PROGRAM INFORMATION

A Thousand Thoughts
A Live Documentary with the Kronos Quartet
Written and Directed by Sam Green and Joe Bini

Wednesday, October 6, 2021
7:30 PM
Bing Concert Hall


Artists


 

Kronos Quartet:

David Harrington, violin

John Sherba, violin

Hank Dutt, viola

Sunny Yang, cello

 

Sam Green and Joe Bini, filmmakers

 

Brian H. Scott, lighting design

Scott Fraser, sound design

 

A Thousand Thoughts was commissioned by The Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi, Barbican, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, Exploratorium, Christos V. Konstantakopoulos, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MASS MoCA, Melbourne Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University through its Wexner Center Artist Residency Award program.

Additional support was received from The DrumStick Fund, Genuine Article Pictures, JustFilms/Ford Foundation, Lear Family Foundation, Andrea Lunsford, The National Endowment for the Arts, Sundance Documentary Film Program with support from Open Society Foundation, Gottfried and Janet Tittiger, and Kenneth and Elizabeth Whitney.

This film was supported by Sundance Catalyst.

 

PROGRAM SUBJECT TO CHANGE. Please be considerate of others and turn off all phones, pagers, and watch alarms. Photography and recording of any kind are not permitted. Thank you.

HEALTH AND SAFETY: All patrons are required to wear a mask at this performance.

 


Program Note


A bow made of wood and horsehair coated with resin from trees scrapes across a string, which makes vibrations in the hollow of the wooden instrument which travel as a series of sound waves in the subtle matter of the air and, perhaps, penetrate the labyrinth of a human ear, or a hundred or a thousand, and this vibration is interpreted by the brain or the brains as information that might have, to use a word that means such vibrations, resonance as a source of pleasure or pain or sorrow. This is one way to describe a note of music on a violin. It is as ephemeral as the waves of the sea or ripples in water; it arises, it fades, it exists in time, and that ephemerality always speaks of mortality and the desire to transcend it, of motion that exists in time, of life that is itself a kind of motion, since we call the living animate and the un-living inanimate.

Human beings have acknowledged and transcended mortality with culture, with rites and songs and other elaborations that can be passed on and bridge more than one human life, that can spread like ripples on a pond, like a sound, that can be reiterated. A Thousand Thoughts begins with the story of The Lost Chord, a song that was one of the first pieces of music recorded when technology made possible the conversion of live sound into tiny impressions on a wax cylinder (and later on phonograph records [phono for “sound,” graph for “writing”]; these were literally devices for writing down sound], and then on magnetic tape, and then as digital data that shaved off some of the fuzz of the vibrations to make something perhaps a little pared down and cleaner than what sounded in the studio where the recording was made). 

A Thousand Thoughts begins with the irony of The Lost Chord, because it was about music heard once and never recovered that offered some joy, some solace, some peace that then vanished, about the sense of loss that was tied to death and perhaps to the impossibility of hanging onto transcendent moments. Perhaps it begins with that story because in it is the desire of all art to transcend time, to shore something up against its depredations, and the particular contradictions of art that unfold in time, like music—that pleasure in the ephemeral, in sounds that can only exist in time itself. A note is heard, it fades, it is gone. There is no music outside of time, and time itself is full of the impossibility of keeping and the inevitability of change, that force that sometimes feels like liberation and sometimes like tragedy. 

Kronos founder David Harrington described a quest analogous to The Lost Chord, saying “We have not created the bulletproof piece of music that will prevent harm from happening—you know, [that] a young child can wrap around herself or a grandparent can wrap around his family. We haven’t been able to do that yet, but I think it’s possible, and I spend every minute of my waking life trying to find that.”

