Superheroes of the new music world at UofSC Monday Nov. 12, 8 p.m.

The award winning Southern Exposure New Music Series is presented each year by the School of Music at the University of South Carolina. These free concerts in the School of Music Recital Hall (813 Assembly St.), are often standing room only and early arrival is suggested for seating. JACK string quartet presents a concert on Monday, November 12 at 8:00 p.m.

Called “superheroes of the new music world” by the Boston Globe, JACK is one of the most potent forces in chamber music today. Recipients of major awards from Lincoln Center, New Music USA, and the American Society of Composers and Performers (ASCAP), the group tours worldwide and has performed to universal claim in venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and London’s Wigmore Hall.

JACK’s program features a new work written for the ensemble by German composer Georg Friedrich Haas, one of today’s musical giants and a composer closely associated with the group because of their path-breaking performances of his third string quartet, performed surrounding the audience and in complete darkness. Haas’s Ninth Quartet (2017), also written to be played in the dark, capitalizes on what has been called one of JACK’s “superpowers”:  their ability to play music in different tuning systems. This work features, in particular, the use of just intonation, where intervals sound strikingly pure.

JACK opens their Southern Exposure program with a radiant quartet written in 2016 by Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri, a young rising star who teaches alongside Haas at Columbia University. The program’s third and oldest piece is one of the 20th century’s chamber music masterworks: György Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 2 (1968), a fantastical work that ranges in textures from brutal and buzzing to mysterious and unearthly.

Program

Zosha Di Castri, String Quartet No. 1
György Ligeti, String Quartet No. 2
Georg Friedrich Haas, String Quartet No. 9

Artist Exposure

This Southern Exposure concert features visual art by Columbia-based artist Abstract Alextrandra in the USC Music Library, School of Music second floor, during the weeks surrounding the concert.