Kronos Quartet
Margaret Leng Tan
Victor Gama
Matmos

Performers

• Kronos Quartet
  ·· David Harrington, Violin
  ·· John Sherba, Violin
  ·· Hank Dutt, Viola
  ·· Jeffrey Zeigler, Cello
• Margaret Leng Tan, Toy Piano, Toy Orchestra, and Vocals
• Matmos
  ·· Drew Daniel, Electronics
  ·· M.C. Schmidt, Electronics
• Victor Gama, Pangeia Instrumentos

Program

• JG THIRLWELL Eremikophobia (World Premiere)
• ERIK GRISWOLD Old MacDonald's Yellow Submarine (NY Premiere)
• GE GAN-RU Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! (NY Premiere)
• VICTOR GAMA SOL(t)O (US Premiere)
• VICTOR GAMA Rio Cunene (World Premiere)
• MATMOS For Terry Riley (NY Premiere)
• Kronos Quartet
• 
  Program is approximately 2 hours, including one intermission

Bios

• Kronos Quartet
  
  David Harrington, Violin
  John Sherba, Violin
  Hank Dutt, Viola
  Jeffrey Zeigler, Cello
  
  For more than 30 years, San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet has pursued a singular artistic vision, combining a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to expanding the range and context of the string quartet. In the process, Kronos has become one of the most celebrated and influential ensembles of our time, performing thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than 45 recordings of extraordinary breadth and creativity, collaborating with many of the world’s most eclectic composers and performers, and commissioning more than 650 works and arrangements for string quartet. Kronos’s work also has garnered numerous awards, including a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance (2004) and Musicians of the Year (2003) from Musical America.
  
  Since 1973, Kronos has built a compellingly diverse repertoire for string quartet, performing and recording works by 20th-century masters (Bartók, Shostakovich, Webern), contemporary composers (Aleksandra Vrebalov, John Adams, Alfred Schnittke), jazz legends (Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk), and artists from even farther afield (Azeri vocalist Alim Qasimov, avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn).
  
  Integral to Kronos’s work is a series of long-running, in-depth collaborations with many of the world’s foremost composers, including Terry Riley, whose work with Kronos includes Salome Dances for Peace, the multimedia production Sun Rings, and 2005’s The Cusp of Magic; Philip Glass, recording his complete string quartets and scores to films like Mishima; Azerbaijan’s Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, who was featured on the 2005 release Mugam Sayagi: Music of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh; Steve Reich, whose Kronos-recorded Different Trains earned a Grammy; Argentina’s Osvaldo Golijov, whose work with Kronos includes both compositions and extensive arrangements; and many more.
  
  In addition to composers, Kronos counts numerous artists from around the world among its regular collaborators, including Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man; legendary Bollywood “playback singer” Asha Bhosle; Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq; Mexican rockers Café Tacuba; and the Romanian gypsy band Taraf de Haïdouks. Kronos has performed live with the likes of icons Allen Ginsberg, Modern Jazz Quartet, Tom Waits, David Barsamian, Howard Zinn, Betty Carter, and David Bowie, and has appeared on recordings by such diverse talents as Nine Inch Nails, Amon Tobin, Dan Zanes, DJ Spooky, Dave Matthews, Nelly Furtado, Rokia Traoré, Joan Armatrading, and Don Walser. Kronos’s music features prominently in other media, including film (Requiem for a Dream, 21 Grams, Heat) and dance, with choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and Eiko and Koma.
  
  Kronos spends five months of each year on tour, appearing in concert halls, clubs, and festivals around the world, including BAM Next Wave Festival, Carnegie Hall, the Barbican in London, WOMAD, UCLA’s Royce Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Shanghai Concert Hall, and the Sydney Opera House. Kronos is equally prolific and wide-ranging on disc. The ensemble’s expansive discography on Nonesuch Records includes such collections as Pieces of Africa (1992), a showcase of African-born composers, which simultaneously topped Billboard’s Classical and World Music lists; 2000’s Kronos Caravan, whose musical “travels” span North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East; 1998’s 10-disc anthology, Kronos Quartet: 25 Years; Nuevo (2002), a Grammy- and Latin Grammy–nominated celebration of Mexican culture; and the 2003 Grammy-winner, Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite.
  
  Kronos’s recording and performances reveal only a fraction of the group’s commitment to new music. As a non-profit organization, the Kronos Quartet / Kronos Performing Arts Association is committed to mentoring emerging professional performers, and to creating, performing, and recording new works.
  

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• Margaret Leng Tan
  
  Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force in American avant-garde music, renowned for her performances of American and Asian music that transcend the piano’s conventional boundaries. She is also hailed as an eminent interpreter of John Cage’s music.
  
  After discovering Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano in 1993, Tan became fascinated with the artistic potential of the toy piano and, more recently, by other toy instruments as well. In her groundbreaking 1997 album, The Art of the Toy Piano (Philips/Universal), she elevated a humble toy to the status of a real instrument. Critics acknowledge her as the world’s first toy piano virtuoso who has inspired composers to create exciting repertoire for a new instrument. Over the past decade, Tan’s diminutive music theater of nostalgia and humor has delighted audiences at festivals around the world.
  
