She says, “Sivunittinni, or ‘the future ones,’ comes from a part of a poem I wrote for my album, and is the perfect title for this piece. My hope is to bring a little bit of the land to future musicians through this piece. There’s a disconnect in the human condition, a disconnect from nature, and it has caused a great deal of social anxiety and fear, as well as a lack of true meaning of health, and a lack of a relationship with what life is, so maybe this piece can be a little bit of a wake-up.
This piece was commissioned for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, a project of the Kronos Performing Arts Association. The score and parts are available for free online. kronosquartet.org.
Tanya Tagaq
From Ikaluktutiak (Cambridge Bay, Nunavut), internationally celebrated artist Tanya Tagaq is an improvisational singer, avant-garde composer and bestselling author. A member of the Order of Canada, Polaris Music Prize and JUNO Award winner and recipient of multiple honorary doctorates, Tagaq is an original disruptor, a world-changing figure at the forefront of seismic social, political and environmental change.
Evan Ziporyn
Evan Ziporyn (b. 1959, Chicago) makes music at the crossroads between genres and cultures, east and west. He studied at Eastman, Yale & UC Berkeley with Joseph Schwantner, Martin Bresnick, & Gerard Grisey. He first traveled to Bali in 1981, studying with Madé Lebah, Colin McPhee's 1930s musical informant. He returned on a Fulbright in 1987.
Earlier that year, he performed a clarinet solo at the First Bang on a Can Marathon in New York. His involvement with BOAC continued for 25 years: in 1992 he co-founded the Bang on a Can All-stars (Musical America's 2005 Ensemble of the Year), with whom he toured the globe and premiered over 100 commissioned works, collaborating with Nik Bartsch, Iva Bittova, Don Byron, Ornette Coleman, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Thurston Moore, Terry Riley and Tan Dun. He co-produced their seminal 1996 recording of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, as well as their most recent CD, Big Beautiful Dark & Scary (2012).
Ziporyn joined the MIT faculty in 1990, founding Gamelan Galak Tika there in 1993, and beginning a series of groundbreaking compositions for gamelan & western instruments. These include three evening-length works, 2001's ShadowBang, 2004's Oedipus Rex (Robert Woodruff, director), and 2009's A House in Bali, an opera which joins western singers with Balinese traditional performers, and the All-stars with a full gamelan. It received its world premiere in Bali that summer and its New York premiere at BAM Next Wave in October 2010.
As a clarinetist, Ziporyn recorded the definitive version of Steve Reich's multi-clarinet NY Counterpoint in 1996, sharing in that ensemble's Grammy in 1998. In 2001 his solo clarinet CD, This is Not A Clarinet, made Top Ten lists across the country. His compositions have been commissioned by Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road, Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Maya Beiser, So Percussion, Wu Man, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with whom he recorded his most recent CD, Big Grenadilla/Mumbai (2012). His honors include awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2011), The Herb Alpert Foundation (2011), USA Artists Walker Fellowship (2007), MIT's Kepes Prize (2006), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Goddard Lieberson Fellowship (2004), as well as commissions from Meet the Composer/Commissioning Music USA and the Rockefeller MAP Fund. Recordings of his works have been been released on Cantaloupe, Sony Classical, New Albion, New World, Koch, Naxos, Innova, and CRI.
He is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT and Inaugural Director of MIT's Center for Art Science and Technology.
The string quartet always makes me think in elemental terms - perhaps the combination of the repertoire, the instruments themselves, and the intense intimacy with which groups like Brooklyn Rider work together. So while many of my pieces have programmatic titles and/or narrative content, my string quartets tend to focus on forces of nature: water (Eel Bone), breath (Breathing Space), and now qi, the traditional Chinese character for life-force, a concept as ubiquitous and difficult to precisely define as analogous principles in all cultures and religions. Gaining awareness of and control over qi is a central, lifelong pursuit in many meditative and martial practices, including tai chi and qigong. In my own experience, it seems that even in everyday life there are certain heightened states in which all of us become aware of qi flow - dreams of flying, repose with nature, and those rare moments in which intense engagement with something or someone allows us to briefly 'break on through to the other side.' The three movements of Qi - Lucid Flight, Garden, and Transport - are inspired by these moments.
Qi was commissioned by Mike Kong & Christine Bulawa; it is dedicated to the members of Brooklyn Rider, who premiered and recorded it.
-Evan Ziporyn
Raven Chacon
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Borealis Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.
A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his composition Voiceless Mass. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.
Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.
His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and various private collections.
The Journey of the Horizontal People is a future creation story telling of a group of people traveling from west to east, across the written page, contrary to the movement of the sun, but involuntarily and unconsciously allegiant to the trappings of time. With their bows, these wanderers sought out others like them, knowing that they could survive by finding these other clans who resided in the east, others who shared their linear cosmologies. It is told that throughout the journey, in their own passage of time, this group became the very people they were seeking.”
