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The FLUX Quartet is an American string quartet dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. It was founded in 1998 and is based in New York City. The group is renowned for its performances of Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2, which lasts for more than six hours. It has performed to rave reviews in venues of all sorts, from Carnegie's Zankel Hall and Kennedy Center, to influential art institutions such as EMPAC, The Kitchen, and the Walker Art Center, to international music festivals in Australia, Europe, and the Americas. It has also premiered new works on numerous experimental series, including Roulette, Bowerbird, and the Music Gallery. FLUX's radio credits include NPR's All Things Considered, WNYC's New Sounds and Soundcheck, and WFMU's Stochastic Hit Parade. The group's discography includes recordings on the Cantaloupe, Innova, Tzadik, and Cold Blue Music labels, in addition to two critically acclaimed releases on Mode Records that encompass the full catalogue of string quartet works by Morton Feldman.
Strongly influenced by the irreverent spirit and "anything-goes" philosophy of the Fluxus art movement, violinist Tom Chiu founded FLUX in the late '90s. The quartet has since cultivated an uncompromising repertoire that follows neither fashions nor trends, but rather combines yesterday's seminal iconoclasts with tomorrow's new voices. Alongside late 20th-century masters like Cage, Feldman, Ligeti, Nancarrow, Scelsi, and Xenakis, FLUX has premiered more than 100 works by many of today's foremost innovators, including Michael Byron, Julio Estrada, David First, Oliver Lake, Alvin Lucier, Marc Neikrug, Matthew Welch; the group has also performed with many influential artists, including Thomas Buckner, Ornette Coleman, Joan La Barbara, Wadada Leo Smith, Henry Threadgill, and many more. As part of its mission to support future musical pioneers, FLUX actively commissions, and has been awarded grants from the American Composers Forum, USArtists International, Aaron Copland Fund, and the Meet-The-Composer Foundation. FLUX also discovers emerging composers from its many residencies and workshops at colleges, including Wesleyan, Dartmouth, Williams, Princeton, Rice, and the College of William and Mary.
The spirit to expand stylistic boundaries is a trademark of the FLUX Quartet, and thus the quartet avidly pursues projects with genre-transcending artists working in mixed media. These artistic synergies have led to an acclaimed recording with experimental balloonist Judy Dunaway, collaborations with choreographers Pam Tanowitz and Shen Wei, and the 3-D video work Upending with digital art-ensemble, OpenEnded Group. Most recently, FLUX appeared both on film and the soundtrack of River of Fundament, the latest work by visionary artist Matthew Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler.
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The term string quartet can refer to either a type of musical composition or a group of four people who play them. Many composers from the mid 18th century onwards wrote string quartets. The associated musical ensemble consists of two violinists, a violist, and a cellist.
Morton Feldman was an American composer. A major figure in 20th-century classical music, Feldman was a pioneer of indeterminate music, a development associated with the experimental New York School of composers also including John Cage, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown. Feldman's works are characterized by notational innovations that he developed to create his characteristic sound: rhythms that seem to be free and floating, pitch shadings that seem softly unfocused, a generally quiet and slowly evolving music, and recurring asymmetric patterns. His later works, after 1977, also explore extremes of duration.
Richard Gavin Bryars is an English composer and double bassist. He has worked in jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, historicism, avant-garde, and experimental music.
The Kronos Quartet is an American string quartet based in San Francisco. It has been in existence with a rotating membership of musicians for almost 50 years. The quartet covers a very broad range of musical genres, including contemporary classical music. More than 900 works have been written for it.
Elliott Sharp is an American contemporary classical composer, multi-instrumentalist, and performer.
Annie Gosfield is a New-York-based composer who works on the boundaries between notated and improvised music, electronic and acoustic sounds, refined timbres and noise. She composes for others and performs with her own group, taking her music to festivals, factories, clubs, art spaces and concert halls. Much of her work combines acoustic instruments with electronic sounds, incorporating unusual sources such as satellite sounds, machine sounds, detuned or out-of-tune samples and industrial noises. Her work often contains improvisation and frequently uses extended techniques and/or altered musical instruments. She won a 2012 Berlin Prize.
