousand-member string orchestra with all instruments played

by Kronos. It was the composer’s first composition for live musicians in 15 years. About Spectre, Oswald writes:

The camera’s shutter blinks and a moment of the visual world is frozen on film. Still, there is no audible equivalent to the snapshot in the time it takes to sound. Sound takes time. Recordings of Kronos fill Spectre. Successive moments happen often at once. In concert the musicians add a final overdub to a string orchestra of 1001 reflections. This wall of sound of veils of vibration of ghosts of events of past and future continuously present is a virtually extended moment. An occasional freeze marks a moment’s gesture.

J o h n O s w a l d ’ s Sp e c t r e w a s commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the Wexner Center, Canada Council, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and appears on Kronos’ Nonesuch recording Short Stories.

last Kind Words (c. 1930)Geeshie Wiley (Birth and death dates unknown)

In March 1930, Geeshie Wiley recorded Last Kind Words in Grafton, WI, for Paramount Records. Beyond this, very little information is confirmed about this singer’s life, though there are reports that she came from Mississippi. She recorded a second song at the same session, “Skinny Leg Blues,” and provided backup for a few additional tracks. Nevertheless, her recording of Last Kind Words has given Wiley the reputation of being perhaps one of the great early blues musicians. Blues scholar Don Kent has written:

If Geeshie Wiley did not exist, she could not be invented: her scope and creativity dwarfs most blues artists. She seems to represent the moment when black secular music was coalescing into blues….

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Moreover, despite her sensual voice, the persona she presents is as tough as Charley Patton: money before romance and she sweetly says, while extolling her sexual charms, that she’s calmly capable of killing you…. [‘Last Kind Words’] is one of the most imaginatively constructed guitar arrangements of its era and possible one of the most archaic. Although the lyrics date it to the late-World War I era, its eight-bar verse structure appears to be older.

The lyrics read, in part, “The last kind words I heard my daddy say: ‘If I die in the German war, please don’t bury my soul. Ah, child, just leave me out, let the buzzards eat me whole.’” Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of Last Kind Words by Geeshie Wiley was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

’round Midnight (c. 1940/arr. 2007)Thelonious MonkBorn October 10, 1917 in Rocky Mount, NCDied February 17, 1982 in Englewood, NJ

The classic ‘Round Midnight, described by record producer Orrin Keepnews as “surely one of the most beautiful short pieces of music written in 20th-century America,” was recorded several times by Thelonious Monk, starting in 1946, and has since become one of the most recorded jazz compositions of all time. At the age of six, Thelonious Monk and his family moved to New York City. He began taking piano lessons at age 10, and early in his career was hired as the pianist in the house band at Minton’s during the formative years of “bebop” — an important time in jazz history as a new form of music emerged. Monk was Coleman Hawkins’ regular pianist when he made his recording debut in 1944. Although Monk’s role in bebop was

as important as those of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, he didn’t produce as many recordings. He made records for Blue Note and Prestige in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which didn’t originally fare well commercially. In 1955, Monk signed with Riverside Records, and with Orrin Keepnews, whom he had met several years earlier, Monk recorded two albums — a tribute to Duke Ellington and a collection of jazz standards — that were deliberate attempts to make the pianist more accessible to the public. After the success of those recordings, they reverted to the format of featuring Monk’s original compositions with an occasional standard thrown in. His third album for Riverside, Brilliant Corners, was recorded in 1956 with a quintet including Sonny Rollins and Max Roach and is widely considered to be one of his best recordings. By 1958, Monk was finally getting recognition and was drawing record crowds to the Five Spot Cafe. After his contract with Riverside was fulfilled in 1960, Monk released a series of albums on Columbia Records and performed regularly throughout the 1960s. After a 1971 world tour for George Wein with “The Giants of Jazz” and his final recordings on London’s Black Lion Records, Monk virtually stopped performing. After his final performance in 1976, he retired from public view and lived the rest of his life in seclusion. Monk died of a stroke in 1982. New York-based Randall Woolf composes music for orchestra, digital audio, dance, video, and concert theater. His recent compositions combine traditional orchestral instruments, digital processing, electric guitar, electronic and acoustic drum sets, and text, creating a richly varied and genre-bending fusion of elements both ancient and futuristic. He also writes and plays piano for SOUP, a soul/jazz/blues/urban band with singer/songwriter Tyrone Henderson. Recently,

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he has been playing turntable on his own works, notable in a series of concerts for young people presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Mr. Woolf also collaborates regularly with art-rock pioneer John Cale on film scores and arranges orchestral instruments for Mr. Cale’s work with Siouxsie Sioux and the Mediaeval Baebes. He collaborated with noise-core/house music composer Atau Tanaka on a work for electronics, Theremin, and orchestra for the Royal Chamber Orchestra of Wallonie in Belgium. Randall Woolf’s arrangement of ’Round Midnight was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Duke Performances and the Center for Documentary Studies.

