Haydn: Dialogues

Haydn: Dialogues is a multi-season commissioning project that reimagines the traditional string quartet cycle. Over the course of the next ten seasons, concluding in 2032 (Haydn’s 300th birth anniversary), the Cramer Quartet will perform Haydn’s 68 string quartets alongside newly commissioned works by American composers. Each commission is an invitation for a composer to respond to an opus from Haydn’s string quartet oeuvre in the composer’s own musical voice, writing specifically for historical instruments. Haydn: Dialogues is made possible with support by the New York State Council with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Juri Seo

Haydn Op. 54 String Quartets

Juri Seo* (b. 1981.12.31) is a Korean-born American composer and pianist based in Princeton, New Jersey. She seeks to write music that encompasses extreme contrast through compositions that are unified and fluid, yet complex. She merges many of the fascinating aspects of music from the past century—in particular its expanded timbral palette and unorthodox approach to structure—with a deep love of functional tonality, counterpoint, and classical form. With its fast-changing tempi and dynamics, her music explores the serious and the humorous, the lyrical and the violent, the tranquil and the obsessive. She hopes to create music that loves, that makes a positive change in the world—however small—through the people who are willing to listen.

Her composition honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and the Andrew Imbrie Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, the Ilshin Composer Prize, and the Otto Eckstein Fellowship from Tanglewood. She has received commissions from prominent organizations including the Fromm Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Goethe Institut, and Tanglewood. She has released three portrait albums: Toy Store with Carrier Records, and Mostly Piano and Respiri with Innova Recordings. She holds a D.M.A. (Dissertation: Jonathan Harvey's String Quartets, 2013) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she studied with Reynold Tharp. She is Associate Professor of Music at Princeton University.

Juri lives in Lawrenceville, just outside of Princeton, with her husband, percussionist Mark Eichenberger and a little mutt named Roman.

*Note on pronunciation: In North America, my name is pronounced [Jew-ri Suh].

Darian Donovan Thomas

Haydn Op. 76 String Quartets

Composer, multi-instrumentalist, and interdisciplinary artist Darian Donovan Thomas was born in San Antonio, Texas and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. He is interested in combining genres and mediums into a singular vocabulary that can express ideas about intersectionality (of medium and identity). Necessarily, he is interested in redacting all barriers to entry that have existed at the gates of any genre - this vocabulary of multiplicity will be intersectional, and therefore all-inclusive. 

Darian has been commissioned by YOSA (the Youth Orchestras of San Antonio), Bang on a Can’s summer festival Banglewood, percussionists at Bard College Conservatory, Sam Houston State University, among others. His music has been premiered by So Percussion, YOSA, Bang on a Can Banglewood Fellows, SoSI Fellows, and performed in Iceland, Switzerland, Canada, and all around the United States.

Darian received his Bachelors in Music Composition from The University of the Incarnate Word (2016) in San Antonio, Texas. He has since been a New Amsterdam Records Composer Lab Fellow (2018), So Percussion Summer Institute (SoSI) Composer Fellow (2018), Infinite Palette composer performer for Aeon Ritual at MASSMoCA (2019), and a Bang on a can Summer Institute “Banglewood” Composer Fellow (2019). He has studied with Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Michael Gordon, Sarah Kirkland Snider, William Brittelle, Andrea Mazzariello, Troy Peters, amongst others.

inti figgis-vizueta

30 mengstaße & Haydn Op. 71 String Quartets

NY-based composer inti figgis-vizueta (b.1993) braids a childhood of overlapping immigrant communities and Black-founded Freedom schools—in Chocolate City (DC)—with direct Andean & Irish heritage and a deep connection to the land. “Her music feels sprouted between structures, liberated from certainty and wrought from a language we’d do well to learn” writes The Washington Post. inti's work explores the transformative power of group improvisation and play, working to reconcile historical aesthetics and experimental practices with trans & Indigenous futures. Recent highlights include the Carnegie Hall premiere of her string quartet concerto, Seven Sides of Fire, written for the Attacca Quartet and American Composers Orchestra, conducted by Mei-Ann Chen; performances of Coradh (bending) by the Spoleto Festival, PODIUM Festival, and Oregon Symphony; and the REDCAT premiere of her evening-length show Music for Transitions, created in collaboration with two-time Grammy Award-winning cellist Andrew Yee, praised as “thrilling” and “revolutionary” by I Care If You Listen. Upcoming projects include Animate Earth for Kronos Quartet’s 50th Anniversary, a new Carnegie Hall-commissioned work for Ensemble Connect, continued development of Earths to Come for vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, and a new piano concerto for Conrad Tao and the Cincinnati Symphony, conducted by Matthias Pintscher.

Alexandra du Bois

String Quartet No. 6 “Strolling in the Ultimate” & Haydn Op. 20 String Quartets

Described as “an intense, luminous American composer”  (Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times) and “a painter who knows exactly where her picture will be hung,” (Vivien Schweitzer, New York Times), the music of Alexandra du Bois is often propelled by issues of indifference and inequality throughout the United States and the world.

Alexandra du Bois (Ph.D. Stony Brook University; M.M. The Juilliard School; B.M. Indiana University Jacobs School of Music) is a Manhattan and Vermont based composer and violinist whose musical imagery has continually attracted commissions created to honor or mourn world events both historical and contemporary. Her music has been performed in concert halls across five continents—her travels connecting her tangibly to the countries that inform and inspire her work.

Kronos Quartet founder and first violinist, David Harrington, described the music of du Bois in 2003 as having “found a voice when many people were speechless” who writes music that “attempts to be a conscience in a time of oblivion. She dared to counter abuses of moral authority with an internal, personal sound using the string quartet as a witness, a reminder, that music and creativity are part of a continuing web of responsibility.” (Strings Magazine).

Her commissioned works range from orchestral (symphonic, chamber, and string orchestras) to collaborative (photojournalists, choreographers, playwrights, visual artists, video artists, and filmmakers) to chamber music (solo, duo, trio, quartet, and quintet without conductor) to voice (a cappella choir, double and triple choir, voice and piano, and chamber vocal ensemble).