This piece was commissioned for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, a project of the Kronos Performing Arts Association. The score and parts are available for free online. kronosquartet.org.
Gabriela Lena Frank
Soon to finish her long tenure as Composer-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra with the premiere of Picaflor (Marin Alsop, conductor) in the spring of 2025, identity has always been at the center of composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank’s music. Her exploration of her indigenous-Peruvian, Chinese, and Lithuanian heritages has placed her on the Washington Post’s list of the most significant women composers in history. More recently, her Spanish-language opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego, commissioned and premiered to sold-out audiences by San Diego Opera and San Francisco Opera in the 2022-2023 season, was hailed as a major landmark of contemporary opera, “[revealing] a significant music-theatre talent. Frank, a Berkeley native, has mastered the intricacies of operatic construction on her first attempt, producing a confident, richly imagined score that is free of lapses and longueurs.” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker)
In 2017, Gabriela founded the award-winning, Mellon Foundation-supported Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (GLFCAM), a training institution held on her two rural properties in Boonville, CA for emerging composers from a broad array of demographics and aesthetics. Additionally, civic outreach is an essential part of Gabriela’s work, and she has volunteered extensively in hospitals and prisons; her current focus is on developing the music offerings for the largely Latino student population of Boonville public schools.
In recent years, Gabriela has become a climate activist, becoming certified as a naturalist through the University of California, and she also reflects environmental ideals in her work, such as Pachamama meets an ode premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra (Yannick Nezét-Seguín, conductor) at Carnegie Hall, and in GLFCAM programs, such as Composing Earth.
Gabriela’s life as a cultural witness has been profiled in multiple PBS documentaries. She will be newly featured in the documentary, Beethoven’s Nine, released internationally by Riddle Films in May 2024 and directed by Academy-nominated filmmaker, Larry Weinstein.
Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout draws inspiration from the idea of mestizaje as envisioned by Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, where cultures can coexist without the subjugation of one by the other. As such, this piece mixes elements from the western classical and Andean folk music traditions.
“Toyos” depicts one of the most recognizable instruments of the Andes, the panpipe. One of the largest kinds is the breathy toyo which requires great stamina and lung power, and is often played in parallel fourths or fifths.
“Himno de Zampoñas” features a particular type of panpipe ensemble that divides up melodies through a technique known as hocketing. The characteristic sound of the zampoña panpipe is that of a fundamental tone blown fatly so that overtones ring out on top, hence the unusual scoring of double stops in this movement.
“Chasqui” depicts a legenday figure from the Inca period, the chasqui runner, who sprinted great distances to deliver messages between towns separated from one another by the Andean peaks. The chasqui needed to travel light. Hence, I take artistic license to imagine his choice of instruments to be the charango, a high-pitched cousin of the guitar, and the lightweight bamboo quena flute, both of which are featured in this movement.
“Coqueteos” is a flirtatious love song sung by gallant men known as romanceros. As such, it is direct in its harmonic expression, bold, and festive. The romanceros sing in harmony with one another against a backdrop of guitars which I think of as a vendaval de guitarras (“storm of guitars”).
Julián Perlata
Pianist and composer Julián Peralta is an iconic figure of contemporary tango. In addition to his musical activity, which includes having created and directed the Orquesta Típica Fernández Fierro, he is also a successful manager and entrepreneur responsible for such projects as La Maquina Tanguera, CAFF and the Teatro Orlando Goñi, among others.
A passionate pedagogue, he lectures on tango musical techniques at the Escuela de Música Popular de Avellaneda and La Escuela Orlando Goñi (both in Argentina).
He is also the author of “the book” on tango arranging and orchestration: La Orquesta Típica. Mecánica y aplicación de los fundamentos técnicos del Tango. (The Tango Orchestra: Fundamental Concepts and Techniques.)
His compositions, which include orchestral works, have allowed him to travel the world’s most prestigious stages including the Barbican Centre (London), Prague State Opera (Czech Republic) and the Viena Konzerthaus (Austria). In 2010 he performed his original score for Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” in a version produced by British actor Kenneth Branagh in London.
Today, he continues to develop his artistic activities as the leader of the Orquesta Típica Julián Peralta and his group Astillero.
The Charrúa are an Indigenous people or Indigenous Nation of the Southern Cone in present-day Uruguay and the adjacent areas in Argentina and Brazil. The Charrúa people were massacred in a campaign in 1831 by the colonial forces in Uruguay known as the Massacre of Salsipuedes. Though largely erased from modern histories, some communities of the Charrúa survived outside of Uruguay in Argentina and Brazil. It is believed that there are approximately between 160,000 and 300,000 individuals in Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil today who are descendants of surviving Charrúa.