Collaborations with Jasper String Quartet
Insects & Machines: Quartets of Vivian Fung
The Jasper String Quartet has included Fung Quartets throughout many tour seasons and on October 27, 2023, JSQ will be releasing their next album, showcasing Vivian Fung’s first four string quartets. Recorded on the Sono Luminus label, this album continues to build the relationship the quartet has with Fung. Following the album release, JSQ will continue to feature Fung quartets in their programming.
Listen to samples of JSQ’s performances of movements 1 and 3 from Quartet No. 1 below:
Lamenting Earth
Vivian Fung is also collaborating with the Jasper String Quartet, tenor Nicholas Phan, and pianist Myra Huang, on the creation of a new song cycle, Lamenting Earth. The project is a half-evening length song cycle, approximately 30 minutes, for tenor, string quartet, and piano. The work centers around poet Claire Wahmanholm’s prize-winning poem “O,” which took second place at the Academy of American Poets’ inaugural Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. The poem is described by the judges as “an original and powerful evocation, using a single letter of the alphabet to name the wonders that are at risk of being no more…The voice is prophetic and unrelenting: a lament, an elegy, and a clarion call to action!”
Along with Wahmanholm’s poem, this project will be a collaboration with students from the Kaufman Center in New York. High School students from the Kaufman Center will be composing poems inspired by “O” about the fragile state of our earth’s environment. Fung will select several student poems to set to music alongside “O” to form the entire song cycle. As interludes in between the songs, student poems will be read by their respective poets and will create a sound collage to complete the cycle.
If you would be a co-commissioner, contribute to the creation of this song cycle, and have the Jasper String Quartet, Phan, and Huang out to perform this song cycle following the premiere in May 2024, please email Ashley Killam for details.