This preview was provided by Duke Performances.
The world-renowned Kronos Quartet will present an open rehearsal of Lament for the imagined by Duke Music Ph.D candidate David Garner on Friday, March 18, at 7 pm in the Duke Coffeehouse in Crowell Hall on Duke’s East Campus. This performance is free and open to the public.
The Kronos Quartet requested the work from Garner after first hearing his music while artists-in-residence at Duke in April of 2010. The world premiere of the piece — which draws on Garner’s research into traditional Scottish music — will be presented by Kronos Quartet at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in May, 2011.
According to Garner, “When Kronos was in planning stages for their upcoming concerts in Glasgow, [David] Harrington [Kronos founder and artistic director] asked me to write a new piece for the event that draws on my own research interests and Harrington’s interests in Scottish traditional music. Having never been to Scotland, yet being very familiar with the imagined Scotland as it exists in the Scottish Diaspora of North America, I draw on Scottish tunes to create musical connections to both music of Appalachia and Cape Breton Island, two places large numbers of Scottish immigrants fled during the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries.”
David Kirkland Garner is a composer and a third year PhD candidate at Duke University. Garner composes music drawing on folk traditions from North America and the British Isles. His research focuses on Southern American banjo and fiddle styles and traditional Cape Breton fiddling. Before coming to Duke, Garner studied composition at Rice University and the University of Michigan.
Credited by the New York Times as having re-invented the concept of the string quartet, San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet has continually put itself at the forefront of contemporary classical and new music performance. Grammy-winners, the quartet’s not-for-profit organization (Kronos Performing Arts Association) has commissioned over 700 new works by the finest composers of the last fifty years, a list that includes Philip Glass, John Adams, Terry Riley, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Henryk Górecki, and countless others.
Kronos Quartet will present the rehearsal as part of their artist-in-residency activities which will lead up to the performance of a program dedicated entirely to the music of Steve Reich on Saturday, March 19, at 8 pm in Page Auditorium. That performance features the world premiere of Reich’s WTC 9/11.
