A program of KRONOS PRESENTS/Kronos Performing Arts Association, this special performance brings together San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) students, musicians from SFCM’s Conservatory in the Schools program and the Kronos Quartet.

Kronos Quartet and student ensembles from SFCM and SFUSD’s George Washington High School, Lowell High School and Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts will perform works from Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire. The program includes music by Wu Man, Philip Glass, Kala Ramnath, San Francisco-based composer Guillermo Galindo and others. Kronos' Fifty for the Future is an education and legacy project that is commissioning – and distributing for free – the first learning library of contemporary repertoire for string quartet.

Last year, the wildly successful results of the partnership between Kronos and the Conservatory became immediately clear after the Community Concert with SFUSD. The concert concluded a month-long collaboration that included in-school instruction led by members of Kronos and musicians from SFCM’s Conservatory in the Schools program. We’re continuing the partnership this year, with Kronos mentoring SFCM and SFUSD students and once again sending SFCM students to local schools to engage with young musicians.

Performers 

Kronos Quartet

Artist Profile

For 45 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 reimagine 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 1,000 works and arrangements for string quartet. Kronos has received over 40 awards, including the prestigious Polar Music and Avery Fisher Prizes. In 2018, they became the first US-based musicians to receive the World Expo (WOMEX) Artist Award.

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; Russia’s Vladimir Martynov; Poland’s Henryk Górecki; and Serbian-American Aleksandra Vrebalov. Additional collaborators have included Wu Man, Laurie Anderson, Tanya Tagaq, Mahsa Vahdat, Trevor Paglen, Sam Green, Van Dyke Parks, múm, Dawn Upshaw, Noam Chomsky, Tom Waits, Asha Bhosle, Taraf de Haïdouks, and Howard Zinn.

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 Folk Songs, featuring Sam Amidon, Olivia Chaney, Rhiannon Giddens, and Natalie Merchant; the collaborative album Ladilikan with Trio Da Kali, an ensemble of Malian griot musicians assembled by Aga Khan Music Initiative; the collaborative album Landfall with Laurie Anderson; and Clouded Yellow by Bang on the Can founding composer Michael Gordon.

The nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association manages all aspects of Kronos’ work, including the commissioning of new works, concert tours and home season performances, education programs, and a self-produced Kronos Festival. In 2015, Kronos launched Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, an education and legacy project that is commissioning—and distributing for free—the first learning library of contemporary repertoire for string quartet.