Prelude from Tristan und Isolde(1865)

Richard WagnerBorn May 22, 1813 in Leipzig, GermanyDied February 13, 1883 in Venice

The Kronos Quartet commissioned Aleksandra Vrebalov’s arrangement for triple quartet of the “Prelude” and “Liebestod” from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde for the 2012 Uppsala International Sacred Music Festival. Two aspects of that sentence give one pause. First, a gentle adjustment is needed: what we now call the “Prelude” was for Wagner the Liebestod or “Love-death,” while he designated the opera’s closing moments Isolde’s Verklärung or “Transfiguration.” Second, Wagner’s Tristan at a festival of sacred music? The idea is less far-fetched than it may seem at first glance. Wagner, after all, founded a cult (with himself as demiurge), a pilgrimage site at Bayreuth, and even a “festival-play for the consecration of a stage,” Parsifal. (“To sit five hours: the first stage of holiness!” sneered the

master’s one-time acolyte Friedrich Nietzsche.) The enigmatic chord of F, B, D#, and G# in Tristan’s second measure is widely considered a musical epiphany, the moment when major-minor tonality began an irreversible slide into liquefaction — a grand narrative that abides even in our postmodern times. (Mr. Vrebalov’s arrangement, incidentally, makes use of Wagner’s own concert ending for the “Love-death”/Prelude.) The word Verklärung offers even weightier grist for the mill. Klar in Verklärung is cognate with clear, “free from darkness.” In Christian theology, transfiguration denotes the radiant fusion of human and divine: Jesus was transfigured when “his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light,” and his disciples saw him in glory conversing with Moses and Elijah. During her transfiguration, Isolde gazes upon the lifeless Tristan and sees him “ever brighter, brightly shining, born in starlight high above.” Tristan and Isolde, though, are no Christians, and they spurn the day and its illusions in favor of night — the realm of truth and oneness and desire’s annihilation in Wagner’s reading of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Buddhist- and Hindu-tinged philosophy. Tristan shines and Isolde is transfigured because, like stars in the night sky, blackness swallows them up. Schopenhauer may also offer a clue as to why Ms. Vrebalov chose to arrange the “Liebestod” and Transfiguration for both live and recorded performers. It is surely not a matter of numbers alone: the notion that Wagner wrote only ear-splitting music for bloated forces is slander, and some of the most haunting passages in Tristan and the master’s other operas comprise mere wisps of sound. In The Recording Angel, his penetrating study of phonography, Evan Eisenberg suggests that recording,

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which seems to give listeners access to disembodied sound, helps us to “hear what Schopenhauer heard:” to perceive music as “the true reality” and the visible world as illusion. The idea that music is intrinsically noumenal and immaterial is of course open to question, but Ms. Vrebalov’s arrangement, mingling musicians seen and unseen, sounds “real” and spectral, inviting concert audiences to meditate on the primal mysteries at the heart of Tristan. David Harrington, Kronos’ founder and first violinist, became mesmerized by the Tristan “Prelude” after seeing Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), in which Wagner’s music serves as soundtrack to the end of life on Earth. He subsequently fell under the spell of a desperately beautiful performance by the New York Philharmonic under Bruno Walter that was recorded in 1943. In Mr. Harrington’s view, works such as Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, and Wagner’s song of passion (in both the profane sense of “sexual love” and the religious meaning of “suffering”) are “sacred” for their density, magnetism, and the vulnerability they convey. “No religion has a monopoly on the sacred,” he says. The delicacy and open-hearted fragility of the “Prelude,” qualities heightened in Ms. Vrebalov’s distillation of Wagner’s score, represent for Harrington “the place where we humans are in our most direct contact with the vastness of the universe, and where the resulting friction between us and the world meets the friction of the bow on the string.” Like Gustav Mahler, Claude Debussy, Bernard Herrmann, and countless others since 1865, Kronos, Ms. Vrebalov, and today’s audiences are sure to be transformed by the blinding light and otherworldly darkness of Tristan und Isolde. Aleksandra Vrebalov’s arrangement

of the “Prelude” from Tristan und Isolde was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

Program note by Marion Lignana Rosenberg.

Flow (2010)Laurie AndersonBorn June 5, 1947 in Glen Ellyn, Illinois

Laurie Anderson is one of America’s most renowned — and daring — creative pioneers. Known primarily for her multimedia presentations, she has cast herself in roles as varied as visual artist, composer, poet, photographer, filmmaker, electronics whiz, vocalist, and instrumentalist. O S u p e r m a n l a u n c h e d M s . Anderson’s recording career in 1980, rising to number two on the British pop charts and subsequently appearing on Big Science, the first of her seven albums on the Warner Brothers label. In 2001, Laurie Anderson released her first record for Nonesuch Records, entitled Life on a String, which was followed by Live in New York, recorded at Town Hall in New York City in September 2001. The original version of “Flow” is the final track on her 2010 Nonesuch album Homeland, and has been nominated for a Grammy for “Best Pop Instrumental.” M s . A n d e r s o n h a s t o u r e d internationally with shows ranging from simple spoken word performances to elaborate multimedia events. She has published six books, and text from her solo performances appears in the book Extreme Exposure, edited by Jo Bonney. Ms. Anderson has also written the entry for New York for the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Her visual work has been presented in major museums throughout the US and Europe. In 2003, The Musée

