Kronos Quartet Announces Year Three Of FIFTY FOR THE FUTURE

Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing Arts Association is proud to announce the third group of composers for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire. Launched in 2015, Fifty for the Future is an exciting partnership with Carnegie Hall and others to create 50 new works - by 25 women and 25 men - expressly for the training of students and emerging professionals. Each year, ten composers are announced. As ever, scores, parts, recordings, videos, and other learning materials for the compositions will be offered free of charge in online modules at kronosquartet.org/fifty-for-the-future. The works represent different levels of difficulty, from beginner through advanced, enabling young quartets to develop as players by working their way up through the ascending levels of complexity and technical challenge. Each composition represents a fully realized work, programmed alongside other repertoire in Kronos' own touring season. Kronos has given more than 140 performances of the fourteen Fifty for the Futurepieces that have been premiered so far.

Since Fifty for the Future was launched, Kronos Quartet has been highly active in teaching young musicians to perform the commissioned pieces. To date, they have mentored 400 young players, in 75 workshops, coachings, and residency activities. More than 7,200 people have attended Fifty for the Future educational events. Online engagement has been strong as well: people have interacted with the ten completed composer modules 17,700+ times.

Kronos will feature several Fifty for the Future works in programs at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall on Saturday, February 11 (7:30 pm), and at WNYC's Greene Space on Tuesday, March 7 (7:30 pm), where they will be joined by young quartets from the Kaufman Music Center's Face the Music. The latter concert, presented in association with Q2 Music and the Ecstatic Music Festival, is sold out.

T H E Y E A R T H R E E C O M P O S E R S

For more than four decades, Kronos Quartet has collaborated with composers representing the highest level of artistic excellence, along with tremendous stylistic and cultural diversity. In Years One and Two, Fifty for the Future composers included Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Fodé Lassana Diabaté, Tanya Tagaq, Rhiannon Giddens, and Aleksandra Vrebalov, among others. Year Three brings a characteristically intriguing mix of established notables and rising voices, representing eight countries of origin:

Islam Chipsy (Egypt)
Islam Chipsy and his band EEK are a three-way force of nature from Cairo, Egypt. Keyboard pioneer Islam Chipsy has retooled Chaabi, the North African musical genre, for the 21st century. His joyous, freewheeling sonic blitz warps the standard oriental scale system into otherworldly shapes, as drummers Mohamed Karam and Mahmoud Refat rain down a percussive maelstrom behind dual kits.

Aftab Darvishi (Iran/Netherlands)
Aftab Darvishi was born in Tehran, Iran. She started playing violin at age five, later branching out into the Kamancheh (Iranian string instrument) and classical piano. Darvishi has studied music performance at the University of Tehran, composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and composing for film and Karnatic Music (South Indian music) at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.

Erin Gee (USA)
In January 2014, Erin Gee was cited by Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, as one of the most influential composer-vocalists of the 21st century; since then she has been awarded the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Bogliasco Fellowship. Having worked with such ensembles as the Latvian Radio Chamber Choir, Arditti Quartet, and JACK Quartet, she has received several composition awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and the 2008 Rome Prize. Her debut portrait CDMouthpieces was released in 2014. Gee is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Illinois.

Zakir Hussain (India/USA)
The pre-eminent classical tabla virtuoso of our time, Zakir Hussain is one of the world's most esteemed and influential musicians, renowned for his genre-defying collaborations. As a composer, he has scored music for numerous feature films, major events and productions. He has composed two concertos, and his third, the first-ever concerto for tabla and orchestra, was premiered in India in September 2015. He is the founder and president of Moment Records, an independent record label presenting rare live concert recordings of Indian classical music and world music. Hussain was resident artistic director at SFJAZZ from 2013 until 2016.

Joan Jeanrenaud (USA)
Cellist and composer Joan Jeanrenaud has been involved in music for more than 40 years, including 20 years as cellist of the Kronos Quartet. Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, she was exposed to the sounds of the blues, Elvis, soul, folk, and classical music. For the past eighteen years she has been involved with projects in composition, improvisation, electronics, and multi-disciplinary performance. Her more-than-70 compositions for cello and small ensembles include many multimedia works. Her compositions and recordings are featured in many films, most recently scoring the documentary Born This Way.

Soo Yeon Lyuh (Korea)
Soo Yeon Lyuh is a haegeum (Korean two-string fiddle) player, composer, and improviser based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Rigorously trained in court and folk repertories from a young age, Lyuh is known for her masterful performances of new compositions for the haegeum. In Korea, she served as a member of the National Gugak Center's new music troupe for twelve years. Lyuh holds a BA, MA, and Ph.D. in Korean Musicology from Seoul National University where she taught for six years. She is currently a Scholar-Artist in Residence at Mills College.

Tod Machover (USA)
Tod Machover is Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab and director of the Media Lab's Opera of the Future group. Called a "musical visionary" by The New York Times and "America's most wired composer" by The Los Angeles Times, Machover is particularly noted for developing technologies that expand music's potential for everyone, from celebrated virtuosi to musicians of all abilities. He studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School and was the first Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM in Paris. Since 2006, he has been Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Onut? Narbutait? (Lithuania)
Onut? Narbutait? (b. 1956) is one of Lithuania's best-known composers. Following early composition studies with Bronius Kutavi?ius, she graduated in 1979 from the Lithuanian State Conservatory (now the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre), where she studied composition under Prof. Julius Juzeli?nas. From 1979 to 1982 she taught music theory and history at the Klaip?da Faculty of the Lithuanian State Conservatory. Since then, she has concentrated solely on her creative work and lives in Vilnius.

Yevgeniy Sharlat (Russia/USA)
Yevgeniy Sharlat's catalog includes orchestra, chamber, solo, theatrical, and multimedia works. The recipient of numerous awards, Sharlat was born in Moscow, Russia. He majored in violin, piano, and music theory at the Academy of Moscow Conservatory. After immigrating to the United States in 1994, he studied composition at Juilliard Pre-College, received his bachelor's degree from the Curtis Institute of Music, and his master's and doctoral degrees from Yale University. Sharlat is associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches composition and music theory.

Stephan Thelen (Switzerland)
Raised in Santa Rosa, California, Stephan Thelen is a composer, electric guitarist, and mathematician based in Zu?rich. Aside from teaching mathematics, he is a member of the Swiss minimal-rock band SONAR (Cuneiform Records), a quartet that produces a unique blend of music that explores polymetrical structures and the harmonic possibilities of guitars tuned in tritones. He studied mathematics and music at the University of Zu?rich, where he obtained a PhD in mathematics in 1990.

An adventurous list of partners - including presenters, academic institutions, foundations, and individuals - has joined forces to support this unprecedented project. For more information on Kronos' Fifty for the Future partners, visit kronosquartet.org/fifty-for-the-future/partners.

A B O U T K R O N O S Q U A R T E T

For more than 40 years, San Francisco's Kronos Quartet - 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, releasing more than 60 recordings, collaborating with many of the world's most intriguing and accomplished composers and performers, and commissioning over 900 works and arrangements for string quartet. A Grammy winner, Kronos also received the Polar Music and Avery Fisher Prizes.

Integral to Kronos' work is a series of long-running 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 Serbian-American Aleksandra Vrebalov. Additional collaborators have included Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, performance artist Laurie Anderson, Azeri vocalist Alim Qasimov, Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, Malian griot musicians Trio Da Kali, Paul McCartney, Carolina Chocolate Drops founder Rhiannon Giddens, Tom Waits, and The National.

On tour for five months per year, Kronos appears in the world's most prestigious concert halls, clubs, and festivals. Kronos is equally prolific and wide-ranging on recordings, including the Grammy- and Latin Grammy-nominated Nuevo (2002) and the 2004 Grammy winner, Alban Berg's Lyric Suite. Kronos' most recent releases include The Sea Ranch Songs, featuring music by Aleksandra Vrebablov and film by Andrew Lyndon, and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's Green Ground, written for Kronos Quartet and Theatre of Voices.

The nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA) manages all aspects of Kronos' work, including commissioning, concert tours and local performances, education programs, and the annual KRONOS FESTIVAL in San Francisco. In 2015, KPAA launched Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, a new education initiative that is commissionin 50 new works (five by women and five by men each year for five years) that are designed expressly for the training of students and emerging professionals. Companion materials, including scores and parts, recordings, videos, performance notes, and composer interviews, are being distributed on kronosquartet.org for free.