Del Sol String Quartet: "Soundings" Concert 1

This is the opening concert in the Del Sol String Quartet’s Home Season 2013-14 “Soundings” Project–a series of three, innovative performances by the Quartet to be held in November, March and May at the Center for New Music in San Francisco. For this project Del Sol will commission and present new works from three Bay Area emerging artists—a visual artist and two composers—each one inspired by and paired with the work of an established contemporary composer, which Del Sol will explore in depth on the program. Each concert will focus on sources of inspiration for the music, such as place, history, or story, and include performance and discussion with the audience in an informal and intimate venue.
The three established composers on which the project will focus are: 20th-Century American composer Robert Erickson (1917-1997), “Corfu” (1986) for Concert 1; Italian composer Stefano Scodanibbio (1956-2012), “Mas Lugares (su Madrigali di Monteverdi)” (2003) for Concert 2; and Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe (b.1929), “String Quartet No. 14” (with didjeridu) for Concert 3. The two works by Erickson evoke the light of the Mediterranean and are centered around one pitch, almost like a meditation on a place or vision. Scodanibbio’s piece makes extensive use of harmonics and relates back to historical roots of 16th-Century madrigals. Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No. 14 is based on a story of a tragic event in Australia’s colonial past in which soldiers drove a tribe of Aborigines over a cliff in northern Tasmania. Didjeridu player, Stephen Kent, will perform with Del Sol on Concert 3.
The emerging artists commissioned by Del Sol are Kimetha Vanderveen, a San Francisco-based visual artist and composers Mads Tolling and Nils Bultmann, both of whom are also accomplished string players. Vanderveen, who has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Cité International des Arts in Paris, has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and San Francisco and whose work is included in the Achenbach Foundation collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, will create a painting or work on paper, paired with the works by Erickson on Concert 1.
Tolling, a Grammy Award-winning jazz violinist and former member of the Turtle Island String Quartet who has written original works on his two most recent albums and numerous arrangements and compositions for Turtle Island, will compose a new work, to be paired with the music of Scodanibbio on Concert 2.
Bultmann, an award-winning, classically-trained violist, improviser and composer who has written works in a variety of styles, served as Composer in Residency with the Berkeley Symphony and is currently a doctoral fellow in music composition at UC Berkeley, will write a new work, to be paired with the music of Sculthorpe on Concert 3.