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Art Contemporain of Lyon, France produced a touring retrospective of her work, entitled The Record of the Time: Sound in the Work of Laurie Anderson. As a composer, Laurie Anderson has contributed music to films by Wim Wenders and Jonathan Demme; dance pieces by Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, and Molissa Fenley; and a score for Robert LePage’s theater production Far Side of the Moon. Her most recent orchestral work, Songs for Amelia Earhart, premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2000 performed by the American Composers Orchestra. Recognized worldw ide a s a groundbreaking leader in the use of technology in the arts, Ms. Anderson collaborated with Interval Research Corporation, a research and development laboratory founded by Paul Allen and David Liddle, in the exploration of new creative tools. In 2002, she was appointed the first artist-in-residence of NASA, out of which she developed her solo performance The End of the Moon. Ms. Anderson was also part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. In 2007 she received the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for her outstanding contribution to the arts. Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of Flow by Laurie Anderson was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

WtC 9/11 (2010)Steve ReichBorn October 3, 1936 in New York, NY

Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for 2009, Steve Reich’s music has been influential to composers and mainstream musicians all over the world. He is a leading pioneer of Minimalism, having in his youth broken away from the “establishment” that was

serialism. His music is known for steady pulse, repetition, and a fascination with canons; it combines rigorous structures with propulsive rhythms and seductive instrumental color. It also embraces harmonies of non-Western and American vernacular music (especially jazz). His studies have included Cornell University, the Juilliard School of Music, Mills College (with Luciano Berio), the Balinese Gamelan, African drumming (at the University of Ghana), and traditional forms of chanting the Hebrew scriptures. Different Trains (written for and recorded by the Kronos Quartet) and Music for 18 Musicians have each earned him Grammy Awards, and his documentary video operas — The Cave and Three Tales, done in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot — have pushed the boundaries of the operatic medium. Over the years his music has significantly grown both in expanded harmonies and instrumentation, resulting in a Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 composition Double Sextet, as well as the Praemium Imperiale given by Crown Prince Hitachi in Tokyo in 2006, and the Polar Prize given by the King of Sweden in 2007. In 2008, Mr. Reich wrote his first piece for rock band set-up, 2x5, which premiered on the opening night of Manchester International Festival on a double-bill with German electronic music legends Kraftwerk. He is published by Boosey & Hawkes. WTC 9/11 is the third string quartet Reich has written for Kronos. About WTC 9/11, he writes:

In 2009 the Kronos Quartet asked me for a piece using pre-recorded voices. My first idea was to elongate the speaker’s final vowels or consonants. Stop Action sound. Impossible in 1973 when I first thought of it. Possible in 2001 when Dolly was begun. In this piece it was to be, and is, the means of connecting one person to another — harmonically.

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I had no idea who was speaking. No subject matter. After several months I finally remembered the obvious. For 25 years we lived four blocks from the World Trade Center. On 9/11 we were in Vermont, but our son, granddaughter, and daughter-in-law were all in our apartment. Our phone connection stayed open for six hours, and our next-door neighbors were finally able to drive north out of the city with their family and ours. For us, 9/11 was not a media event. By January 2010, several months after Kronos asked me for the piece, I realized the pre-recorded voices would be from 9/11. Specifically, they would start from publicly accessible recordings by NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and FDNY (the New York City Fire Department), and then from interviews with former friends and neighbors who lived or worked in lower Manhattan. ‘WTC’ is also an abbreviation for ‘World to Come,’ as my friend composer David Lang pointed out. After 9/11 the bodies and parts of bodies were taken to the Medical Examiner’s office on the east side of Manhattan. In Jewish tradition there is an obligation to guard the body from the time of death until burial. The practice, called Shmira1, consists of sitting near the body and reciting Psalms or Biblical passages. The roots of the practice are, on one level, to protect the body from animals or insects, and on another, to keep the neshama, or soul, company while it hovers over the body until burial. Because of the difficulties in DNA identification, this went on for seven months, 24/7. Two of the women who sat and recited Psalms are heard in the third movement. You will also hear a cellist (who has sat Shmira elsewhere) and a cantor from a major New York City synagogue sing parts of Psalms and the Torah. WTC 9/11 is in three movements (though the tempo remains unchanged throughout). The piece begins and ends with the first violin doubling the loud warning beep

(actually an ‘F’) your phone makes when it is left off the hook. In the first movement there are archive voices from NORAD air traffic controllers, alarmed that American Airlines Flight 11 was off course. This was the first plane to deliberately crash into the World Trade Center. The movement then shifts to the FDNY archives of that day telling what happened on the ground. The second movement uses recordings I made in 2010 of neighborhood residents, an officer of the Fire Department and the first ambulance driver (from Hatzalah volunteers) to arrive at the scene, remembering what happened nine years earlier. The third and last movement uses the voices of a neighborhood resident, two volunteers who took shifts sitting near the bodies, and the cellist/singer and cantor mentioned above. Throughout WTC 9/11 the strings double and harmonize the speech melodies and prolonged vowels or consonants of the recorded voices. You will hear a total of three string quartets, one live, and two pre-recorded. The piece can also be played by three live quartets and pre-recorded voices. WTC 9/11 is only 15-and-a-half minutes long. While composing it I often tried to make it longer, and each time it felt that extending its length reduced its impact. The piece wanted to be terse.

Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11 was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the Barbican/London, Carnegie Hall, Duke Performances/Duke University, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts/University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This commission was also made possible by the Chamber Music America Commissioning Program, with funding generously provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.

1“Stretching a Jewish Vigil for the Sept. 11 Dead,”The New York Times, November 6, 2001

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Black angels (1970)George CrumbBorn October 24, 1929 in Charleston, West Virgina

George Crumb’s Black Angels, inspired by the Vietnam War, draws from an arsenal of sounds including shouting, chanting, whistling, whispering, gongs, maracas, and crystal glasses. The score bears two inscriptions: “in tempore belli” (in time of war) and “Finished on Friday the Thirteenth, March, 1970.” Mr. Crumb studied at the Mason College of Music in Charleston and studied for a master’s degree at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He continued his studies at the Hochschule für Musik, Berlin, and received a DMA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. George Crumb’s music often juxtaposes contrasting musical styles. The references range from music of the Western art-music tradition to hymns and folk music to non-Western musics. Many of his works include programmatic, symbolic, mystical, and theatrical elements, which are often reflected in his beautiful and meticulously notated scores. George Crumb has been honored with festivals devoted to his music from Los Angeles to Moscow, and from Scandinavia to South America. He is the winner of a 2001 Grammy Award and the 1968 Pulitzer Prize in Music, and was named Musical America’s “Composer of the Year” in 2004. He retired from his teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania after more than 30 years of service. Awarded honorary doctorates by numerous universities and the recipient of dozens of awards and prizes, he makes his home in Pennsylvania. Mr. Crumb’s music is published by C.F. Peters and the ongoing series of “Complete Crumb”

recordings, supervised by the composer, is being issued on Bridge Records. About Black Angels, George Crumb writes:

Black Angels was conceived as a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world. The work portrays a voyage of the soul. The three stages of this voyage are Departure (fall from grace), Absence (spiritual annihilation), and Return (redemption). The numerological symbolism of Black Angels, while perhaps not immediately perceptible to the ear, is nonetheless quite faithfully reflected in the musical structure. These ‘magical’ relationships are variously expressed: e.g., in terms of length, groupings of single tones, durations, patterns of repetition, etc.... There are several allusions to tonal music: a quotation from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet; an original Sarabanda; the sustained B-Major tonality of God-Music; and several references to the Latin sequence Dies Irae (Day of Wrath). The work abounds in conventional musical symbolisms such as the Diabolus in Musica (the interval of the tritone) and the Trillo Di Diavolo (the Devil’s Trill, after Tartini).

Kronos’ recording of Black Angels is available on the Nonesuch recording of the same name. Kronos’ 2008 production of George Crumb’s Black Angels was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, with additional support from the Williams Center for the Arts/Lafayette College. Kronos’ original staged version was commissioned by Hancher Auditorium/University of Iowa in 1988.

Please refer to pages 27-28 in your program book for a biography of the Kronos Quartet.

MANy THANks TO THE iNdiViduAls, cORPORATiONs, ANd fOuNdATiONs wHO HAVE cONTRibuTEd GENEROusly TO THE RENEGAdE VENTuREs fuNd, A MulTi-yEAR cHAllENGE GRANT cREATEd TO suPPORT uNiquE, cREATiVE, ANd TRANsfORMATiVE PERfORMiNG ARTs ExPERiENcEs wiTHiN THE uMs sEAsON:

Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation

Susan and Richard GutowCandis J. and Helmut F. Stern Endowment FundUniversity of Michigan Health System

Herbert S. and Carol L. Amster FundThe Herbert and Junia Doan FoundationPenny and Ken FischerMartin and Lynn HalbfingerJerry and Dale KolinsNational Endowment for the ArtsEleanor PollackGlenn E. Watkins

John and Cheryl MacKrellFrancois TamresJudy and Lewis TannBruce and Pamela Tuchman

Mike Allemang and Janis BobrinEd and Gail BagaleKatherine HeinBeverly MankoNina Silbergleit

We invite you to invest in the renegade ventures Fund. For more information, please contact Margaret McKinley at 734.647.1177 or margiem@umich.edu.

R E N E G A d E V E N T u R E s f u N d

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42nd Performance of the 135th annual Season

Photo: Kronos Quartet in San Francisco, 2013; photographer: Jay Blakesberg.

