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The Ying Quartet will take the stage at the Williams Center for the Arts 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 6 with their inventive new concert program.
Tickets are free for students, $4 for faculty and staff, and $18 for the public. They can be obtained by calling the Williams Center box office at (610) 330-5009.
The remaining performer in the Chamber Music Series is Christopher Taylor, Tuesday, April 3, $18.
The Ying Quartet’s Williams Center performance will feature the program but not simpler. Conceived by Tod Machover, it is a collage of pieces interwoven in electronic and acoustic form. The program will include Bach chorales, a madrigal by William Byrd, string works by Elliott Carter and John Cage, and Lennon-McCartney’s “A Day in the Life,” along with a new quartet and four interludes by Machover.
Natives of Chicago, the Ying siblings began their career as an ensemble in 1992 in Jesup, Iowa, as the first artists involved in the National Endowment for the Arts Chamber Music Rural Residencies Program. The Quartet performed on countless occasions for audiences of six to 600 people in a residency so successful that it was widely chronicled in the national and international media, including features in The New York Times and STRAD magazine and on CBSSunday Morning.
While the Quartet was in Jesup, its exceptional musical qualities earned it the 1993 Naumburg Chamber Music Award. Since then, the Yings have established an international reputation for excellence in performance with appearances in virtually every major American city, numerous festivals, and in Europe, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan. The Yings’ enthusiasm for performing in diverse settings has led to concerts in Carnegie Hall, the White House, hospitals, and juvenile prisons. The group’s recording of works by Osvaldo Golijov with the St. Lawrence Quartet was nominated for a 2003 Grammy award.
In 1999, the Quartet introduced LifeMusic, a multiyear commissioning project supported by the Institute for American Music, designed to produce a distinctively American string quartet repertoire. Each season, a pair of new works by established and emerging composers is featured in the Yings’ performance program.
As Quartet in Residence at the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester, the Ying Quartet plans and directs a rigorous, sequential chamber music curriculum that integrates intensive musical instruction with training in creative presentation and communication skills, and includes practical performance opportunities throughout the greater Rochester community. The Quartet has also taught at Northwestern University and Interlochen and Brevard Music Festivals. Since 2001, the Ying Quartet has been the Blodgett Artist in Residence at Harvard University.
Machover– called “America’s Most Wired Composer” by The Los Angeles Times – is widely recognized as one of the most significant and innovative composers of his generation. He is celebrated for inventing new technology for music, including Hyperinstruments, which he launched in 1986. Machover studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School and was the first Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris. He has been professor of music and media at the MIT Media Lab since it was founded in 1985, and is currently launching a major new Center for Creativity and Invention there. In addition, he has recently been appointed as Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
The 2006-2007 Performance Series at Lafayette is supported in part by gifts from Friends of the Williams Center for the Arts; by provisions of the Josephine Chidsey Williams Endowment, Alan and Wendy Pesky Artist-in-Residence Program, James Bradley Fund, and Ed Brunswick Jazz Fund; and by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, and Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour; the F.M. Kirby Foundation, Dexter and Dorothy Baker Foundation, and New England Foundation for the Arts.