Sun Ra was one of the most unusual musicians in the history of jazz, moving from Fletcher Henderson swing to free jazz with ease—sometimes in the same song. Portraying himself as a product of outer space, he “traveled the spaceways” with a colorful troupe of musicians, using a multitude of percussion and unusual instrumentation, from tree drum to celesta.
Sun Ra, who enjoyed cloaking his origins and development in mystery, is known to have studied piano early on with Lula Randolph in Washington, DC. His first noted professional job was in 1946–1947 as pianist with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra at the Club DeLisa on the South Side of Chicago. Finding his calling as an arranger, he put together a band to play his own compositions. In the 1950s, he began issuing recordings of his unusual music on his Saturn label, becoming one of the first jazz musicians to record and sell his own albums. Sun Ra’s band became a central part of the early avant-garde jazz movement in Chicago, being one of the first jazz bands to employ electronic instruments.
In 1960, he moved his band to New York, where he established a communal home for his musicians, known as the Sun Palace; by the 1970s, the Sun Ra Arkestra and its various permutations began touring Europe extensively. An outsider who linked the African American experience with ancient Egyptian mythology and outer space, Sun Ra was years ahead of all other avant-garde musicians in his experimentation with sound and instruments, a pioneer in group improvisations and the use of electric instruments in jazz.
Jacob Garchik, multi-instrumentalist and composer, was born in San Francisco and has lived in New York since 1994. At home in a variety of styles and musical roles, he is a vital part of the Downtown and Brooklyn scenes, playing trombone in groups that range from jazz to contemporary classical to Balkan brass. He has released five albums as a leader, including The Heavens: The Atheist Gospel Trombone Album. He also co-leads Brooklyn’s premier Mexican brass band, Banda de los Muertos. As a trombonist, Garchik has worked with many luminaries of jazz and the avant-garde, including Henry Threadgill, Steve Swallow, Lee Konitz, Laurie Anderson, Anthony Braxton, and George Lewis. In 2018, he won the Rising Star—Trombone category in the DownBeat Jazz Critics Poll. Garchik also plays accordion, tenor horn, and tuba.
Sun Ra recorded Outer Spaceways Incorporated many times. To create this arrangement, I listened to as many renditions as I could find—abstracted solo piano concerts; instrumental Arkestra odysseys with long, freely improvised introductions; electro-acoustic versions; and the swinging version with June Tyson singing that appears in the film Space Is the Place. In place of the often raucous solo section that followed the vocal verses, I made a little “shout chorus” for Kronos that tried to capture the time-traveling feeling of Sun Ra—that you are listening to music that exists in past, present, and future all at once.
—Jacob Garchik
The symbiotic relationship between jazz artists and the American Songbook can look strange from the outside. Standards written by Broadway composers, Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, and Hollywood songwriters in the half-century before the advent of The Beatles still have widespread currency in the 21st century because jazz vocalists and instrumentalists continue to reimagine and transform them in ways that their originators often found alarming. Few artists put a more indelible personal stamp on familiar songs than Nina Simone, but even in the realm shaped by the High Priestess of Soul’s alchemical prowess, “For All We Know” stands out as a singular transformation.
Kronos’ David Harrington, who often spends odd hours of free time spelunking through the internet following hints and clues in search of new sounds, can’t recall exactly how he found his way to the video of Simone performing “For All We Know” in a studio. But he’ll never forget the thrill of discovery and the feeling of being transfixed by her performance. “I was talking with a musician recently about the idea that rabbit holes are real places,” he said. “And they can be really fun. I can’t tell you how I ended up hearing Nina’s live performance of ‘For All We Know,’ but I was in a hotel room and all the sudden there it was. I could not stop listening to her. I thought, ‘This is perfection—musical perfection.’”
Simone first recorded the song on the sessions that produced her 1959 debut album Little Girl Blue, though “For All We Know” wasn’t included on that Bethlehem record. Taking advantage of her sudden rise to stardom with her hit version of “I Loves You, Porgy,” the label released several leftover tracks on the compilation Nina Simone and Her Friends without her knowledge. While she sang the Sam M. Lewis lyrics from the 1934 standard, Simone entirely eschewed the melody by J. Fred Coots and reimagined the song as a Baroque-style fugue. Performing with bassist Chris White and guitarist Al Schackman, she elaborates on that arrangement on the video that enthralled Harrington.