David Harrington, ViolinJohn Sherba, ViolinHank Dutt, ViolaSunny yang, Cello

Brian T. Scott, Lighting SupervisorBrian Mohr, Audio Engineer

Saturday Evening, January 18, 2014 at 8:00Power Center • Ann Arbor

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KronoS Quartet

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Suite from Dirty Wars

Unknown,Arr. Ljova & Kronosoh Mother, the Handsome Man tortures Me+

David Harrington Drone for Children*

Ramallah Underground,Arr. Jacob Garchiktashweesh*

Harrington Drone Forever*

Traditional,Arr. Stephen PrutsmanWa Habibi (Beloved)+

Michael DaughertySing Sing: J. edgar Hoover*

Bob Dylan,Arr. GarchikMasters of War+

Aleksandra Vrebalov …hold me, neighbor, in this storm…*

i N T E R M i s s i O N

P R O G R A M

Friday and Saturday evening’s performances are supported by the Renegade Ventures Fund, a multi-year

challenge grant created by Maxine and Stuart Frankel to support unique, creative, and transformative

performing arts experiences within the UMS season.

Media partnership provided by WGTE 91.3 FM and WRCJ 90.9 FM.

Special thanks to Michael Daugherty for his participation in events surrounding tonight’s concert by the Kronos

Quartet.

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David T. Little aGenCY* (World Premiere Performance)

aCt i: γένεσιςi.uluru Rising —

a. yulara / in The Dreamtimeb. Cipher i – Coordinates ic. Cipher 2 – Negative Cartography —

ii: Auscannzukus Rising —a. Constructionsb. Cipher 3 – Coordinates iic. Cipher 4 – Complicitous Listd. Cipher 5 – No Way in

Entr’acte iii: A quiet song of secret lessons (cipher 6 [log 324]) —

aCt ii: ἀποκάλυψις iV: leviathan Rising and The All-seeing Eye —

a. introduction/Early Warningsb. Cipher 7.1 – Fact/Fiction (Beneath) —c. Cipher 8.1 – Ben, Then (Above)d. Cipher 7.2 – Fact/Fiction (Beneath) — e. Cipher 8.2 – Ben, Then (Above)f. Cipher 8.3 – (o)GoD(o)GoD(o) (orwell i)g. Cipher 9 – Coordinates iiih. yulara / in The Dreamtime (orwell ii)

* Written for Kronos / + Arranged for Kronos

Following this evening’s concert, please feel free to remain in your seats and join us for a post-performance Q&A with members of the Kronos Quartet, David T. Little, and Michael Daugherty.

David T. Little’s AGENCY was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by UMS of the University of Michigan and

the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

Kronos Quartet appears by arrangement with David Lieberman Artists’ Representatives.

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Suite from Dirty Wars (2013)

The documentary film Dirty Wars was directed by Richard Rowley and written by Jeremy Scahill (author of the book by the same title and BLACKWATER: The Rise of the World’s Most Mercenary Army) and David Riker. The film follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, tracing the rise of the Joint Special Operations Command. David Harrington acted as the film’s music supervisor, selecting several existing works from Kronos’ repertoire and creating new works for use in the film’s score. For more information about the film, visit dirtywars.org. About the film, Mr. Rowley writes:

A decade ago, I became a war reporter in order to cover my generation’s most important untold story. The War on Terror is the longest war in US history; it has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives; it is being fought in dozens of countries; but it is unfolding in the shadows and we know next to nothing about it. I made short films from Iraq and Afghanistan, but remained frustrated by the limitations on what kind of stories I could tell. It was not enough to be an embedded journalist and see the war only through the eyes of American soldiers. It was not enough to understand this global war through the experience of a single country in isolation. It was also not enough to tell stories of a war being fought in far off places that seemed irrelevant to life back home. I got to know Jeremy [Scahill] during the Iraq War and Dirty Wars grew out of our shared experience as war reporters. But over three years of filming on the ground in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen, the film turned into something that I believe is much more powerful — an intimate and deeply personal story of life turned upside down by war. As a journalist, you begin to think of yourself as invincible — you believe

you can see and film all the intensity and pain of war, and that none of it will touch you. But it does touch you. It changes you. Somewhere along the way Jeremy and I both realized that there were two halves to what I was filming: an outside story that was an exposé of a war that had gone out of control, and an inside story — about a reporter, a person — changed by his journey.… Dirty Wars grew out of our experience as war reporters, but it is, in many ways, our attempt to escape our own limitations and to tell a story that doesn’t just make this war visible but makes this war real.

This arrangement of Oh Mother, the Handsome Man Tortures Me by Ljova and Kronos Quartet was commissioned for Kronos by Deborah and Creig Hoyt. Ramallah Underground’s Tashweesh, arranged by Jacob Garchik, was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the Columbia Foundation and the David Harrington Research and Development Fund. Stephen Prutsman’s arrangement of Wa Habibi was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Simon Collier. Kronos’ recordings of these three pieces are available on Floodplain, released on Nonesuch Records.

