Kronos Performing Arts Association and Serious have created a huge free online summer festival that starts on Saturday 19 June and can be enjoyed right across the summer.
The Festival features 15 world premieres by composers such as Sahba Aminikia, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté, Nicole Lizée, and Vân-Ánh Võ, alongside many of Kronos’ signature works including Clint Mansell’s Lux Aeterna from Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, God-music from George Crumb‘s Black Angels, Terry Riley’s One Earth, One People, One Love and Vladimir Martynov’s The Beatitudes. The Festival also features several pieces that were commissioned as part of Kronos’ ground-breaking ‘Fifty for the Future’ project.
Art, activism and the fight for civil rights are key themes in Kronos’ works, represented in the Kronos Summer Festival in pieces by Sahba Aminikia, Stacy Garrop, Nicole Lizée, Bill Morrison, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Eiko Otake, Kayla Pellom, Pete Seeger, Valerie Soe, Vân-Ánh Võ and Zachary James Watkins.
Along with three 45-minute concerts, the festival features KRONOS FESTIVAL Kids! – a lively and engaging 30-minute presentation for audiences of all ages
Kronos has achieved lasting renown for transforming the string quartet concert into an immersive experience with lighting, video, audience participation, and more. In similar fashion, KRONOS SUMMER FESTIVAL’s programmes stand apart from usual music streams. Rather than capturing a continuous concert, each programme is a mosaic of original films and performances, with contributions from such noted filmmakers as Sam Green (a world premiere), Bill Morrison (a world premiere), and Valerie Soe constituting a mini-festival within the festival. The programme will also feature new short films from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, created to illuminate specific musical works.
The full programme can be seen next Saturday, and then viewed online at leisure 24 hours a day right across the summer at https://serious.org.uk/kronos-summer-festival.
Details of the day are below:
Programme #1 at 1pm – world premieres by Nicole Lizée, Soo Yeon Lyuh, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté, Tadi Todi, and Mahsa Vahdat (45 minutes)
The Kronos Summer Festival opens with the world premiere of ZonelyHearts, with music and film by puckish Canadian composer Nicole Lizée. In another world premiere, Korean composer Soo Yeon Lyuh wrote Tattoo in response to a harrowing incident in Berkeley, California in which someone fired a gun at her car. Wawani, the first of three pieces by Malian singer Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté to premiere at the festival, features Diabaté’s joyous performance with daughter Rokia Kouyaté captured in a vibrant film, shot in Mali. Mahsa Vahdat’s Vaya, Vaya, with music and text by the Iranian singer, is a deep expression of longing, with film by Laurie Olinder. Stacy Garrop‘s Glorious Mahalia, a celebration of the artistry of gospel icon Mahalia Jackson, is featured in the world premiere of a new film with San Francisco dance artist Tadi Todi. Also on the programme: inti figgis-vizueta‘s Music for Transitions, performed by special guest Andrew Yee, Clint Mansell’s ominous Lux Aeterna, Jlin’s driving, insistent Little Black Book, and Pete Seeger’s anti-war lament Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, with singers Sam Amidon, Brian Carpenter, Lee Knight, and Aoife O’Donovan
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KRONOS FESTIVAL Kids! at 2pm (30 minutes)
KRONOS FESTIVAL Kids! is a sparkling collection of short films with music, including Kronos Makes Sounds With Stuff by composer Danny Clay; 3000 Reefs with stunning underwater cinematography by Julia Sumerling and music by Aftab Darvishi; Music of the Birds with avian-inspired music and film by Sahba Aminikia, featuring the San Francisco Girls Chorus, young people from the Sirkhane Social Circus School, and ornithologists from the Smithsonian Institution and around America; Funtukuru an exuberant song by Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté; and Chebiyat Muqam, Third Dastan, a traditional melody arranged by Wu Man and performed by young musicians from Oakland School for the Arts and Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts. Also featured are George Crumb’s haunting God-music from Black Angels, an excerpt from Garth Knox’s cosmic Satellites, and Bill Steele’s humorous environmental anthem Garbage, made famous by Pete Seeger and performed by singer Lee Knight with Kronos.
This programme will be followed by Michael Hearst’s Songs for Unusual Creatures – The Sea Pig (7 minutes) in which composer and author Michael Hearst investigates the mysteries of the invertebrate sea pig, an unusual creature that lives at the bottom of the ocean floor. Kronos lends a hand by playing musical toys and their usual strings to create “sea pig sounds.”
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Programme #2 at 3pm – world premieres by Sahba Aminikia, Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté, Kayla Pellom, and Vân-Ánh Võ.(45 minutes)
This concert ranges widely, geographically and stylistically. This diversity is reflected in four world premieres: Iranian composer Sahba Aminikia’s arrangement ofKavuki, a passionate Kurdish love song, sung by Shahram Nazeri; Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté’s delicate but propulsive Dulen filmed in Mali with daughter Rokia Kouyaté; Vietnamese composer/multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Võ’s Adrift, and Pink Book, with poetry by Kayla Pellom and film by Miguel Navarro of Sunset Youth Services. A brief Library of Congress film about the Gullah-Geechee culture of coastal Georgia is followed by composer/trumpeter Charlton Singleton’s stirring Testimony, inspired by his childhood experience of Gullah-Geechee sacred music traditions. Frank Zappa’s spiky None of the Above, written for Kronos, is featured in an excerpt from Alex Winter’s documentary Zappa. Completing the program are three Kronos classics: George Crumb’s God-music from Black Angels; Aleksandra Vrebalov’s My Desert, My Rose; and Vladimir Martynov’s radiant The Beatitudes.
This is followed by three short films:-
Valerie Soe’s Radical Care: The Auntie Sewing Squad (8 minutes)
With music by Susie Ibarra, director Valerie Soe celebrates the Auntie Sewing Squad collective of volunteer mask-makers, who have cut, sewn, and distributed hundreds of thousands of homemade face masks to marginalized and at-risk communities during the pandemic.
Sam Green: Five Thoughts on Thirty Pieces (14 minutes) – world premiere
Sam Green’s short film essay will explore John Cage and the 1983 piece he wrote for Kronos entitled Thirty Pieces for String Quartet.
Bill Morrison’s Buried News (12 minutes) – world premiere
Frequent Kronos collaborator Bill Morrison uses rare, early-20th century news footage to uncover ways that narratives about race have been used in the U.S. to divide people and maintain power.
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Programme #3 at 5pm – world premieres by Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Eiko Otake, and Tadi Todi (45 minutes)
The Kronos Summer Festival ends with a focus on the Black American struggle for civil rights. Kronos is joined by San Francisco Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin in Third in the World, a new film with original poetry. Abel Meeropol’s Strange Fruit, made famous by Billie Holiday, is heard in an arrangement by Jacob Garchik. The recorded voice of civil rights leader Dr. Clarence B. Jones is featured in an excerpt from Zachary James Watkins’ Peace Be Till. Tadi Todi’s Concrete Junglemakes its debut, along with the third of Diabaté’s world premieres Kalime, a buoyant triple-meter song with a melancholy tinge. Also on the program: A Body in Fukushima, with music by David Harrington, in which legendary movement artist Eiko Otake (of Eiko and Koma) dances on the beach in Fukushima, Japan, near the site of the nuclear plant disaster of 2011. Closing the festival on an uplifting note is Terry Riley‘s One Earth, One People, One Love from Sun Rings.