Harrington and arranger Jacob Garchik envision Simone’s version within a three-piece suite that pays homage to Questlove’s Grammy- and Academy Award–winning documentary Summer of Soul alongside arrangements inspired by gospel legend Mahalia Jackson’s “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People.” Where those pieces are definitive renditions of beloved songs, Simone’s “For All We Know” is something quite different (she doesn’t perform the song in the film) and confusing. She wrote the arrangement at a time when she still aspired to a career as a concert pianist, ambition that was thwarted by her stinging rejection from the Curtis Institute of Music despite an outstanding audition. (The institute would later award her with an honorary degree in 2003.)
“She studied classical piano at Juilliard and she ends up going way beyond that,” Garchik said. “In this period, she’s still drawing strongly from that background and you can hear that in this composition. She took the lyrics of an old Tin Pan Alley standard and wrote this loose sort of fugue with a completely different melody. It sounds to me like she composed an intro and ending, and the middle is improvised. Hank plays the low part. Her voice fits the viola very well.”
Simone wasn’t done with the piece. She recorded the melody again with a new set of lyrics for her 1967 orchestral album Silk & Soul. The album’s concluding track, “Consummation,” transposes a tale of romance into a soaring account of spiritual bliss that leaves Tin Pan Alley dwindling in the distance.
—Andrew Gilbert
Recipient of the 2024 Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition, Aleksandra Vrebalov defines her work as an opportunity for healing, service, connection, and a celebration of humanness. Her more than 100 works—diverse in aesthetics, genre, and medium—are often inspired by urgent personal concerns and explore themes of identity, place, and belonging.
Living through wars in former Yugoslavia, Vrebalov has been inspired by the friction between the public and the private side of heroism—like in Beyond Zero: 1914–1918, the 2014 multimedia collaboration with Kronos, or her opera The Knock.
Vrebalov’s works—ranging from concert music and opera to music for modern dance and film—have been performed by Kronos Quartet, Cincinnati Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Serbian National Theatre, English National Ballet, Rambert, Sybarite5, Göttinger Symphonieorchester, ETHEL, Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre, IJsbreker, Moravian Philharmonic, Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra, and Festival Ballet Providence, among others. Her works have been recorded for Nonesuch, Cantaloupe, Innova, Centaur, Vienna Modern Masters, and Ikarus Films.
Gold Came From Space—a meditation on the beauty and purity of soul incorruptible by earthly dealings and on the nobleness of work guided by love and truth—is a singular journey driven by curiosity, passions, memories, and exploration of my deep creative connection to Kronos Quartet and our place as creators who together crossed over from the XX into the XXI century.
The dramatic narrative of the piece is abstract and distorted with islands of harmonic and melodic grounding. The piece unfolds through the juxtaposition of contrasting, extreme qualities of musical parameters: Rhythm is amorphous and driven, harmony emerges from and dissolves into noise, the texture vacillates between sparse and dense, and fragmented circular patterns—timestoppers—propel into linear cohesion. The overall structure follows 17 harmonics descending towards the mothertone, and 17 turns of the spiral in the Fibonacci sequence spiraling down to one. The piece, much like nature, follows the contours of these phenomena, but it never conforms to their theoretical precision.
Sporadic references to a chord, a pattern, or a line from The Sea Ranch Songs, Beyond Zero: 1914–1918, and ilektrikés rhimés do not sound like quotes; they form the fabric of a new context, celebrating where we—Kronos and I—have musically come from more than 25 years of collaboration.
Gold Came From Space is a space of gathering of old friends, an imaginary session of philosophers and alchemists, a picture a little diffused and out of focus whose image slowly gets revealed as the eye adjusts.
My purpose—to create beauty, and to create it with others, for ourselves and for others, for the world to be more loving and wonder-full—has been fulfilled many times with Kronos, as well as with The Friends of Kronos at The Sea Ranch, who commissioned this work. I am immensely grateful for it.
—Aleksandra Vrebalov
Recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young less than three weeks after National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed protesters at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, killing four students and wounding nine, “Ohio” is the most immediate, visceral, and prominent response to political violence in American music. As the country’s first nationwide student strike shuttered more than 450 campuses that spring, Neil Young’s song resounded on radios and record players, bringing the outraged cry of “how many more?” to a landscape convulsed by President Nixon’s announcement that he’d expanded the US war against the Viet Cong into Cambodia.
As one of the first new pieces premiered by the next incarnation of Kronos, Paul Wiancko’s arrangement of “Ohio” is a clarion welcome for violinist Gabriela Díaz and violist Ayane Kozasa. Watching the news as protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict spread across US campuses in the winter and spring of 2024—unrest that sometimes altered Kronos’ performance plans—“and searching for something for the new Kronos to sink its teeth into, this song immediately came to my mind,” the cellist says. “Part of the legacy and mission of Kronos is to cover songs that we feel have some significance socially and politically.”