  Evans Chan’s 2004 documentary, Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan, was nominated for Best Music Documentary at the American Film Institute / Discovery Channel’s SilverDocs. Sorceress and Chan’s The Maverick Piano, featuring live performances by Tan, are available as a Mode Records DVD. Tan’s latest Mode recording, She Herself Alone: The Art of the Toy Piano II, will be available this spring. Visit margaretlengtan.com for more information.
  
  Margaret Leng Tan plays the Schoenhut toy piano and the Steinway piano.
  

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• Matmos
  
  Drew Daniel, Electronics
  M. C. Schmidt, Electronics
  
  Matmos is Drew Daniel and M. C. Schmidt. Currently based in Baltimore, the duo formed in San Francisco during the mid-1990s and self-released its debut album in 1997. Marrying the conceptual tactics and noisy textures of object-based musique concrète to a rhythmic matrix rooted in electronic pop music, Matmos quickly became known for its highly unusual sound sources: amplified crayfish nerve tissue, the pages of bibles turning, water hitting copper plates, liposuction surgery, cameras and VCRs, chin implant surgery, contact microphones on human hair, rat cages, tanks of helium, a cow uterus, human skulls, snails, cigarettes, cards shuffling, laser eye surgery, whoopee cushions, balloons, latex fetish clothing, rhinestones, Polish trains, insects, life support systems, inflatable blankets, rock salt, solid gold coins, the sound of a frozen stream thawing in the sun, and a five-gallon bucket of oatmeal. These raw materials are manipulated into surprisingly accessible forms, and often supplemented by traditional musical instruments played by the duo’s large circle of friends and collaborators.
  
  Since their debut, Matmos has released over eight albums, including Quasi-Objects, The West, A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, The Civil War, and The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast. In 2001, Matmos was asked to collaborate with Icelandic singer Björk on her Vespertine album, and subsequently embarked on two world tours as part of her band. In addition to musical collaborations with such artists and ensembles as So Percussion, David Tibet, the Rachel’s, Zeena Parkins, and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, Matmos has also worked with a wide range of artists across disciplines, from the visual artist Daria Martin (on the soundtrack to her film Minotaur) to the playwright Young Jean Lee (for her play The Appeal) to a new project with Berlin-based choreographer Ayman Harper.
  
  The band’s most recent album, Supreme Balloon, saw the duo return to their habits of conceptual restriction, but cut out sampling entirely. With no microphones allowed, the result was an entirely synthesizer-based album that features a collaboration with pianist Sarah Cahill on a version of French Baroque composer François Couperin’s Les Folies françaises, and guest appearances by Marshall Allen and Terry Riley. Matmos’s next album, Treasure State, will be a collaboration with the Brooklyn-based quartet So Percussion, scheduled for release later this spring.
  
  

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• Victor Gama
  
  Angolan by birth but of Portuguese origins, Victor Gama has been steadily building an array of instruments since the early 1990s. Gama experiments with the phenomenon of metamorphosis of instruments and musical crafts that span the period from pre-historic times to the here-and-now. Visually reminiscent of the Swiss-Brazilian instrument builder Walter Smetak’s creations in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, and sonically related to Harry Partch’s more widely celebrated constructions and compositions, Gama’s work introduces a kind of archeology of music as an exploratory theme through his theory of the Golian Modes. The Golian Modes aim to establish a system of music representation and theory based on ancient knowledge, philosophies, and traditions. Gama’s research that resulted in the Golian Modes focuses primarily on the Kongo-Angola cosmogony and religious beliefs that originate from Central Africa, underlying a graphic expression system used particularly in Angola, the Caribbean, and South America. While drawing inspiration from his own native Angolan folk music and instruments, as well as those from throughout the African Diaspora, his work as a composer further elaborates on the potential to transform beyond the structures of tradition.
  
  The sound palette he creates on his instruments are hypnotic and otherworldly, ranging from percussive loops to string arpeggios built from the barest of components that square the circle between Gamelan music, the work of turn-of-the-century composers (such as Erik Satie), and the music of 20th-century minimalists (Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, and Arvo Pärt).
  
  High on his list of references are composers such as Francis Bebey, Egberto Gismonti, and Naná Vasconcelos. Breathing through his compositions are the silence and space of desert(ed) terrains, landscapes populated by no one but traversed by nomads, geographies beyond ordinary human time.
  
  Gama’s installations and exhibitions are an attempt at creating a space where the listener witnesses and experiments a topography of music, its body, and its orientation—a concept reminiscent of John Cage’s theater of music where the listener can hear, see, and touch. Among several albums and recordings for dance and film are his latest release Pangeia Instrumentos on Rephlex and Oceanites Erraticus on PangeiArt.
  

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