Isaura String Quartet presents an evening of new music (plus a couple premieres!) at Human Resources. Joined by guest violist Rachel Iba, ISQ will perform works by:

Amy Golden
Ulrich Krieger (new work)
Nicole Lizée
Caroline Shaw
Scott Worthington (new work)

Isaura String Quartet

The Isaura String Quartet is a LA-based ensemble dedicated to the promotion of contemporary chamber music through live performance, workshops, and collaborative projects with composers and interdisciplinary artists. ISQ has worked with composers including David T. Little, Anne LeBaron, Gloria Coates, Ulrich Krieger, Julia Wolfe, Sean Griffin, and Charles Gaines. Recent performances include Artaud in the Black Lodge with Beth Morrison Productions at REDCAT’s NOW Festival, the world premiere of Gloria Coates’ chamber opera Stolen Identity, a concert of microtonal string quartets for MicroFest LA, and Love, Honor, Obey with Timur and Margaret Cho. ISQ is featured on Refractions, Daniel Corral’s concert-length work for string quartet, processed music box, and guitar, released in 2017 on Populist Records.

In addition to ISQ’s work in new music, they are the house band for Emo Nite LA under the alias String String Quartet, and have performed with artists including the All-American Rejects and Demi Lovato. They have also performed and recorded for artists such as Baths, Emily Wells, and Jherek Bischoff.

COMPOSERS

Amy Golden

Amy Golden is a composer, vocalist, sound artist, and occasional sculptor from Springdale, Arkansas living and working in Los Angeles, California. She creates works for voices, instruments, and objects that investigate record keeping, the relationship between sound and object, ideas surrounding the female experience, and definitions of texture.

Caroline Shaw

Caroline Adelaide Shaw is a New York-based musician—vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer—who performs in solo and collaborative projects. She is the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for the Dover Quartet, the Calidore Quartet, the Aizuri Quartet, FLUX Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Anne Sofie von Otter, The Crossing, Roomful of Teeth, yMusic, ACME, ICE, A Far Cry, Philharmonia Baroque, the Baltimore Symphony, and Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. In the 2017–18 season, Caroline’s new works will be premiered by Renée Fleming with Inon Barnatan, Dawn Upshaw with Sō Percussion and Gil Kalish, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow, the Britten Sinfonietta, TENET with the Metropolis Ensemble, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Netherlands Chamber Choir, and Luciana Souza with A Far Cry. Future seasons will include a new piano concerto for Jonathan Biss with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and a new work for the LA Phil. Caroline’s scoring of visual work includes the soundtrack for the feature film To Keep the Light as well as collaborations with Kanye West. She studied at Yale, Rice, and Princeton, and she has held residencies at Dumbarton Oaks, the Banff Centre, Music on Main, and the Vail Dance Festival. Caroline loves the color yellow, otters, Beethoven opus 74, Mozart opera, Kinhaven, the smell of rosemary, and the sound of a janky mandolin.

Nicole Lizée

Called a “brilliant musical scientist” and lauded for “creating a stir with listeners for her breathless imagination and ability to capture Gen-X and beyond generation”, JUNO-nominated composer Nicole Lizée creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, 1960s psychedelia and 1960s modernism. She is fascinated by the glitches made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and integrates them into live performance.

Nicole’s compositions range from works for orchestra and solo turntablist featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, omnichords, stylophones, Simon™, and karaoke tapes. In the broad scope of her evolving oeuvre she explores such themes as malfunction, reviving the obsolete, and the harnessing of imperfection and glitch to create a new kind of precision.

In 2001 Nicole received a Master of Music degree from McGill University. After a decade and a half of composition, her commission list of over 50 works is varied and distinguished and includes the Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, BBC Proms, the San Francisco Symphony, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Eve Egoyan, the Australian Art Orchestra, l’Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, CBC, Radio-Canada, NYC’s Kaufman Center, Powerplant, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, So Percussion, Ben Reimer, Vicky Chow, Tapestry Opera, Standing Wave, Gryphon Trio, MATA Festival, TorQ Percussion, Fondation Arte Musica/Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, E-Gré National Music Competition, Innovations en Concert, ECM+, Continuum, Soundstreams, SMCQ, Arraymusic, Megumi Masaki, and Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. Her music has been performed worldwide in renowned venues including Carnegie Hall (NYC), Royal Albert Hall (London), Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam) and Cité de la Musique (Paris) – and in festivals including the BBC Proms (UK), Huddersfield (UK), Roskilde (Denmark), Bang On a Can (USA), Classical:NEXT (Rotterdam), All Tomorrow’s Parties (UK), Barbican’s Sound Unbound (UK), Metropolis (Australia), Sydney Festival (Australia), X Avant (Canada), Luminato (Canada), Other Minds (San Francisco), C3 (Berlin), Ecstatic (NYC), Switchboard (San Francisco), Melos-Ethos (Slovakia), Casalmaggiore (Italy), and Dark Music Days (Iceland).