A Thousand Thoughts, a thousand questions, mine, yours, ours, theirs, questions that perhaps open up things that definitive answers would only nail shut. Kronos Quartet’s long trajectory offers a series of questions that are solid and answers that are elusive: How do you find a path between predictability and instability? How do you have both a clear identity and an open door that lets in new ideas and collaborators? How do you keep the faith that what you’re doing matters? How do make an art that grows like a tree, ring by ring, year by year, and stands as a testament? How do you keep it alive through all the changes, and how do you incorporate the change that is, as my photographic collaborator Mark Klett likes to say, the measure of time? Or how do you proceed as Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi said in some instructions for Zen Buddhist practice, “not too tight, not too loose,” not so tied by custom and convention and the past, not so formless that you lurch and spill into whatever the present offers?

There was an old idea of immortality as transcendence, as beauty, as power that was less about living forever than about lifting someone out of themselves and the gloom and despond of mortality. There is also a particular beauty of mortality, of this light that will never shine the same way twice, of the spring that will be devoured by the summer, the youth that will be consumed by maturity, the freshness of beginnings and the ripeness of arrival.

The live music of the “live film” A Thousand Thoughts raises other questions, about irreproducible and evanescent experience, about the water that runs through your fingers, about the events that cannot be reconstituted. How do you swim upstream against what film and all our digital era has become, an immersion in other times and places than the present: in recordings, images, and reproductions? Once, everything happened and was then irretrievable, though you could sketch it or describe it in words on paper or spoken aloud, and then in the late 1830s came photography, promising exact replication of the visible, and half a century later came recorded sound, promising exact replication of the audible. They had photographs, then phonographs; they thought that they had conquered time; we had even more recording technology, even more data stored, even more ease in capturing every moment.

Did we conquer time or were we conquered by substitutes for presence? Did we give up the moment itself, the things themselves, for their reproductions? Did we fall into substitutes and fakes and lose our grasp on the moment, give up presence for absences and in the process lose ourselves that are also mortal, timebound, eternally changing, eternally invited to witness in the moment? Is there a way that thinking you will never die becomes a way to never live, like the person who tries to document the moment so that in the future the past will be retrievable and only misses the present? The present, that pun in English for gifts and for now.

The foundation for modern cinema was laid when Eadweard Muybridge animated sequential photographs and when Edison captured recorded sound on his wax cylinders. The latter man saw it as an uncanny act, a reaching into the grave, a dance with the dead.

"In the year 1887,” Edison later remembered, “it occurred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument which would do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear and that, by a combination of the two, all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultaneously. I believe that in coming years by my own work and that of Dickson, Muybridge, Marey and others who will doubtless enter the field, that grand opera can be given at the Metropolitan Opera House at New York...with artists and musicians long since dead."

He declares that cinema is a ghost dance, as I said somewhere else, that it is a raising of the dead or at least a fraternizing with the dead and the gone. It is not about presence but absence and the ability to be with who and what is absent. Harrington wanted to make a music that would protect a child from harm, but Edison aspired to revive the dead at least enough to make them sing for us. Perhaps in that is the difference between the present and the past recaptured.

Edison’s astonishing declaration raises as well questions Sam Green has tried to answer: What is live cinema? What is it to be fully present? What is it to have the thing itself and not its representation? What is it to be here and now in an age of being anywhere but here, and every time but this irreproducible moment? What is it to have a film mixed live before you, prone to accidents and serendipities, to be each time something distinct, of its time, and not outside it, to hear music as a vibration of horsehair and wood and the movement of muscles traveling through the air and then into the labyrinth of your ear, with all the nuances that get sanded down and painted over by a digital recording? What is the work of art in the age of digital reproduction, and what is it to be in the presence and the present?