Tom Chiu (邱崇德) is a violinist and composer of Taiwanese origin working and living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the founder of the FLUX Quartet, who are widely recognized for their performances of technically challenging cutting-edge compositions, including Morton Feldman's six-hour marathon String Quartet No. 2.
Phill Niblock is an American composer, filmmaker, videographer, and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium.
Earle Brown was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of "open form," a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since—notably the downtown New York scene of the 1980s and generations of younger composers.
Aleksandra Popovska is a vocalist, multimedia artist, educator, and composer/improviser currently resident in The Netherlands. Raised in the Former Yugoslavia, she was exposed to a wide variety of cultural influences. In the Balkans she is known as one of the pioneers in so called "extended vocal techniques". She uses her voice as an instrument and her interests in music are various, from folk and pop to jazz and experimental live electronics. Her freely exploration of different art contexts expands the boundaries of the genres. The focus of her most recent work is on new vocal performance and creation of audio-visual works.
Stephen Whittington is an Australian composer, pianist, teacher and writer of music.
Judy Dunaway is a conceptual sound artist, avant-garde composer, free improvisor and creator of sound installations who is primarily known for her sound works for latex balloons. Since 1990 she has created over thirty works for balloons as sound conduits and has also made this her main instrument for improvisation.
Matthew Odell is an American pianist. He has performed as both a solo and collaborative pianist, performing at a variety of locations throughout the United States including New York's Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Paris, Nice, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Taipei, and Kyoto.
The Carpe Diem String Quartet was founded in 2005 and is a classical string quartet based in Columbus, Ohio. The quartet's repertoire ranges from classical to contemporary chamber music. They regularly perform the works of contemporaries like Reza Vali, Richard Danielpour, Jonathan Leshnoff, Jessie Montgomery, Osvaldo Golijov, Gunther Schuller, Erberk Eryilmaz, Bruce Wolosoff, and Korine Fujiwara, as well as the works of classical composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn, Joseph Haydn and countless others. Carpe Diem performs and tours regularly, in the United States, Canada, Japan, China, and Europe. The quartet is a strong proponent for the overlooked Russian composer Sergei Taneyev, and recorded his nine (9) string quartets, as well as his viola quintet, all for the Naxos label. The quartet regularly performs and collaborates with non-classical artists, including Willy Porter and Jayme Stone. A few of the outstanding artists with whom the quartet has played include Yo-Yo Ma, David Krakuaer, Raul Juarena, and Richard Stoltzman.
Bryce David Dessner is an American composer and guitarist based in Paris, also known as a member of the rock band the National. Dessner's twin brother Aaron is also a member of the group. Together they write the music, in collaboration with lead singer / lyricist Matt Berninger.
Piano and String Quartet is a composition by American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman. It was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet and pianist Aki Takahashi, who premiered the piece at the 7th annual New Music America Festival in Los Angeles and released a studio recording in 1993.
Marshall McGuire is an Australian harpist, teacher, conductor and musical administrator. He has been described as the world's greatest champion of new music for the harp. Tristram Cary has written "A new school of harp music is emerging from the enterprise of this innovative master performer".
David Felder is an American composer and academic who is a SUNY Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo. He is also the director of both the June in Buffalo Festival and the Robert and Carol Morris Center for 21st Century Music.
Amy Williams is an American composer and pianist. She was born in Buffalo, New York, into a musical family, with her mother being a violist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and her father being a percussionist and professor emeritus at the university at Buffalo.
Another Timbre is a record label, based in Sheffield and known for its releases of free improvisation, experimental and contemporary classical music. It was founded by television sound recordist Simon Reynell, who also engineers and produces most of the label's recordings.