Sing Sing: J. edgar Hoover (1992)Michael Daugherty (b. 1954)Born April 28, 1954 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Grammy Award-winning composer Michael Daugherty is one of the most commissioned, performed, and recorded composers on the American concert music scene. His music is rich with cultural allusions and bears the stamp of classic modernism, with colliding tonalities and blocks of sound; at the same time, his melodies can be eloquent and stirring. He has been hailed by The Times (London) as “a master icon maker”

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with a “maverick imagination, fearless structural sense and meticulous ear.” Mr. Daugherty first came to international attention when the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Zinman, performed his Metropolis Symphony at Carnegie Hall in 1994. Since that time, his music has entered the orchestral, band, and chamber music repertory and made him, according to the League of American Orchestras, one of the 10 most performed living American composers. In 2011, the Nashville Symphony’s Naxos recording of Mr. Daugherty’s Metropolis Symphony and Deus ex Machina was honored with three Grammy Awards, including “Best Classical Contemporary Composition.” Michael Daugherty’s music is published by Peermusic Classical, Boosey & Hawkes and Michael Daugherty Music. For more information, please visit www.michaeldaugherty.net. About Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover, Mr. Daugherty writes:

Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover for string quartet and pre-recorded sound was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet. The first performance was given by Kronos in Chicago, IL, at the Vic Theatre on January 23, 1993, and the work was recorded for a Nonesuch recording entitled Howl, U.S.A. My composition is about the man who directed the US Federal Bureau of Investigation virtually unchallenged from 1924 until his death in 1972. My composition opens with one of J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite mottoes: ‘The FBI is as close to you as your nearest telephone.’ This ‘reassurance’ to the American public also served to authorize his systematic invasion of their privacy: for Hoover, the telephone became an instrument for playing out his lifetime obsession with collecting sensitive information for his so-called ‘secret files.’ Throughout his 48 years as director of the FBI, Hoover ordered the wiretapping of

the telephones of movies stars, gangsters, presidents, civil rights activists, politicians, communist sympathizers, entertainers, and anyone who opposed his own political and moral agenda. For me, the motto offers an opportunity to listen in on Hoover’s voice, and to manipulate it for my own compositional purposes. The telephone, like the digital technology I have used, mediates voice so that it is both distant and near. I wanted to bring the dead voice of J. Edgar Hoover back to a posthumous life through technology, so that it may ‘sing’ of its own death. I created the tape part by digitally sampling bits of actual historical speeches delivered by Hoover from 1941 to 1972, to such diverse audiences as the American Legion, Boys’ Club of America, and the FBI National Academy. It was eerie to be the first person to hear these tapes since they were made available to the public. I composed string parts to ‘sing along’ with Hoover, in order to convey my sense of Hoover’s grim, threatening, yet darkly comic personality. The part played by the string quartet is also inspired by sounds associated with the FBI, such as sirens, American patriotic songs, and machine gun syncopations. The quartet therefore creates another context for hearing Hoover’s own words: ‘I hope that this presentation will serve to give you a better knowledge and a deep understanding of YOUR FBI.’

The composer extends his thanks to the staff of the National Archives in Washington, DC for their help in obtaining the Hoover F.B.I. tapes, through the Freedom of Information Act. Sing Sing: J. Edgar Hoover is the second of three works Michael Daugherty has written for Kronos, and was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. His two other works for Kronos are Beat Boxer (1991) and Elvis Everywhere (1993).

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Masters of War (1963)Bob DylanBorn May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota

Spinning on record players in teenage bedrooms and college dorm rooms, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released by Columbia Records in Spring 1963, came to serve as the soundtrack to the first legion of Baby Boomers. The LP album bore love songs, original and recycled folk songs, and some of the earliest of the era’s peace-seeking protest songs, including “Masters of War.” Most of these were written by Bob Dylan in 1962 and 1963, shortly after he’d dropped out of college and relocated to New York City from Minnesota (where he was born Robert Zimmerman). The young songwriter had been eager to showcase his talents in the lively folk music scene of Greenwich Village, and to visit his musical idol, Woody Guthrie, hospitalized in nearby New Jersey. Making a first visit to England in December of 1962, Bob Dylan found more fans in folk clubs there, and gleaned additional material from exponents of the centuries-old English folk tradition, particularly Martin Carthy. For “Masters of War,” Mr. Dylan drew on the melancholy melody of “Nottamun Town,” known to serious folk fans from a recording by singer and dulcimer player Jean Ritchie. The song had been passed down through generations of Richie’s Appalachian family, and it dated back to the late medieval period in England, where the strangely surrealistic lyrics may have referred to the chaos of the English Civil War, or to the magical mode of mummers’ plays. But Bob Dylan’s new lyrics, intoned in his rough and reedy voice and accompanied forcefully on guitar, carried his clearest and most unmitigated

condemnation of war and its makers, who maintained a nuclear threat throughout the 1950s and ’60s. In his liner notes to the album, Nat Hentoff revealed that Bob Dylan had startled himself with the song. As the US maneuvered itself towards a prolonged conflict in Vietnam in the early ’60s, Bob Dylan’s warnings gained gravitas. Many other artists included “Masters of War” in their performances and on recordings, among them Judy Collins, The Staple Singers, and Odetta, though after 1963, Bob Dylan himself didn’t return to the song until a concert in Hiroshima in 1994. In the intervening decades, after helping elevate the American folk movement and the repertoire of fellow performers such as Joan Baez, The Byrds, and Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan went on to explore electrified folk rock, country music, Christian praise music, and even rap, along with a bit of film acting, artwork, and blacksmithing. His musical output and popularity have stayed high, and have been rewarded with numerous Grammy Awards and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012. His songs of protest remain sadly salient, in a world still wracked by war. Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of “Masters of War” by Bob Dylan was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

Program note by Jeff Kaliss.