 

— Rebecca Solnit

 


Musical Selections


Philip Glass / String Quartet No. 2 (Company): Movement II *
Terry Riley / Requiem for Adam (excerpt) *
George Crumb / Selections from Black Angels
            10. God-music
            1. Threnody I: Night of the Electric Insects (excerpt)

Ryan Brown / Pinched *
John Adams / "Judah to Ocean" from John’s Book of Alleged Dances *
Tanya Tagaq (arr. Jacob Garchik) / Sivunittinni (excerpt) **
Ken Benshoof / Traveling Music: I. Gentle, easy *
Fodé Lassana Diabaté (arr. Jacob Garchik) / Sunjata’s Time: 5. Bara kala ta **
Terry Riley / The Wheel *
David Harrington / "Drone" from Dirty Wars *
Café Tacuba (arr. Osvaldo Golijov) / 12/12 (excerpt) *
Philip Glass / String Quartet No. 3 (Mishima Quartet): Blood Oath
Aleksandra Vrebalov / The Sea Ranch Songs: 7. Chapel, Rainbows *
Laurie Anderson (arr. Jacob Garchik) / Flow +
John Zorn / Meditation (The Blue of Noon) from The Dead Man *
Pérotin (arr. Kronos Quartet) / Viderunt Omnes (excerpt) +
Clint Mansell (arr. David Lang) / Selections from Requiem for a Dream +
            Lux Aeterna
            Ghosts of a Future Lost

John Oswald / Spectre (excerpt) *
Wu Man / Two Chinese Paintings: II. Silk and Bamboo (inspired by Huanlege) **
Ervin T. Rouse (arr. Danny Clay) / Orange Blossom Special (excerpt) +
 

* Written for Kronos
** Written for Kronos and composed for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire
+ Arranged for Kronos

 


About the Artists


Kronos Quartet
For more than 45 years, San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet—David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello)—has combined a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually reimagine the string quartet experience. In the process, Kronos has become one of the world’s most celebrated and influential ensembles, performing thousands of concerts, releasing more than 60 recordings, collaborating with countless composers and performers, and commissioning over 1000 works and arrangements for string quartet. The group has won over 40 awards, including three Grammys, and the prestigious Polar Music, Avery Fisher, and Edison Klassiek Oeuvre Prizes. The nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association manages all aspects of Kronos’ work, including the commissioning of new works, concert tours and home season performances, education programs, and the annual Kronos Festival. In 2015, Kronos launched Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, an education and legacy project that is commissioning—and distributing online for free—50 new works for string quartet written by composers from around the world.


Sam Green
Sam Green is a New York–based documentary filmmaker. He received his Master’s Degree in Journalism from University of California, Berkeley, where he studied documentary filmmaking with the acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. Green’s most recent projects are the “live documentaries” The Measure of All Things (2014), The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller with Yo La Tengo (2012), and Utopia in Four Movements (2010). His performance work has screened at venues such as the Barbican, The Kitchen, TBA Festival, Fusebox Festival, Brighton Festival, and many others. Green’s 2004 feature-length film, the Academy Award–nominated documentary The Weather Underground, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on PBS, was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and has screened widely around the world.


Joe Bini
Joe Bini is a filmmaker, writer and editor who works in both fiction and nonfiction forms. He is best known for his twenty-year collaboration with Werner Herzog, resulting in such notable films as, Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Into the Abyss, and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. He has also edited the groundbreaking films, We Need To Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here, directed by Lynne Ramsay, and American Honey, directed by Andrea Arnold, as well as Nick Broomfield's, Tales of the Grim Sleeper. He has lectured on and taught cinema in film schools worldwide.

 


Credits


Directed, written, and edited by
Sam Green, Joe Bini

Music performed by
Kronos Quartet: David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, Sunny Yang

Cinematography by
Kirsten Johnson

Produced by
Janet Cowperthwaite, Sam Green

Executive Producers
Josh Penn, Maida Lynn, Kenneth & Elizabeth Whitney

Co-Producers
Thomas O. Kriegsmann, Brendan Doyle

Lighting Designer, Performance
Brian H. Scott

Sound Designer, Performance
Scott Fraser

Produced in Association with
ArKtype, C41 Media, The Department of Motion Pictures, Genuine Article Pictures

