Michael Gordon was born in Miami Beach, Florida, and raised in Nicaragua in an Eastern European community on the outskirts of Managua. His music, which combines the intensity and power of rock music and his formal composition studies at Yale, has been performed around the world. Gordon’s early compositions demonstrate a deep exploration into the possibilities and nature of rhythm and what happens when rhythms are piled on top of each other, creating a glorious confusion.
Gordon’s special interest in adding dimensionality to the concert experience has led to frequent collaborations with artists in other media. In his string orchestra piece Weather, a collaboration with video artist Elliot Caplan, the musicians sit on scaffolding three tiers high. In Gordon’s 2001 multimedia orchestra piece, Decasia, the audience sits on swivel chairs encircled by the orchestra and large projection scrims. In The Carbon Copy Building—an opera collaboration with comic book artist Ben Katchor, Bob McGrath, the Ridge Theater, and composers David Lang and Julia Wolfe—a projected comic strip accompanies the singers, interacting with each other so that the frames fall away in the telling of this story. (The work received the 2000 Obie Award for Best New American Work.) More recently, Gordon premiered Gotham in Zankel Hall in February 2004; the work incorporates film, projections, lighting, and an orchestra of 35 musicians to explore the “other” New York City. The Sad Park is Gordon’s second string quartet written for Kronos Quartet; the first, Potassium, premiered in 2000.
In 1983, Gordon formed the Michael Gordon Philharmonic—part string quartet, part rock band—which performed his angular tunes and driving rhythms with compelling energy and off-beat humor in concerts worldwide. The latest incarnation of this ensemble, now called the Michael Gordon Band, debuted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in December 2000. Gordon holds a bachelor’s degree from New York University and a master’s from Yale School of Music. He is co-founder of the Bang On a Can Festival, a major force in the presentation of new music. His recordings include Weather (Nonesuch), Trance (Argo), Decasia (Cantaloupe), Lost Objects (Teldec), Big Noise from Nicaragua (CRI), and Light Is Calling (Nonesuch).
Working on this string quartet, I found myself thinking about the Clouded Yellow. This butterfly takes part in mass migrations that are referred to in England as “clouded yellow years.” I love the image of a cloud of bright yellow butterflies, and I think the word clouded describes the blurred harmonies and melodies of this piece.
I imagined the opening harmony to be accordion-like, a syncopated vamp played by the viola and cello. The rhythm, a tugging three over four, flits in and out. I heard some high sighing sounds floating above all of this and gave them to the violins. It was as if I could hear the flapping of butterfly wings. I imagined I was flying around on a butterfly, gliding in the air, the air dense with moisture, like in a rainforest. It was all very free and fanciful, like a travelogue around a garden.
I tried to feel the thickness of the atmosphere and create a reverberant sound texture. The raw sound of open strings drones in accompaniment to the melody. The C, G, and D strings can be heard vibrating in almost all parts of the quartet. And the C string on the cello—its lowest note—is used as a pedal point throughout. While I was creating this string quartet, I thought about each of the members of Kronos. Their personalities and talents were never far from my consciousness.
—Michael Gordon
Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times.
The operas—Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, Akhnaten, and The Voyage, among many others—play throughout the world’s leading houses, and rarely to an empty seat. Glass has written music for experimental theater and for Academy Award–winning motion pictures such as The Hours and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, while Koyaanisqatsi, his initial filmic landscape with Godfrey Reggio and the Philip Glass Ensemble, may be the most radical and influential mating of sound and vision since Fantasia. His associations—personal and professional—with leading rock, pop, and world music artists date back to the 1960s, including the beginning of his collaborative relationship with artist Robert Wilson. Indeed, Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film, and in popular music—simultaneously.
He was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, The Juilliard School, and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Quincy Jones), and worked closely with sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble, seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.
The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, and develops.
There has been nothing “minimalist” about his output. In the past 25 years, Glass has composed more than 25 operas, large and small; 12 symphonies; three piano concertos and concertos for violin, piano, timpani, and saxophone quartet and orchestra; soundtracks to films ranging from new scores for the stylized classics of Jean Cocteau to Errol Morris’s documentary about former defense secretary Robert McNamara; string quartets; and a growing body of work for solo piano and organ. He has collaborated with Paul Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Yo-Yo Ma, and Doris Lessing, among many others. He presents lectures, workshops, and solo keyboard performances around the world, and continues to appear regularly with the Philip Glass Ensemble.
