Southern Exposure’s 2021-2022 Season

Southern Exposure’s 20th Anniversary Season captures all the elements that have made the nationally acclaimed series special over the years. It includes innovative, accessible concerts that showcase the very best of today’s classical music — regardless of style — and features some of contemporary music’s most legendary ensembles, young stars, and the School of Music’s superb faculty and student performers.

This year’s Kronos Quartet concert is a ticketed event. All other concerts are free. Season patrons will receive seating priority.

Night Music

7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 17
School of Music Recital Hall
(limited in-person attendance, also live-streamed)

With special guest Augusta Read Thomas, composer. Registration required – season supporters receive seating priority

7 p.m. champagne toast and season overview

School of Music faculty and students perform an atmospheric program of works about the beauty, seduction, and terror of the night. Music by Augusta Read Thomas, Brian Eno, Christopher Cerrone, and George Crumb.

Charles Hite, featured photographic artist. Lyon Hill, lighting design.

Night Music Ensemble

Kronos Quartet: at War with Ourselves – 400 Years of You

3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 7
Koger Center for the Arts

Music by Michael Abels; text and narration by Nikky Finney; conducted by Valérie Sainte-Agathe; choir prepared by Jared Johnson

2 p.m. Pre-concert conversation with Nikky Finney and Michael Abels, led by Michael Harley

This concert will be a ticketed event.

The legendary string quartet joins forces with a 24-voice choir of local professionals and USC’s National Book-Award winning poet Nikky Finney in the preview performance of a vitally important new work about the African American Experience in the New World. This concert concludes a four-day campus residency with Kronos and composer Michael Abels, best known for his film scores in the Jordan Peele movies Get Out and Us.

Kronos Quartet

Founders: Songs for the End of Time

7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 28, 2022
School of Music Recital Hall

The creative New York-based quintet Founders (violin / vocals, trumpet, cello, clarinet, bass) – winners of USC’s 2019 Savvy Chamber Music Competition – brilliantly reimagines Messiaen’s masterpiece Quartet for the End of Time, composed and first performed in a German POW camp during World War II.

Founders

The Westerlies

7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 18, 2022
School of Music Recital Hall

The critically acclaimed Westerlies are an idiosyncratic, genre-bending brass quartet (two trumpets, two trombones) whose performances freely mix “ideas from jazz, contemporary classical, and Appalachian folk music” (New York Times).

The Westerlies

20th Anniversary Celebration - Fundraiser

6 p.m. Sunday, March 20, 2022
Bourbon Restaurant, 1214 Main St.

Bang on a Can All-stars

7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 24, 2022
Johnson Performance Hall, Darla Moore School of Business

Founded in 1992, the venerable contemporary music supergroup has been heralded as “the country’s most important vehicle for contemporary music” (San Francisco Chronicle), and continues to transform the idea of what classical concert music is and can be. Members have collaborated with musicians including Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Alison Krauss, Bob Dylan, and many others.

Bang on a Can All-stars

School of Music

Southern Exposure New Music Series