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…hold me, neighbor, in this storm…(2007)

Aleksandra VrebalovBorn September 22 1970 in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia

Aleksandra Vrebalov, a native of the former Yugoslavia, left Serbia in 1995 and continued her education in the US. She holds a doctorate from the University of Michigan, where she studied with Evan Chambers and Michael Daugherty, and a master’s degree from the San Francisco Conservatory, where her teacher was Elinor Armer. She has participated in numerous master classes and workshops, such as the New York University Summer Composition Workshop, Music Courses in Darmstadt (Germany), Szombathely (Hungary), and Kazimierz Dolny (Poland) in collaboration with IRCAM, and the Cabrillo Festival in Santa Cruz, California. She now teaches at the City College of New York. Ms. Vrebalov’s works have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Jorge Caballero, the Sausalito Quartet, Dusan Tynek Dance Company, Ijsbreker, and the Moravian Philharmonic. Her music has been recorded for Nonesuch and Vienna Modern Masters. In 2005, Lila was premiered in Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall by violinist Ana Milosavljevic. The premiere of the orchestral work Orbits opened the 30th Novi Sad Music Festivities and was broadcast live on national television. The same channel produced a 30-minute television biography of Ms. Vrebalov. That year, she also worked on the score for Sleeping Beauty, an experimental film introduced at New York City’s Anthology Film Archives. About …hold me, neighbor, in this storm…, Ms. Vrebalov writes:

The Balkans, with its multitude of cultural and religious identities, has had a troubled

history of ethnic intolerance. For my generation of Tito’s pioneers and children of Communists, growing up in the former Yugoslavia meant learning about and carrying in our minds the battles and numberless ethnic and religious conflicts dating back half a millennium, and honoring ancestors who died in them. By then, that distant history had merged with the nearer past, so those we remember from World War II are our grandparents. Their stories we heard firsthand. After several devastating ethnic wars in the 1990s we entered a new century, this time each of us knowing in person someone who perished. As I write this in November 2007, on YouTube a new generation of Albanians and Serbs post their war-songs bracing for another conflict, claiming their separate entitlements to the land and history, rather than a different kind of future, together. Strangely, the cultural and religious differences that led to enmity in everyday life produced — after centuries of turbulently living together — most incredible fusions in music. It is almost as if what we weren’t able to achieve through words and deeds — to fuse, and mix, and become something better and richer together — our music so famously accomplished instead. …hold me, neighbor, in this storm… is inspired by folk and religious music from the region, whose insistent rhythms and harmonies create a sense of inevitability, a ritual trance with an obsessive, dark energy. Peaceful passages of the work grew out of the delicately curved, elusive, often microtonal melodies of prayers, as well as escapist tavern songs from the region, as my grandmother remembers them. For me, …hold me, neighbor… is a way to bring together the sounds of the church bells of Serbian orthodox monasteries and the Islamic calls for prayer. It is a way to connect histories and places by unifying one of the most civilized sounds of Western classical music — that of the string quartet — with ethnic Balkan instruments, the gusle

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(a bowed string instrument) and tapan (large double-headed drum). It is a way to piece together our identities fractured by centuries of intolerance, and to reach out and celebrate the land so rich in its diversity, the land that would be ashen, empty, sallow, if any one of us, all so different, weren’t there.

Aleksandra Vrebalov’s . . .hold me, neighbor, in this storm... was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Carnegie Hall and by the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at Maryland with funds from The Leading College and University Presenters Program of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional support was provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Kronos’ recording is available on Floodplain, released on Nonesuch Records.

aGenCY (2013)David T. LittleBorn October 25, 1978

David T. Little fuses classical and popular idioms to dramatic effect. His operas Soldier Songs and Dog Days have been widely acclaimed, “prov(ing) beyond any doubt that opera has both a relevant present and a bright future” (New York Times). His recent and upcoming works include CHARM (Baltimore Symphony/Marin Alsop), Hellhound (Maya Beiser), Haunt of Last Nightfall (Third Coast Percussion), the opera JFK (working title, Fort Worth Opera), a new opera commissioned by the MET Opera/Lincoln Center Theater new works program, and the music-theater work Artaud in the Black Lodge. His music has been heard at Carnegie Hall, the Park Avenue Armory, and the Bang on a Can Marathon. Educated at the University of Michigan and Princeton, Mr. Little was executive director of MATA and is currently

director of composition at Shenandoah Conservatory. The founding artistic director of the ensemble Newspeak, his music can be heard on the New Amsterdam and Innova labels. For more information, please visit www.davidtlittle.com. About AGENCY, Mr. Little writes:

a•gen•cy ( eɪ dʒən si)1. an organization, company, or bureau

that provides a particular service.2. a government bureau or administrative

division.3. a means of exerting power or influence;

instrumentality.4. the capacity for human beings to act

independently and to make their own free choices.