Serving as both muse and vehicle for Philip Glass’s music, Kronos Quartet has played an essential role in the composer’s creative realm for decades. But Quartet Satz—Glass’s contribution to Kronos’ Fifty for the Future initiative—isn’t just a dazzling addition to a body of work that constitutes one of new music’s definitive relationships. Solemn, measured, and inexorable as the tides, the sweeping piece distills the rhythmic and emotional currents that have woven Glass’s music into our consciousness.
“Each movement feels like an entire universe,” says David Harrington. “That’s what I thought before we even played it. Philip was giving us something that encapsulates his entire vision in one work. I think it’s one of his most amazing pieces. Philip has this connection to the early root system of the string quartet, a connection you hear in its gorgeous sonorities.”
At this point it’s impossible to know whether we experience Glass’s work as cinematic because of the countless times film scores have employed his music or whether there’s something inherent in his palette of pulse and texture and melodic imagination that evokes the moving image. No collaboration better embodies the depth of Glass’s relationship with Kronos than the score for Tod Browning’s Dracula, which they performed together live numerous times at screenings of the classic 1931 film and documented on a 1999 Nonesuch album.
Glass has written several other major pieces specifically for Kronos, starting with 1991’s String Quartet No. 5 (featured on the 1995 Nonesuch album Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass). All of those experiences came to play in writing Quartet Satz, as Glass had the ensemble in mind as he was composing. “I automatically visualize them playing the music and know how they sound,” he says. “I’m thinking, ‘This will be a good part for Hank. He will like this part.’ I think it’s likely I’ll never have this kind of a relationship with another quartet.”
Glass’s history with Kronos isn’t the piece’s only subtext. Some of the ideas in Quartet Satz first appeared in a piece he wrote for Robert Hurwitz to mark the end of his spectacularly productive tenure running Nonesuch. But the title also unambiguously references Schubert’s famously incomplete Quartettsatz, a move that Glass acknowledges with a chuckle as “a form of self-aggrandizement. Schubert was my father’s favorite composer. I grew up with him, and we actually share a birthday, January 31. I know the Schubert landscape like the back of my hand.”
Under the auspices of Kronos’ Fifty for the Future, Glass’s hand now gracefully welcomes new generations of string players. Mastering Quartet Satz means grappling with the string quartet as an organic organism, and the piece’s architectural strength means that Kronos can usher young musicians inside the piece. At a recent string festival at Austria’s Esterházy Palace, “We had an amazing experience with two very fine quartets we were mentoring, Canada’s Rolston String Quartet and South Korea’s Esmé Quartet,” Harrington says. “The 12 of us played Satz as an encore and it sounded glorious.”
—Andrew Gilbert
Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (The New York Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out New York), Missy Mazzoli has had her music performed globally by Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, violinist Jennifer Koh, Los Angeles Opera, New York City Opera, the Minnesota Orchestra, Cincinnati Opera, and many others. From 2012–2015, she was composer-in-residence with Opera Philadelphia, Gotham Chamber Opera, and Music-Theatre Group, and in 2011–2012 was composer-in-residence with the Albany Symphony.
Mazzoli’s 2016 opera Breaking the Waves, based on the film by Lars von Trier and created in collaboration with librettist Royce Vavrek, was commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects. It premiered in September 2016 and was called “one of the best 21st-century American operas yet” by Opera News, “powerful … dark and daring” by The New York Times, and “savage, heartbreaking, and thoroughly original” by The Wall Street Journal. In February 2012, Beth Morrison Projects presented Song from the Uproar, Mazzoli’s first multimedia chamber opera, which had a sold-out run at venerable New York venue The Kitchen. The Wall Street Journal called this work “both powerful and new,” and The New York Times claimed that “in the electric surge of Mazzoli’s score you felt the joy, risk, and limitless potential of free spirits unbound.”
Recent months included the premiere of Mazzoli’s third opera, Proving Up, at Washington National Opera; the premiere of Vespers for a New Dark Age, an extended work for her ensemble Victoire and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, commissioned by Carnegie Hall; and new works performed by pianist Emanuel Ax, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Upcoming commissions include new works for Opera Philadelphia, the National Ballet of Canada, Opera Omaha, and New York’s Miller Theatre.