In recent years, Kronos has charged through the door kicked open by Steve Riffkin’s arrangement of “Purple Haze” with the program Music For Change: The 60s. While “Ohio” falls just outside the ’60s time frame, it’s a glowing ember from that incendiary era and the first piece by Young to enter the quartet’s repertoire. For Wiancko, “Ohio” is both an era-defining anthem and a signature work by a foundational figure in his musical upbringing.
“I discovered Neil Young about the same time I discovered Janis Joplin and Cat Stevens and Bob Dylan and Hendrix,” he recalls. “He played a big role in my own musical taste and priorities. Even as a composer, I think somehow he’s an important figure in my musical development. I thought it would be incredibly appropriate to incorporate this magnificent song in the world of Kronos.”
David Harrington remembers the adrenaline rush of hearing “Ohio” on the radio in the spring of 1970. Kronos was still a hazy dream three years away from inception, “but hearing that song made me feel like this medium, the string quartet, could play music that responds to things happening now,” he says.
Rather than reimagining the song, Wiancko leans into Young’s crunching guitar riff and his bandmates’ trademark vocal harmonies. “The guitar line and vocal line are so strong in terms of how the melody is constructed, violin and viola are definitely going to play a big role. I’m looking forward to laying back and playing the bass line, and hearing Gabriela and Ayane dig into those harmonies. I’m writing this to celebrate and welcome them into the quartet.”
—Andrew Gilbert
Terry Riley first came to prominence in 1964 when, with the groundbreaking In C, he subverted the world of tightly organized atonal composition then in fashion and pioneered the musical aesthetic known as minimalism. Following In C, he quit formal composition in order to concentrate on improvisation and devoted himself to studying North Indian vocal techniques under the legendary Pandit Pran Nath. In 1979, Riley began notating music again when both he and Kronos were on the faculty at Mills College in Oakland. This four-decade–long relationship has yielded dozens of works for string quartet, including a concerto, The Sands, which was the Salzburg Festival’s first-ever new music commission; Sun Rings, a NASA-commissioned piece for choir, visuals, and space sounds (Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Classical); and The Cusp of Magic for string quartet and pipa. Kronos’ album Cadenza on the Night Plain, a collection of music by Riley, was selected by both TIME and Newsweek as one of the 10 best classical albums of the year in 1988. The epic five-quartet cycle, Salome Dances for Peace, was selected as the best classical album of the year by USA Today in 1989 in addition to being nominated for a Grammy.
Sara Miyamoto is an improviser, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and graphic artist originally from Yamanashi, Japan. A graduate of Joshibi University of Art and Design, Miyamoto was able to hone her musical skills under the guidance of the professional musicians who recorded in her father’s recording studio. After recording as a backup singer for Tomofumi Tanizawa, she joined the Japanese singer-songwriter’s band Space Like Carnival on vocals and electric bass. Since then, Miyamoto has performed as part of her own mood punk band AWAW and has been commissioned to compose for radio dramas, films, and other music groups. She has performed frequently with Terry Riley in Mexico, the US, and Japan, including a concert with Joe Hisaishi’s Music Future Band. Miyamoto has been a disciple of the Kirana School of Indian Classical vocal music since 2019 and co-directs KIRANA EAST classes in Kamakura.
Riley’s Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye, created in collaboration with Miyamoto, utilizes Sun Ra’s track “Nuclear War” as source material and inspiration. Riley composed this remix through keyboard improvisations, which were then translated for string quartet by Kronos cellist Paul Wiancko. This remix was created for the Red Hot + Ra series—a large-scale, multi-album multimedia series that features many artists offering their interpretations of and tributes to the music of Sun Ra. Illustrating Sun Ra’s profound influence on contemporary culture around the world, the series also aims to raise awareness about climate justice. Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye is part of the Red Hot + Ra album curated by Kronos’ David Harrington, released in 2024.
The music of American composer Viet Cuong has been performed on six continents by musicians and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Sandbox Percussion, Albany Symphony, PRISM Quartet, and Dallas Winds, among others. Passionate about bringing different facets of the contemporary music community together, his recent projects include a concerto for Eighth Blackbird with the United States Navy Band. He also enjoys exploring the unexpected and whimsical, and he is often drawn to projects where he can make peculiar combinations and sounds feel enchanting or oddly satisfying. He is currently the Pacific Symphony’s composer-in-residence and serves as assistant professor of music composition at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Cuong holds degrees from Princeton University, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Peabody Conservatory.
The title of this piece comes from Mary Oliver’s poem “Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks.” In this particular time of great loss, I was deeply inspired by Oliver’s words—words that are a gentle reminder of the uncertainty of the future, the confident hope of the present, and the propulsive force of life that drives us through any doubt that a new day will arrive.
