Kronos Quartet February 17, 2008

Building on their commitment to expanding the role music plays in our world, Kronos brings us Tan Dun's "Ghost Opera" and Terry Riley's "The Cusp of Magic". Using the environment for instruments — stone, water and metals — Tan Dun creates music he calls "a dialogue between past and future, spirit and nature, based on the shamanistic customs of Chinese peasant culture." In "The Cusp of Magic", Terry Riley combines the different timbre and resonance of the Chinese pipa and the western string ensemble to highlight the crossover regions of cultural reference, so that western musical themes might be projected with an eastern accent and vice-versa.

$40 / $7 student

Official Website: http://claricesmithcenter.umd.edu/2007/c/performances/performance?rowid=5452