John Coolidge Adams is an American composer and conductor whose music is rooted in minimalism. Among the most regularly performed composers of contemporary classical music, he is particularly noted for his operas, which are often centered around recent historical events. Apart from opera, his oeuvre includes orchestral, concertante, vocal, choral, chamber, electroacoustic and piano music.
Terrence Mitchell "Terry" Riley is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his work became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape music techniques, improvisation, and delay systems. His best known works are the 1964 composition In C and the 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental music, rock, and contemporary electronic music. Subsequent works such as Shri Camel (1980) explored just intonation.
The Kronos Quartet is an American string quartet based in San Francisco. It has been in existence with a rotating membership of musicians for 50 years. The quartet covers a very broad range of musical genres, including contemporary classical music. More than 1,000 works have been written for it.
John Luther Adams is an American composer whose music is inspired by nature, especially the landscapes of Alaska, where he lived from 1978 to 2014. His orchestral work Become Ocean was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Wu Man is a Chinese pipa player and composer. Trained in Pudong-style pipa performance at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, she is known for playing in a broad range of musical styles and introducing the pipa and its Chinese heritage into Western genres. She has performed and recorded extensively with Kronos Quartet and Silk Road Ensemble, and has premiered works by Philip Glass, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, Zhao Jiping, and Zhou Long, among many others. She has recorded and appeared on over 40 albums, five of which have been nominated for Grammy Awards. In 2013, she was named Instrumentalist of the Year by Musical America, becoming the first performer of a non-Western instrument to receive this award. She also received The United States Artists Award in 2008.
William Edward Childs is an American composer, jazz pianist, arranger and conductor from Los Angeles, California, United States.
Theatre of Voices is a vocal ensemble founded by baritone Paul Hillier in 1990; it focuses on early music and new music.
Aleksandra Vrebalov is a Serbian-American composer based in New York City and Novi Sad, Serbia.
Sam Green is an American documentary filmmaker. His most recent projects are “live documentaries” in which he narrates a film in-person while musicians perform a live soundtrack. His 2018 project A Thousand Thoughts features a live score by the Kronos Quartet, and his 2012 project The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller featured a live score by the band Yo La Tengo. Green's 2004 film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award, included in the Whitney Biennial, and broadcast nationally on PBS.
Loren Nerell is an American composer and performer of ambient American music and Balinese gamelan.
Mark Grey is an American classical music composer, sound designer and sound engineer.
Terry Riley: Requiem for Adam is a studio album by the Kronos Quartet. The music was composed by Terry Riley, commissioned by the quartet; the album is a requiem for Adam Harrington, the son of Kronos co-founder David Harrington.
Kronos Quartet Performs Alfred Schnittke: The Complete String Quartets is a studio album by the Kronos Quartet. The double CD contains all four of Russian composer Alfred Schnittke's "startling" string quartets. String Quartet No.3 was recorded and released in 1988; the other three were recorded between 1994 and 1996 and released in 1998.
Terry Riley: Cadenza on the Night Plain is a studio album by the Kronos Quartet, the first album-length recording of a collaboration between the quartet and American composer Terry Riley.
Witold Lutosławski: String Quartet is a studio album by the Kronos Quartet, containing String Quartet by Polish Witold Lutosławski composed in 1964 and first performed in 1965. This string quartet is an example of aleatory music, that is, music in which some element of the composition is left to chance, and/or some primary element of a composed work's realization is left to the determination of its performer(s). As Gerald Gold noted in a review of the Kronos album in The New York Times, "the Lutoslawski composition integrates notated music with chance performance."
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.
Terry Riley: The Cusp of Magic is a studio album by the Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, an album-length recording of a collaboration between the quartet and American composer Terry Riley.
Dracula is a soundtrack performed by the Kronos Quartet, with music composed by Philip Glass, for the 1931 film Dracula.
This is a Nonesuch Records discography, organized by catalog number.
Sahba Aminikia is an Iranian-born American contemporary music composer, artistic director, performer, and educator. Aminikia is the founder and the artistic director of Flying Carpet Festival, the first performing arts festival for children living in war zones.