—Viet Cuong
Benedicte Maurseth is a distinguished performer and composer in the Norwegian music scene. With nearly 30 years of tutelage under Hardanger fiddle master Knut Hamre, traditional music from Hardanger is her specialty. She has toured extensively as a soloist and collaborates closely with numerous leading artists across various genres and artistic expressions. She has been the recipient of numerous artist grants from the Norwegian state in recognition of her contributions to traditional and creative music. She has recorded for Grappa Musikkforlag and ECM Records, and has also published books, articles, and essays. Her book To Be Nothing: Conversations with Knut Hamre, Hardanger Fiddle Master was published in English by Terra Nova Press / MIT Press in 2019.
Maurseth’s latest solo album, Hárr, received the Nordic Music Prize and was recognized by The Guardian as one of the 10 best folk music albums of 2022. The same year, her non-fiction book Fiddlesisters was published, offering a groundbreaking exploration of female fiddlers from the 18th century to the present. The book, along with a concert performance and museum exhibition of the same title, earned Maurseth the Folkelarm Award for Folk Musician of the Year in 2023, as well as the SFF prize for her contributions to Norwegian folk music.
Nature in motion and process is often reflected in Kristine Tjøgersen’s works. Her music is developed in support of the notion that astonishment lies wherever one is willing to look. Born in the Norwegian village of Sagesund, she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she studied clarinet with Hans Christian Bræin. She then pursued a master’s in composition at the Anton Bruckner University in Linz, Austria, where she studied with Carola Bauckholt.
In 2019–2020, Tjøgersen was a fellow at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 2020, she received Norway’s Arne Nordheim Composer’s Prize, as well as the Pauline Hall Prize for Bioluminescence. In 2021, her Piano Concerto was named Work of the Year by the Norwegian Society of Composers. Tjøgersen’s Between Trees was the selected work of the 2022 International Rostrum of Composers in Palermo and won the Coup de Coeur des Jeunes Mélomanes from the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco in 2023. In 2024, she was awarded the Edvard Prize for Pelagic Dreamscape. Earlier this year, Tjøgersen was honored with a Composer Prize from the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung.
Elja is inspired by the vast open landscape of Hardangervidda in Southern Norway. The mountain plateau is considered the largest in Europe: a barren treeless moorland, with countless pools, lakes, rivers and streams, moraines and glaciers. You can walk for days and still not have reached the end.
The Hardanger region is a vital habitat for numerous species. Elja honors this landscape and its inhabitants: wild reindeer, wolverine, Arctic fox, cranes, golden plover, Lapland longspur, snowy owl, Eurasian whimbrel, curlew, ptarmigan, and more. All of them are parts of a fragile ecosystem where everything is connected and codependent. In the past 50 years, these diverse animals, plants, and insects have decreased in numbers. The reasons for this decline are myriad, one of the main factors being human impact. The loss of moorland and the disappearance of insects affect the entire food chain, leaving the landscape more and more quiet.
This rugged space is also home to Hardanger fiddle playing, a tradition passed on orally from masters to students over several centuries. Modal scales, intricate rhythms, rich timbre, ornamentation, and numerous recurring musical motifs characterize this fiddle music, collectively allowing for high degrees of individual expression. This musical heritage forms the foundation of Maurseth’s compositions, weaving together lyrical qualities, a strong melodic focus, and the use of minimalistic repetition in conjunction with spontaneous composition.
Tjøgersen characterizes her compositional practice through curiosity, imagination, humor, and precision. In her work, she creates unexpected auditory situations through playing with tradition. She reflects nature in motion and process in her works, and collaborates with researchers and biologists for sources of new sound and scenic ideas, inspiring her to incorporate organic forms into the music.
“By giving nature a voice in the concert hall,” says Tjøgersen, “I want the audience to get to know valuable forms of life and to raise awareness of what can be lost if humans continue to change nature.”
Elja reflects the dynamic partnership of Tjøgersen and Maurseth. They have collaborated to compose a piece that blends Maurseth’s expertise as a traditional Hardanger fiddler with Tjøgersen’s innovative and sonorous musical style, creating colorful landscapes filled with overtones, lyrical quality, adventurous spirit, wind, and groove.
Elja is performed on various types of Hardanger fiddles—instruments with resonating strings and different tunings originating from the Hardanger region in Western Norway. The Hardanger fiddle has been one of the main instruments in Norwegian traditional music for centuries. The gifted Norwegian luthier, Ottar Kåsa, has custom-built the Hardanger viola and Hardanger cello with resonating strings for Kronos Quartet.
—Benedicte Maurseth and Kristine Tjøgersen