Kronos: Listen Local - Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Kronos: Listen Local at YBCA, February 21-22, 2013Advance tickets: $25-30 regular/$20-25 students, seniors, teachersAt the door: $30-35 regular/$25-30 students, seniors, teachers$20-25 YBCA Members; FREE for YBCA:YouLam Research Theater at YBCA, 700 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA 94103Tickets and Information: www.ybca.org, 415.978.2787SAN FRANCISCO (January 29, 2013) – San Francisco’s own Grammy Award-winning KronosQuartet concludes its multi-year partnership with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Thursdayand Friday, February 21–22, with Kronos: Listen Local, a program highlighting the vibrantcreative voices of its hometown composers. Internationally renowned for innovativecollaborations spanning dozens of countries and cultures, Kronos turns its focus to its home turffor two world premieres, including And the Movement of the Tongue, a new work for stringquartet and electronics by San Francisco’s celebrated media artist Pamela Z, co-commissionedby YBCA and the Kronos Performing Arts Association; and the Nicholson Baker–inspired StringQuartet No. 3, The Mezzanine by Nathaniel Stookey, who at age 17 was the youngestcomposer ever commissioned for the San Francisco Symphony’s New and Unusual MusicSeries. The program also features the West Coast premiere of Carrying the Past by DanBecker, Chair of the Composition Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, andfour works arranged by longtime Kronos collaborator Stephen Prutsman.“I’m so excited about these concerts, because San Francisco is a huge part of Kronos’ identity,”said Kronos founder and artistic director David Harrington. “If you look at all of the cultures andtraditions around the world that we've explored in our music, you're really holding up a mirror toSan Francisco's own incredibly diverse culture. And the audience will definitely experience thisamazing breadth in the music of these San Francisco composers. Here, 'Listen Local' reallymeans 'Listen Global.'"ABOUT THE COMPOSERSPamela Z, based in San Francisco since 1984, is a composer/performerand media artist who works primarily with voice, live electronicprocessing, sampling technology and video. Her large-scale multi-mediaworks have been presented at venues including Z Space and ODC in SanFrancisco and The Kitchen in New York, and her media works have beenpresented in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum (NY), theDiözesanmuseum (Cologne), and the Krannert Art Museum (Illinois). Andthe Movement of the Tongue, co-commissioned by Kronos PerformingArts Association and YBCA, is a work about speaking accents—specifically accented English that starts as an exploration of the profusionof broad-ranging accents that abound in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Ihave always had a fascination with language and speech, and have mademany works that use the sound of the human voice as both an inspirationand a primary source for the actual generation of the music,” saysPamela Z. To create this piece, she conducted and recorded interviews with a number of BayArea residents who speak English with a variety of either regional, foreign language, or culturalaccents, creating hundreds of audio clips, which were used to construct the text collage thatbecame an armature for the work.