Nicole was recently awarded the 2017 SOCAN Jan. V. Matejcek Award. In 2013 she received the prestigious Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. She is a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow (New York City/Italy) and recently received a 2016 Lucas Artists Fellowship Award (California). In 2015 she was selected by acclaimed composer and conductor Howard Shore to be his protégée as part of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards. This Will Not Be Televised, her seminal piece for chamber ensemble and turntables, placed in the 2008 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers’ Top 10 Works. Her work for piano and notated glitch, Hitchcock Études, was chosen by the International Society for Contemporary Music and featured at the 2014 World Music Days in Wroclaw, Poland. Additional awards and nominations include an Images Festival Award (2016), JUNO nomination (2016), Dora Mavor Moore nomination in Opera (2015), Prix Opus nomination (2013), two Prix collégien de musique contemporaine, (2012, 2013) and the 2002 Canada Council for the Arts Robert Fleming Prize for achievements in composition.

Nicole is the Composer in Residence at Vancouver’s Music on Main.

She is a Korg Canada and Arturia artist.

Scott Worthington

Scott Worthington is a double bassist and composer based in Los Angeles. As a performer, he plays in chamber ensembles, orchestras, recording studios, and as a soloist. His music has been commissioned by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, Loadbang, the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble, and numerous soloists. As a performer-composer, Worthington has released two albums to critical acclaim on Populist Records. The most recent, Prism, features his own music for solo bass with electronics and bass ensemble and was named one of The New Yorker’s top ten classical albums of 2015 by Alex Ross. In 2017, Worthington became the principal bass of the Redlands Symphony and the Artist Teacher of Bass at the University of Redlands. www.scottworthington.com

Ulrich Krieger

Ulrich Krieger is an internationally recognized German composer and saxophonist living in Southern California. He is known for his originality and innovation in composed and free improvised contemporary music. As a celebrated composer of chamber and electronic music, Krieger’s compositions are widely performed by ensembles in Europe and the USA. He works in variety of contexts; from new and experimental music to free improvisation, electronic music, reductionsim, noise, ambient, rock and metal.

He has been active in pushing the boundaries of saxophone playing in general and the function of the saxophone in rock and noise in particular, collaborating with Lou Reed (Metal Machine Trio, Lou Reed Band), Lee Ranaldo (Text of Light), Faust, and Merzbow, in addition to leading his own death-doom-noise-metal band Blood Oath.

In his distinct style of amplified saxophone playing, Krieger processes refined acoustic and quasi-electronic sounds by amplifying his instrument in various ways. He gets down to the grains of the sounds, changing their identities and structures from within. No saxophone player has ever dared to explore these uncharted outer realms of woodwind expression.

Outside Krieger’s solo practice, he has performed extensively with his groups Metal Machine Trio and Text of Light. He has collaborated and performed with Lou Reed, Faust, Merzbow, Thomas Köner, Carl Stone, John Zorn, Lee Ranaldo, Christian Marclay, Laurie Anderson, LaMonte Young, Phill Niblock, Radu Malfatti, Michael Pisaro, Berlin Philharmonics, Ensemble Modern, PARTCH Ensemble, and many more. As a saxophonist he has performed in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia. Krieger studied classical/contemporary saxophone, composition, electronic music, and musicology in Berlin and New York. He is professor for composition, Experimental Sound Practices, and rock music at CalArts, where his special field of interest is the cross-pollination of new art music and avant-garde rock.

Krieger’s recent focus lies on the fringes of contemporary rock culture, in the areas of limbo where noise, metal, silence, and experimental chamber music meet. Not accepting stylistic categories, Krieger’s practice operates in the margins of 21st century genres while resisting the problematic trappings of appropriation. His compositional approaches include micro-sounds, microtones, reductionism, ‘instrumental electronics’ (instrumental music evoking the soundworld of electronics), drone, and noise; forms that often demand elaborate and nuanced amplification. www.ulrich-krieger.com

Join us  for drinks & music! Tickets are $10 cash or pay what you can – no one will be turned away for lack of funds.