Mazzoli is the recipient of a Fulbright Grant, a 2015 music grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and four ASCAP Young Composer Awards. Along with composer Ellen Reid, she recently founded Luna Lab, a mentorship program for young female composers in collaboration with the Kaufman Music Center in New York. Mazzoli teaches composition at the Mannes School of Music (The New School), and her works are published by G. Schirmer.
I think of music itself, particularly the music made by Kronos Quartet, as a strategy for mustering enthusiasm and joy. It’s a way of setting the world in order, a method of carving up time in way that—seemingly by magic—changes our frame of mind, energizes us, and gives us courage and reassurance. In this piece, I tried to combine techniques that were both scary and familiar to me; a cascade of natural harmonics collapses into an ecstatic chorale, which then evaporates into silence. Enthusiasm Strategies was composed for Kronos Quartet as part of its amazing and important educational initiative Fifty for the Future. I’m honored to contribute to this project and thrilled to be part of the incredible legacy of this quartet.
—Missy Mazzoli
Born in 1969 in Tokyo, Misato Mochizuki is equally active in Europe and in Japan. After receiving a master’s degree in composition from the National University of Fine Arts and Music in Tokyo, she was awarded first prize for composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris in 1995, and then integrated the composition and computer music programs at IRCAM.
In her very own combination of Occidental tradition and the Asiatic sense of breathing, Mochizuki’s style of writing developed magical rhythms and unusual sounds of great formal and stylistic freedom. Her catalog (published by Breitkopf & Härtel) consists of approximately 40 works, including 15 symphonic compositions and 12 pieces for small ensemble. Her works—which have been performed at the Salzburg Festival, Biennale di Venezia, La folle journée in Tokyo, and Lincoln Center Festival—have earned Mochizuki numerous awards, including the audience prize at Ars Musica in Brussels for Chimera (2002), the Japanese State Prize for the greatest young artistic talent (2003), the Otaka Prize for best symphonic world premiere in Japan (Cloud nine, 2005), the grand prize of the Tribune internationale des compositeurs for L’heure bleue (2008), and the Heidelberg Women Artists Prize (2010). Her most outstanding productions include the orchestral portrait concert at Suntory Hall in Tokyo (2007), the cinema concert at the Louvre with music to the silent film Le fil blanc de la cascade by Kenji Mizoguchi (2007), and the portrait concert at the Festival d’Automne in Paris (2010).
In 2011–2013, Mochizuki was composer-in-residence at the Besançon International Music Festival. Since 2007, she has been professor of artistic disciplines at the Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo, and has been invited to lead composition courses at institutions around the world, including the Amsterdam Conservatory. Within the framework of her activities, she continually reflects on the role of the composer in today’s society and on the necessity to open oneself to it. In addition, Mochizuki writes about music and culture in her own column every three months for the renowned Yomiuri Shimbun, the most widely read daily newspaper in Japan.
Boids was composed as an apostil to Brains, a string quartet I wrote in 2017. They can be played separately or enchained. In Boids, the violins and viola each have scales that represent “personalities”—chromatic, whole tone, and pentatonic—that all swim together in the same direction to create the sense of a flock. Each strike from the cello is a stone thrown into the water: After each pizz, the “fish” disperse, but eventually they begin to flock together anew.
—Misato Mochizuki
In the 2002 work Sun Rings, the wonders of technology meet the expansive and compassionate imagination of world-renowned composer Terry Riley, bringing the music of the spheres to life for this new millennium. The full evening-length composition includes sounds harvested from our solar system—the crackling of solar winds, the whistling of deep-space lightning, and other cosmic events—that create auditory landscapes triggered by Kronos using an interactive computer. In the full, evening-length production, this interplanetary musical story unfolds in a visual environment of breathtaking imagery gathered by NASA spacecraft and prepared for the project by Kronos in collaboration with eminent visual designer Willie Williams.
Given the literally galactic scope of Sun Rings, it is perhaps a touch ironic that the seeds of the project lay in a cardboard box in the University of Iowa physics department. Inside that box rested a store of audio-cassette tapes of cosmic phenomena recorded over some 40 years by Iowa’s Dr. Donald Gurnett. The esteemed plasma physicist affectionately refers to these extraterrestrial sounds as “whistlers,” because, as he told the Los Angeles Times, when lightning discharges in the plasma of space, “it’s like the electrons get together and whistle.”