AGENCY is a work about the presence or absence of choice in society, explored through the tension between faith-based indigenous cultures and modern information-based spy agencies. Specifically focusing on the tension between the Aboriginal holy site Uluru in central Australia (also known by the colonial name Ayers Rock) and Pine Gap, a massive American spy center of top secret function, which sits just five hours to the north, AGENCY seeks to ask: to what degree are we autonomous agents in the world, and to what degree are we acted upon by outside, unknown, and potentially more powerful agents. Both Uluru and Pine Gap are shrouded in great mystery, with a fantastical mix of fact, fiction, and fantasy surrounding them. Likewise, this work is riddled with clues and secret messages — including nine labeled ciphers, and many others not indicated — which must either be found or decoded in order to access the meaning of the piece. In some cases, the answers to these riddles must be found in the score itself — hidden via substitution ciphers, redactions, translation from various spy codes, etc. — while in other cases the clues only exist in the electronic backing track and must be detected through audio manipulation

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— time expansion, reversal, filtering, etc. These hidden messages together include ideological texts, map coordinates, lists of ‘guilty parties’ to international spy conspiracies, and philosophical, religious, and poetic quotations. Other messages are audible, but unclear: often abstracted to obscure meaning, while also amplifying their poetry. These messages together express the core meaning of AGENCY, but must first be deciphered before they can be understood.

There are two master scores, each of which serves as a key for deciphering the codes found in the work: one is held in the archives of the Kronos Quartet, and the other is held in the composer’s archives. There is no other key for deciphering the messages embedded within the work.

AGENCY was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the University Musical Society of the University of Michigan and the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

A R T i s T s

F or 40 years, San Francisco’s K r o n o S Q u a r t e t — David Harrington (violin), John

Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello) — has combined a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually re-imagining the string quartet experience. In the process, Kronos has become one of the world’s most celebrated and influential ensembles, performing thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than 50 recordings, collaborating with many of the world’s most intriguing and accomplished composers and performers, and commissioning more than 800 works and arrangements for string quartet. A Grammy winner, Kronos is also the only recipient of both the Polar Music Prize and the Avery Fisher Prize. Integral to Kronos’ work is a series of long-running, in-depth collaborations with many of the world’s foremost composers, including Americans Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich; Azerbaijan’s Franghiz Ali-Zadeh; Poland’s Henryk Górecki; and Serbia’s Aleksandra Vrebalov. Additional collaborators in concert and/or on record have

included Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, performance artist Laurie Anderson, Azeri vocalist Alim Qasimov, legendary Bollywood “playback singer” Asha Bhosle, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, and rockers Tom Waits, Amon Tobin, and the Icelandic group Sigur Rós. The quartet spends five months per year on tour, appearing in the world’s most prestigious concert halls, clubs, and festivals. Kronos is equally prolific and wide-ranging on recordings, including the Nonesuch Records releases Pieces of Africa (1992), a showcase of African-born composers that simultaneously topped Billboard’s Classical and World Music lists; Nuevo (2002), a Grammy- and Latin Grammy-nominated celebration of Mexican culture; the 2004 Grammy Award-winner, Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite; and Music of Vladimir Martynov (2011). With a staff of 10 based in San Francisco, the non-profit Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA) manages all aspects of Kronos’ work, including the commissioning of new works, concert tours, and home-season performances, and education programs.

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Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing arts associationJanet Cowperthwaite, Managing DirectorLaird Rodet, Associate DirectorMatthew Campbell, Strategic Initiatives DirectorSidney Chen, Artistic AdministratorScott Fraser, Sound DesignerChristina Johnson, Communications and New Media ManagerNikolás McConnie-Saad, Office ManagerHannah Neff, Production AssociateLaurence Neff, Production DirectorLucinda Toy, Business Operations Manager

www.kronosquartet.orgwww.facebook.com/kronosquartetwww.myspace.com/kronosquartetTwitter: @kronosquartet #kronos

The Kronos Quartet records for Nonesuch Records.

Scan for our interviews with Black Angels composer George Crumb and Kronos Quartet founding violinist David Harrington.

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u M s A R c H i V E s

This week’s performances mark the Kronos Quartet’s third and fourth appearances under UMS auspices following its March 1994 UMS debut which featured kora player and drummer Foday Musa Suso. The Quartet last appeared under UMS auspices in March 2004 presenting a program entitled Visual Music at the Power Center as part of a week-long UMS celebration of American iconoclasts which included presentations of choreographer Merce Cunningham and saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman.