New Thread Quartet

Bowerbird is pleased to present the New Thread Quartet performing their program Explorations. The ensemble invites the audience to a reception following the performance.

New Thread Quartet presents Explorations, Vol. 8: Energy Flows, featuring music by Marilyn Shrude, Georg Friedrich Haas, Hannah Kendall, James Tenney, and a world premiere by Hong-Da Chin. The quartet’s annual Explorations Series, now in its 8th iteration, is dedicated to programming important works of our time. The unifying element that brings these works together is the undulation of sonorities.

Wishing doesn’t make it so was inspired by the same phrase from Stephen King’s Heart of Atlantis. Hong-Da Chin is intrigued by these words, because they point to how our “minds can run like a child in a world full of winter,” but it’s not until we take action that our ideas become real and hold meaning. This transfers to the action a composer takes when they engrave the ideas they have in their mind. Chin takes the trill, a standard technique used for centuries, to a whole new level.

energy flows nervously . . . in search of stillness is seeped in the chromatic motion and harmony typical of Marilyn Shrude’s music. Pulsating, churning, and thickly layered, the intensity waxes to its loudest, most dissonant sonorities, finally waning to calmness and silence.

Hannah Kendall’s Gilt was inspired by Hew Locke’s 2022-2023 Facade Commission of the same name, created for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Kendall represents Locke’s four shimmering, golden sculptures with each voice in the quartet. The extreme saturation of sound and layered texture mirrors the meaning and symbolism behind Locke’s piece.

Saxophonquartett is a spectral motor of microtones, swelling and rubbing against each other until they explode into wailing overtones. The piece is a masterful display of Georg Friedrich Haas’ ability to take musicians to the edges of their instruments.

James Tenney, American music theorist and composer, included Swell Piece in his collection entitled Postal Pieces, short works that could fit on a postcard. Instrumentation is not specified and the instructions are simple. Players swell from nothing to as loud as they can play and return to nothing with as little timbre and intonation shift as possible. The piece demonstrates Tenney’s interest in harmonic perception, minimal material, meditation, among other parameters.