Like one of these bolts from the heavens—if a bit slower-paced—the Sun Rings project was born through a kind of chain reaction. From Dr. Gurnett, the story moves to Bertram Ulrich, curator of the NASA Art Program. Long intrigued by Gurnett’s “whistlers” and a devoted fan of Kronos, Ulrich offered Kronos a commission to turn these seemingly random tones from outer space into music. Kronos’ David Harrington, for his part, turned to longtime Kronos collaborator Terry Riley—the California-based father of minimalism, consummate uniter of musical traditions and innovations, and deep well of spirituality in sound—who agreed to serve as the project’s composer. (As a historical note, in what is either a manifestation of karma or a happy coincidence for the Sun Rings project, Riley’s very first composition for Kronos was entitled Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector.)
On his approach to bringing together the music of Kronos and the sounds of outer space, Riley notes, “The ‘spacescapes’ that comprise Sun Rings … were written as separate musical atmospheres, with the intention to let the sounds of space influence the string quartet writing, and then to let there be an interplay between live ‘string’ and recorded ‘space’ sound. In some movements the intention was to place the quartet in such a way that it felt like they were traveling through spatial atmospheres as a symbolic representation of the wanderings of space probes Voyager and Galileo as they moved through what must have been the quite incredible atmospheres of our solar system. In some cases, fragments of melody that I observed in these sounds became the basis for themes that were developed in the quartet writing.”
In exploring the musical possibilities for the piece, Riley and Harrington paid visits to Gurnett at Iowa and to Cape Canaveral, where they observed the workings of NASA in person, enthusiastically taking in a space shuttle launch while they were there. Despite this promising start, however, the project was nearly de-railed by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, after which all parties concerned questioned Sun Rings’ relevance in the wake of the terrorist attacks and the impending war in Afghanistan.
At this point, the Sun Rings chain reaction surprisingly continued, with a new and vital link. As the Los Angeles Times put it: “Riley heard poet and novelist Alice Walker on the radio talking about how she had made up a September 11 mantra—‘One Earth, One People, One Love.’ It suddenly occurred to him that contemplating outer space could be a way to put the problems on Earth into perspective.” As Riley told the Times, the concept of humanity’s relationship to outer space also took on a spiritual dimension for him: “I thought about a prayer central that would be like a big operating system up there that funnels all the prayers from different people.”
As Riley describes his fully realized, post–September 11 conception of Sun Rings: “This work is largely about humans as they reach out from Earth to gain an awareness of their solar system neighborhood … Space is surely the realm of dreams and imagination, and a fertile feeding ground for poets and musicians. Ancient astrologers were aware of the significant influences of planetary movements on our lives. I feel these influences are somehow responsible for this amazing collaboration that has been so enthusiastically undertaken by all the participants responsible for its outcome. Do the stars welcome us into their realms? I think so or we would not have made it this far. Do they wish us to come in peace? I am sure of it.”
—Matthew Campbell
Bryce Dessner is a vital and rare force in new music. He has won Grammy Awards both as a classical composer and with the band The National, of which he is founding member, guitarist, arranger, and co-principal songwriter. He is also an increasingly high-profile presence in the world of film-score composition. The breadth and level of Dessner’s creative output is remarkable.
Dessner’s rapidly expanding body of work is commissioned by the world’s leading ensembles, from the Orchestre de Paris and London Philharmonic Orchestra to the New York Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, and Carnegie Hall.
Few artists are able to bridge diverse creative worlds with such virtuosity, and he regularly collaborates with some of the world’s most respected artists. These include Philip Glass, Paul Simon, Sufjan Stevens, Caroline Shaw, Johnny Greenwood, Bon Iver, Justin Peck, Ragnar Kjartansson, Nico Muhly, and Steve Reich, who called Dessner “a major voice of his generation.” His orchestrations can be heard on the new albums by Paul Simon and Bon Iver, among others.
In 2018, Dessner was named one of a collective of eight “extraordinary artists, thinkers, and doers” to help steer the artistic leadership of Esa-Pekka Salonen when he takes over as San Francisco Symphony’s music director in September 2020. Dessner was nominated for Grammy and Golden Globe awards for the soundtrack to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning film The Revenant, co-written with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto. Additional film-score credits include The Kitchen for Warner Bros. (2019) and The Two Popes by Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles (2019).