Motion Design
Work-Order

Additional Cinematography
Yoni Brook
Pete Sillen
Raf Fellner
Andrew Black
David Kaplowitz

Associate Producer
Evan Neff

Assistant Editor
Jonathan Rapoport

Sound Mix
Rich Bologna

Colorist
Ayumi Ashley

Footage Research
Sierra Pettengill
Rosemary Rotondi
Anna Hudak

Sound
Claudia Katanaygi
Judy Karp
Stephen Koszler
Doug Dunderdale
Paul Mendez

Production Assistance
Sam Schnorr
Mike Reid
Chris Niesing
Forrest Pound
Tara Kutz
Evan Neff
Ariel Hahn
Raf Fellner

Legal – Fair Use
Peter Jazsi

SPECIAL THANKS
Christine Burgin
Greg Dubinsky
Shari Frilot
Catherine Galasso
Jonn Herschend
Caroline Libresco
Nikolás McConnie-Saad
Nion McEvoy
Rebecca Solnit
William Wegman

 

THANKS
Jad Abumrad
Aga Khan Music Initiative
Kira Akerman
Bay Area Video Coalition
Rick Beal
Yves Béhar
Meriko Borogove
Bill Bragin
Camille Brunet
Neil Burger
Stuart Candy
Rachel Chanoff
Robert Chehoski
Michele Clement
Bonni Cohen
Mary Fernando Conrad
Tony Conrad
Victoria Cook
Susan Coyle
Libby Craig
Mary Cybulski
Jay Dehejia
Alejandro Delgado
Dale Djerassi
Katie Doering
Sandi Dubowski
Jessica Edwards
Emily Harvey Foundation
Kristin Feeley
Alison Byrne Fields
Dave Filipi
Kate Fowle
Vallejo Gantner
Jacob Garchik
Sherri Geldin
Jeanne Giordano
Andrew Goldfarb
Michael Gottwald
Barbara Green
Agnes Gund
Bill Haber
Alana Hauser
Hooligan NYC
Jim Hubbard
Gary Hustwit
Tabitha Jackson
Fred Kaplan
Kirstin Kapustik
Liz Keim
Braden King
Edward King
Jim Koester
Jennifer Lange
Paul Lazar
Brian Liem
Bibiana Lozano
Conchita Lozano
Donlyn Lyndon
Marina McDougall
Amy Miller
Bill Morrison
Fairouz Nishanova
Laurie Olinder
Frederic Opsomer
Emil Packer
Trevor Paglen
Marla Painter
Annie-B Parson
Liz Pasquale
Boris Penth
Thomas Pierce
Kerry Leigh Pittenger
Keri Putnam
Rosemary Quigley
Marjorie Randolph
Revolution Studios
Jonathan Rose
Mark Rudd
Georg Schmundt-Thomas
Max Schroder
Tara Sheffer
Jon Shibata
Nadia Sirota
Heike Sommer
Michael Stack
Noah Stahl
Liz Lodge Stepp
Priscilla Stoyanof
Mark Swed
Jules Tippett
David Toop
Lucinda Toy
Zane Vella
Tom Welsh
Ryan Werner / Cinetic Media
Christine Woodhouse
Chi-hui Yang
John Paul Young
Jeffrey Zeigler

 

For the Kronos Quartet / Kronos Performing Arts Association

Janet Cowperthwaite, Executive Director, KPAA / Manager, Kronos Quartet
Mason Dille, Development Manager
Dana Dizon, Business Manager
Sarah Donahue, Operations Manager
Reshena Liao, Creative Projects Manager
Nikolás McConnie-Saad, Artistic Administrator
Kären Nagy, Strategic Initiatives Director

Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing Arts Association
P. O. Box 225340
San Francisco, CA 94122-5340  USA
kronosquartet.org
facebook.com/kronosquartet
instagram.com/kronos_quartet
twitter.com/kronosquartet

The Kronos Quartet records for Nonesuch Records.

 

 

Acknowledgments

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