Escalay (Water Wheel)
By Hamza El Din

My country was flooded after the construction of the Aswan dam and we lost it after a recorded history of 9,000 years, so I have a nostalgia for that place. Escalay is a representation of how to start the waterwheel and let it run. 

[The Nubian] music system is Afro-Arab—we are a bridge, musically and culturally, between Africa and the Middle East… I wanted the Quartet to represent the sound of my instrument, the oud. The challenge was to make audible the overtones that only the musician can hear from a solo instrument—the ‘unheard’ voice.

I was in New York when the Aswan Dam was finished. I lost my village. When I went back and saw my village and my people in a different place, I saw in their eyes the loss. I saw my people were lost. They had moved to an almost semi-desert place. When I came back, I was lost myself. I was playing my oud, doing nothing except repeating a phrase. I was on the water wheel, the oldest surviving machine in our land. Whoever sits on that machine will become hypnotized by that noise. 

Everyone who sits behind the oxen, which helps the water wheel go round, will express himself according to his age. If it’s a child, he’ll sing a children’s song. If it’s a woman or a man, they’ll sing a love song. If it’s an older man, he’ll sing a religious song. I wrote this as the sound of the older man, so with [the Kronos Quartet] it becomes a religious song.

Hamza El Din

Hamza El Din was a virtuoso of the oud, a lute-like fretless instrument prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa. He was born 1929 in Nubia, a region straddling the Egypt-Sudaneese border. His small village was destroyed in 1960’s by the flooding caused by the construction of the Aswan Dam. He went on to study music in Cairo, and became an ambassador of the Nubian musical tradition around the world as a teacher and performer, collaborating and inspiring musicians as diverse as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, The Grateful Dead, and the Kronos Quartet, who worked with him to make this arrangement of “Escalay”, one of his signature pieces for solo oud. He settled down in Berkeley, California, where he passed away in 2006.

Borys Lyatoshynsky was a Ukrainian composer and violinist active in the Soviet era. Born in what is now Western Ukraine in 1895, Lyatoshynsky studied composition in Kiev with Reinhold Glière, a prominent Ukrainian/Russian composer. While his music draws inspiration from composers throughout the Russian Empire (such as Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin), he maintained a distinct Ukrainian voice in his music. Much like his contemporary Shostakovich, much of his creative expression was stymied by Stalinist restrictions; after Stalin’s death in 1953, Lyatoshynsky became more adventurous with his compositions and was able to travel internationally to promote his music and openly exchange ideas. He died in Kiev in 1968 at the age of 73.

Lyatoshynsky’s Fourth Quartet was composed in 1943 in the midst of World War II, a time of great tumult and violence in Ukraine. It draws on traditional Ukrainian themes, and features an extended treatment of tonality. The “Lento” we are performing is deeply somber, with the opening theme passed in canon between all four instruments. The movement ends with a contemplative, defeated sigh.

You Know Me From Here
By Missy Mizzoli

You Know Me From Here was commissioned by Carol Cole, for the Kronos Quartet, in honor of her husband Tim’s 75th birthday. When she asked me to write this piece, I immediately imagined a twenty-minute musical journey homeward, a trek through chaos (I. Lift Your Fists) and loneliness (II. Everything That Rises Must Converge) to a place of security and companionship (III. You Know Me From Here). This is, at its core, music about loss, but in the most positive sense; it speaks of the loss of our old selves, the jumps into the unknown, the leaps of faith we all must make and the beautiful moments when we find solace in a person, in an idea, or in music itself. The music itself shifts constantly from earthy, gritty gestures to soaring, leaping melodies that rarely land where we expect.

Missy Mazzoli

Missy Mazzoli is an American composer born 1980 in rural Lansdale, Pennsylvania. She studied composition at Boston University, Yale School of Music, and the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, and served as the Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony 2018-2020. Mazzoli has composed 3 full-length operas, in addition to several orchestral and chamber works. She also performs and writes for her ensemble Victoire, which blends electronic, percussive, and acoustic elements in their music. She currently is a faculty member at the Mannes School of Music in New York City.