Major classical works include the Concerto for Two Pianos (2017) written for Katia and Marielle Labèque, and premiered by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and recorded for release on Dessner’s album El Chan on Deutsche Grammophon in 2019; Voy a Dormir (2018) written for mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor and Orchestra of St. Luke’s; Skrik Trio (2017), commissioned by Steve Reich and Carnegie Hall; No Tomorrow (2017), a ballet by Ragnar Kjartansson, Margrét Bjarnadóttir, and Dessner; and Wires (2016), commissioned for Ensemble Intercontemporain and Matthias Pintscher.
Dessner’s other albums include St. Carolyn by the Sea, Music for Wood and Strings, and Aheym, commissioned by Kronos Quartet. His most recent releases include When We Are Inhuman, a collaborative album with Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Eighth Blackbird; and an album of string compositions performed by Ensemble Resonanz.
Dessner is very active as a curator, and is regularly called upon to program festivals and events around the world. He has crafted weekend residencies in his name at the Barbican Centre, Philharmonie de Paris, and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. He co-founded and curates the festivals MusicNOW in Cincinnati, HAVEN in Copenhagen, Sounds from a Safe Harbour in Cork, and PEOPLE.
Dessner is principal songwriter for The National along with his brother Aaron, in collaboration with singer-lyricist Matthew Berninger. In spring 2019, the band released its latest studio recording, I Am Easy to Find, collaborating with film director
Mike Mills.
Le Bois for string quartet is based on Pérotin’s Sederunt principes, and was inspired by the Notre Dame Cathedral and the 1,000-year-old wood ceiling that was lost in the devastating fire there last spring. Le Bois is a musical reflection on the impermanence of so many things we take for granted, whether it be our relationships, the structures that surround us, or our environment itself, which is rapidly being destroyed by climate change.
“When I was one year old,” Steve Reich recalls, “my parents separated, with my mother going to Los Angeles and my father staying in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I used to travel back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles, from 1939 to 1942, accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, as a Jew, if I had been in Europe during this period I would have had to ride very different trains.”
Such is the historical subtext for Reich’s Different Trains, a composition in three movements commissioned for Kronos Quartet. But whatever the strength of its philosophical inquiry, the musical impact of this work will be greater because it represents a turning point in Reich’s art.
To construct Different Trains, Reich first made a series of tape recordings: of his governess, Virginia, when in her 70s, remembering the cross-country train trips; of Lawrence Davis, a retired Pullman porter who regularly made the NY–LA run, reminiscing about his life; of Rachella, Paul, and Rachel, three Holocaust survivors (and Reich contemporaries) who now live in America; and of American and European train sounds of the 1930s and ’40s. Reich then selected small speech samples and notated the musical pitches of these fragments, using the resultant melodies as the basis of the composition.
These melodies were performed and then overdubbed on tape by Kronos, so that as many as three “Kronos Quartets” are heard at one time. Reich next used sampling keyboards and a computer to mix in the original speech samples and train sounds. Kronos appears on stage to perform with the prepared tape.
In its combination of pre-taped and live performances by the same artists, Different Trains exemplifies the series of “counterpoint” pieces Reich has written over the years for instrumental soloists. But in its use of recorded speech as a musical score, Different Trains has its roots in It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, Reich’s first recorded works. Different Trains thus connects two stages of Reich’s career, and served as the debut of what he predicted at the time would be “a direction that … will lead to a new kind of documentary music video theater.” Since Different Trains, Reich has indeed continued to utilize the musical material in speech patterns in his two theatrical collaborations with video artist Beryl Korot, The Cave (1999) and Three Tales (2002).
Born in New York, Reich graduated with honors in philosophy from Cornell University, and studied at The Juilliard School with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti. After receiving his master’s from Mills College, Reich studied drumming at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, and traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew scriptures in New York and Jerusalem. Reich founded his own ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, which since 1971 has frequently toured the world, performing at venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall and the Bottom Line cabaret.
In 1990, Reich received a Grammy Award in the category of Best Contemporary Composition for Different Trains, as recorded by Kronos on Nonesuch. In 1997, Nonesuch released a 10-disc retrospective box set, Steve Reich Works: 1965–1995. He won a second Grammy Award in 1999 for his piece Music for 18 Musicians, also on Nonesuch.
Reich was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994, to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, and awarded Commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1999. The year 2000 brought five additional honors: the Schuman Award from Columbia University, the Montgomery Fellowship from Dartmouth College, the Regents’ Lectureship at the University of California at Berkeley, an honorary doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts, and recognition as Musical America’s Composer of the Year. In 2009, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Double Sextet.
—Neil Tesser