JACK Quartet & Lightbulb Ensemble

New music champions JACK Quartet collaborate with the Santa Cruz/Oakland-based Lightbulb Ensemble (LBE) in a concert of new works for string quartet and contemporary American gamelan. Building on the success of their 2015 performance of LBE director Brian Baumbusch’s epic Hyrdrogen(2)Oxygen—called “maddeningly beautiful … magnificent, and as intoxicating as a drug” by the Washington Post—the two ensembles premiere new pieces by three current and former LBE members: Santa Cruz composer Sarang Kim, Wayne Vitale, and Peter Sloan. Baumbusch’s Hydrogen(2)Oxygen will close the concert.

About the Program
Water, Wayne Vitale
Oblivion, Sarang Kim
Pratityasamutpada, Peter Sloan
Hydrogen(2)Oxygen, Brian Baumbusch

Hydrogen(2)Oxygen presents the first-ever collaboration between the Lightbulb Ensemble and the JACK Quartet. The work draws on the 2012 collaboration between Baumbusch and JACK entitled Bali Alloy, which premiered several works at the Bali Arts Festival in Denpasar written for JACK and a 25-member Balinese Gong Kebyar ensemble. Hydrogen(2)Oxygen comes from an aesthetic of molecular crystallizations, confluences of symmetry and asymmetry represented through non-coincidental rhythmic cells of contrary proportions and immense time cycles, and meanwhile explores the musical potential and the depths of raw expression contained in the contemporary string quartet and the American gamelan.