Aleksandra Vrebalov (b. 1970), a native of the former Yugoslavia, left Serbia in 1995 and now lives in New York City. She has written more than 60 works, ranging from concert music, to opera and modern dance, to music for film. Her works have been commissioned and/or performed by the Kronos Quartet, Serbian National Theater, Carnegie Hall, Moravian Philharmonic, Belgrade Philharmonic and Providence Festival Ballet. Vrebalov is a fellow of MacDowell Colony, Rockefeller Bellagio Center, New York’s New Dramatists, American Opera Projects, Other Minds Festival, and Tanglewood. Her awards include The Harvard Fromm Commission, The American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Fellowship, Barlow Endowment Commission, MAP Fund, Vienna Modern Masters, Meet the Composer, and Douglas Moore Fellowship. Her works have been recorded for Nonesuch, Innova, Centaur, Records, and Vienna Modern Masters.

A frequent collaborator with Kronos Quartet, Vrebalov most recently completed My Desert, My Rose for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, which Kronos premiered at Carnegie Hall on April 2, 2016, and released the scores, recordings, as well well as additional materials, for free online. Her collaborative work with director Bill Morrison, Beyond Zero (1914–1918), was commissioned and premiered by Kronos at U.C. Berkeley’s Cal Performances in April 2014 and had its European premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival that summer. Her string quartet …hold me, neighbor, in this storm… was written for and recorded by Kronos for the album Floodplain. Her string quartet Pannonia Boundless, also for Kronos, was published by Boosey & Hawkes as part of the Kronos Collection, and recorded for the album Kronos Caravan. Vrebalov just finished a song cycle on Charles Simic’s poetry commissioned by ASCAP/Kingsford Fund and a sound installation with architect Ronit Eisenbach, converting an old bank building into a music box in Chestertown, Maryland. She is currently collaborating with choreographer Patricia Okenwa on a new piece to be premiered by Rambert Dance Company in London. For more information, please see aleksandravrebalov.com.

Andrew Lyndon is a videographer, animator, and filmmaker who makes stand-alone video, freelance multimedia work, video theater sets, and narrative film; he is a professor of animation at California College of the Arts; has been digital imaging and video instructor at Pixar Animation Studiosand is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony.  His animated video Cat Black Sea was included in the Milkbar International Film Festival in 2007, which screened in San Francisco and St. Petersburg Russia, and in 2008 he developed animation and titles for the documentary Mirrors of Priviledge; Making Whiteness Visible (2008), and motion graphics for Building the Green Economy (2008) a film by the Ella Baker Foundation. He was also a 2008 NEA Artist in Residence at the San Francisco Exploratorium. In 2010, he curated From Pencil to Pixel, an exhibition of Bay Area Animation studios for The Oakland Museum at The Oakland International Airport. In 2013 he created animation and motion graphics for The California Department of Education’s early childhood education training program, and contributed animation for the documentary “The Battle of AmFar”, Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffry Friedman, which premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. He recently created animation for a performance by Ariadne Greif, with music by Aleksandra Vrebalov, as part of the Ferus Fest, performed at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY, May 2015. For more, please visit alyndon.com.

The Kronos Quartet is an American string quartet based in San Francisco. They have been in existence with a rotating membership of musicians for over forty years. The quartet specializes in contemporary and new music, with more than 750 works having been written for them. The quartet was founded by violinist David Harrington in Seattle, Washington. Its first performance was in November 1973. Since 1978, the quartet has been based in San Francisco, California. The longest-running combination of performers (from 1978 to 1999) had Harrington and John Sherba on violin, Hank Dutt on viola, and Joan Jeanrenaud on cello. In 1999, Joan Jeanrenaud left Kronos because she was "eager for something new";she was replaced by Jennifer Culp who, in turn, left in 2005 and was replaced by Jeffrey Zeigler. In June 2013, Zeigler was replaced by Sunny Yang.With almost forty studio albums to their credit and having performed worldwide, they were called "probably the most famous 'new music' group in the world"and were praised in philosophical studies of music for the inclusiveness of their repertoire. By the time the quartet celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary in 1999, they had a repertoire of over 600 works, which included 400 string quartets written for them, more than 3,000 performances, seven first-prize ASCAP awards, Edison Awards in classical and popular music, and had sold more than 1.5 million records.

1. Spirit I

2. Fort Ross Chorale

3. Gratitude

4. Numbers

5. Ideas: Condominium One

6. Creatures

7. Chapel, Rainbows

8. Elements I

9. Starry Night

10. Ideas: Barn Fugue

11. Spirit II

12. Elements II

13. Gratitude, Coda