Commission to Anthony Cheung

Sound is ever-present. Although most sound in a natural environment is filed under “background noise,” it can also trigger an automatic emotional response. The exact emotions evoked from sounds, such as a car horn, a loved one’s laugh, or a gust of wind, will be unique to the individual listener. Many composers aim to emulate this experience for the audience. Composer and pianist Anthony Cheung not only recognizes the natural conjuration of emotion through music but hopes for variation in interpretation. His newest piece, commissioned and performed by the JACK Quartet, will involve a manipulation of excerpts from environmental and musical sounds.

In Cheung’s words: “In the piece, I will continue the work I began in 2019 with The Natural Word in which I used found captions of environmental and musical sounds in film and television, stringing together many such distillations into new strands of narrative that could be musically depicted in radically different interpretations. Taking into account scholarship in Media and Disability Studies, my new work for quartet will create strange riffs and detours on what are often banal signifiers of emotion, focusing only on sound and sonic associations with words, and without the benefit of video as in my earlier work.”

Long-standing mutual admiration has led to the collaboration between Cheung and the New York-based JACK Quartet for the duration of this commission, which is funded by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung.

Further information:
jackquartet.com

Dates

November 10, 2024
92NY, New York City

February 14, 2025
Lugano Arte e Cultura Teatrostudio

March 20, 2025
Pierre Boulez Saal, Berlin

March 22, 2025
Wigmore Hall, London

March 29, 2025
Stadthaus Winterthur

August 1, 2025
New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival