Program:
Julia Wolfe - Blue Dress
György Ligeti - String Quartet No. 1 (Métamorphoses nocturnes)
I. Allegro grazioso
II. Vivace, capriccioso
III. A tempo
IV. Adagio, mesto
V. Presto – Prestissimo
VI. Molto sostenuto – Andante tranquillo
VII. Più mosso
VIII. Tempo di Valse, moderato, con eleganza, un poco capriccioso
IX. Subito prestissimo
X. Subito: molto sostenuto
XI. Allegretto, un poco gioviale
XII. Allarg. Poco più mosso
XIII. Subito allegro con moto, string. poco a poco sin al prestissimo
XIV. Prestissimo
XV. Allegro comodo, gioviale
XVI. Sostenuto, accelerando – Ad libitum, senza misura
XVII. Lento
intermission
Joseph Haydn - String Quartet op. 76 no. 6 in E flat Major
I. Allegretto – Allegro
II. Fantasia. Adagio
III. Menuetto. Presto
IV. Finale. Allegro spiritoso.
Friction Quartet:
Otis Harriel, violin
Kevin Rogers, violin
Mitso Floor, viola
Doug Machiz, cello
Program Notes
Blue Dress for String Quartet
My love of American folk music blossomed in the 1980s when I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor is a big folk town with amazing musicians of all kinds. I started to play mountain dulcimer and accompanied myself singing. I picked up the bones, played folk guitar, and assisted an instrument builder in making psaltries. Many of my compositions reference folk songs – like Four Marys (for string quartet) and Cruel Sister (for string orchestra.) For the Bang on a Can All-Stars I wrote Steel Hammer (a deconstruction of the John Henry ballad), and Reeling (featuring Canadian mouth music.) In Blue Dress for String Quartet my folk roots come to the fore with fiddling licks, fragments of song, humming, and bows deep into the string. The work was inspired by a field recording of a woman singing “pretty little girl with a blue dress on.”
— Julia Wolfe
From György Ligeti
The first word of the sub-title Metamorphoses nocturnes refers to the form. It is a kind of variation form, only there is no specific “theme” that is then varied. It is, rather, that one and the same musical concept appears in constantly new forms - that is why “metamorphoses” is more appropriate than “variations”. The quartet can be considered as having just one movement or also as a sequence of many short movements that melt into one another without pause or which abruptly cut one another off. The basic concept, which is always present in the intervals but which is in a state of constant transformation, consists of two major seconds that succeed each other transposed by a semitone. In this First String Quartet there are certainly some characteristics of my later music, but the writing is totally different, “old-fashioned”; there are still distinct melodic, rhythmic and harmonic patterns and bar structure. It is not tonal music, but it is not radically atonal, either. The piece still belongs firmly to the Bartók tradition (remember my situation as a composer in Hungary at the beginning of the fifties), yet despite the Bartók-like tone (especially in the rhythm) and despite some touches of Stravinsky and Alban Berg, I trust that the First String Quartet is still personal work.
String Quartet op 76. no 6, in E flat major
Much can be said about the last set of quartets Haydn completed in his life. As you might expect, in the same vein as composers who came after, these late quartets are the most expansive and ambitious chamber works he ever composed. The six String Quartets, Op. 76 were composed in 1797 or 1798 and dedicated to the Hungarian count Joseph Georg von Erdödy thus the common moniker, the “Erdödy Quartets” These quartets are some of Haydn’s most popular quartet works, and many of the quartets have their own nicknames, such as “Sunrise” or “Fifths” that describe their mood. The sixth of this set is one of the least played, but simultaneously one of the most ingenious.
The quartet completely dispenses with the common sonata form that many of Haydn’s earlier quartets adhere to and instead replaces the form with a constantly evolving theme and variations in the first movement. This theme constantly transforms as it is played, resulting in a feeling of joy and delight, as the listeners expectations are constantly defied (typical Haydn trickery). The movement ends with a rousing coda section that is surprisingly full of lengthy development on the original theme.
The second movement quotes a movement from another op. 76 quartet, the “Sunrise” quartet - but develops in a completely different fashion. The movement is titled “Fantasia” - a form that demonstrates the improvisatory nature of the unfolding of the movement, but also describes the surprising key of movement; B Major, a very far removed key from the original E flat Major!
The third movement is an almost typical Haydn Menuet scherzo, with the only caveat being, there is no trio section. A perfunctory alternativo section replaces the trio and Haydn makes a little game of the simplest building block of music, the common major scale.
Finally in the last movement to this brilliant and light hearted work, Haydn plays another building block of music. While seemingly written in the time signature of 3/4 the quartet is constantly coming in on the “wrong” beat and fighting with each other. We’d all like to think that WE are right - and in terms of musical conversation, it couldn’t be a more exciting and entertaining argument.
- notes by Otis Harriel
Bios
Friction Quartet, lauded for performances described as "terribly beautiful" (San Francisco Classical Voice), "stunningly passionate" (Calgary Herald), and "exquisitely skilled" (ZealNYC), is dedicated to modernizing the chamber music experience and expanding the string quartet repertoire. The quartet achieves its mission by commissioning cutting-edge composers, curating imaginative concert programs, collaborating with diverse artists, and engaging in interactive educational outreach.
Friction made their debut at Carnegie Hall in 2016 as participants in the Kronos Quartet Fifty for the Future Workshop. They returned in March of 2018 to perform George Crumb’s Black Angels as part of “The 60’s” festival and their performance was described as, “one of the truest and most moving things I’ve ever heard or seen.” (Zeal NYC)
Since forming in 2011, Friction has commissioned 43 works for string quartet and given world premiere performances of more than 80 works. They developed the Friction Commissioning Initiative in 2017 as a way to work together with their audience to fund specific commissions. The $14,000 raised to date has helped Friction commission a total of 12 new works, including six by young composers between the ages 16 and 21. They were awarded a 2019 Intermusic SF Musical Grant to develop a participatory educational program with composer Danny Clay that is designed to be accessible and sensory-friendly. The project is slated to premiere in the Fall of 2020 at the Pomeroy Recreation and Rehabilitation Center in San Francisco. Friction’s past grants include a grant from Chamber Music America that was used to commission a piano quintet from Andy Akiho, which debuted in November 2016, as well as project grants from Intermusic SF and Zellerbach Family Foundation supporting special projects involving the performance of commissioned works.
While Friction has garnered international attention as commissioners and interpreters of new music, they are also devoted to performing masterworks of the string quartet repertoire at the highest level. They won Second Prize in the 2016 Schoenfeld Competition, they were quarter-finalists in the 2015 Fischoff Competition and placed second at the 2015 Frances Walton Competition
Friction has held residencies at the New Music for Strings Festival in Denmark, Interlochen Arts Camp, Lunenburg Academy of Music in Nova Scotia, Napa Valley Performing Arts Center, Old First Concerts, San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, and was the first ensemble in residence at the Center for New Music.
Friction Quartet is dedicated to building new audiences for contemporary music through interactive musical enrichment programs. They are participating for the third consecutive year in the San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music program, visiting over 60 public schools annually. They are Ensemble Partners with Young Composers & Improvisors Workshop, workshopping and premiering new works written by young composers in the Bay Area. They have also given presentations at Oakland public schools through KDFC’s Playground Pop Up program. In collaboration with Meridian Hill Pictures, they created a short documentary, titled Friction, that profiles their early educational outreach in Washington DC’s Mundo Verde Public Charter School. Their presentations regularly utilize Doug’s adventurous arrangements of Pop songs alongside excerpts from standard string quartet repertoire to help young audiences build connections to musical concepts.
Friction appears on recordings with National Sawdust Tracks, Innova Records, Albany Records, Pinna Records, and many independent releases. They released their full-length debut album, resolve, in 2018 through Bandcamp. Friction has appeared on radio stations such as NPR, KALW, KING-FM, and KUT, among others.
Friction’s video of the second movement of First Quartet by John Adams was named the #2 video of the year in 2015 by Second Inversion. John Adams shared this video on his own homepage and called it “spectacular.” Their video for Andy Akiho’s In/ Exchange, featuring Friction and Akiho, was also chosen by Second Inversion for their Top 5 videos of 2016. The video was also featured on American Public Media’s Performance Today.
Friction Quartet takes risks to enlarge the audience’s understanding of what a string quartet can be using arrangements of pop music, digital processing, percussion, amplification, movement, and additional media. Their multimedia and interdisciplinary projects have received critical acclaim. In 2017 they produced Spaced Out, an evening-length suite of music about the cosmos that utilizes surround sound electronics and includes a Friction Commission written by Jon Kulpa. The San Francisco Classical Voice called it “accessible, yet surreal.” No matter where their musical exploration takes them, they never lose sight of the string quartet’s essence– the timeless and endlessly nuanced interaction of four analog voices.
Julia Wolfe’s music is distinguished by an intense physicality and a relentless power that pushes performers to extremes and demands attention from the audience. She draws inspiration from folk, classical, and rock genres, bringing a modern sensibility to each while simultaneously tearing down the walls between them.
In the 2026-2027 season, Wolfe sees four premieres of her critically-acclaimed work Fire in my mouth, based on the garment industry in New York City at the turn of the 20th century, with a focus on the tragic 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and its aftermath.
In September, conductor Marin Alsop and the Philharmonia Orchestra give the UK premiere at the Southbank Centre, with London Voices. In November, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and conductor Brad Lubman give the Dutch premiere at the de Doelen Center in Rotterdam and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam with the National Choir. In May, Alsop brings Fire in my mouth to Cincinnati’s May Festival for the Ohio premiere with the Cincinnati Symphony and May Festival Chorus.
Five performances of Liberty Bell occur this season. In August, the Grant Park Music Festival and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero give the Chicago premiere; the Philadelphia Orchestra, with conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin give the Philadelphia and New York City premieres in October; and in November Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony give the Tennessee premiere, and Jaap Van Zweden and the Chicago Symphony give a reprise Chicago performance.
In January, conductor Teddy Abrams leads the Louisville Orchestra in the US premiere of Wolfe’s orchestral arrangement of her Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Anthracite Fields, with the Louisville Choir and Cardinal Singers. This arrangement was co-commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic, the Antwerp Symphony, and Trinity Wall Street.
Recent premieres include Liberty Bell, premiered by the Houston Symphony in September 2025 — co-commissioned by the Houston Symphony, Pittsburgh Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Grant Park Music Festival, and the Nashville Symphony. The work celebrates the iconic Liberty Bell — a major symbol of American democracy. Taking the bell’s inscription literally, “unto all the inhabitants thereof”, the proclamation speaks to all who reach for the promise of liberty.
Pretty, premiered in June 2023 by conductor Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic. Co-commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, Houston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Pretty is a raucous celebration — embracing the grit of fiddling, the relentlessness of work rhythms, and inspired by the distortion and reverberation of rock and roll.
Her Story, a 45-minute semi-staged work for orchestra and women’s chamber choir, received its world premiere in September 2022 with the Nashville Symphony, conductor Giancarlo Guerrero, the vocal ensemble Lorelei, and stage direction by Anne Kauffman. Co-commissioned by the Nashville Symphony, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, and National Symphony Orchestra, Her Story invokes the words of historical figures and the spirit of pivotal moments to pay tribute to the centuries of ongoing struggle for equal rights and representation for women in America.
The 2019 world premiere of Fire in my mouth — a large-scale work for orchestra and women’s chorus — by the New York Philharmonic with The Crossing and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City, addresses the plight of young immigrant women working in New York City’s garment industry at the turn of the century. The work received extensive acclaim — one reviewer called it “a monumental achievement in high musical drama, among the most commandingly imaginative and emotively potent works of any kind that I’ve ever experienced.” (The Nation Magazine) The work is the third in a series of compositions about the American worker: 2009’s Steel Hammer examines the folk-hero John Henry, and the 2015 Pulitzer prize-winning work, Anthracite Fields, a concert-length oratorio for chorus and instruments, draws on oral histories, interviews, speeches, and more to honor the people who persevered and endured in the Pennsylvania Anthracite coal region. Mark Swed of the LA Times wrote, Anthracite Fields “captures not only the sadness of hard lives lost…but also of the sweetness and passion of a way of daily life now also lost. The music compels without overstatement. This is a major, profound work.”
Other recent works include Forbidden Love (2019), a string quartet performed by percussionists, written for Sō Percussion and co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, the LA Philharmonic, and the Kennedy Center; Flower Power (2020), a concerto for the Bang on a Can All-Stars co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Danish National Symphony; and Oxygen (2021) for 12 flutes, commissioned by the National Flute Association — a version for twelve flute choirs (144 flutes) was premiered in August 2022 at the National Flute Convention in Chicago.
Wolfe has written a major body of work for strings, from quartets to full orchestra. Her quartets “combine the violent forward drive of rock music with an aura of minimalist serenity [using] the four instruments as a big guitar, whipping psychedelic states of mind into frenzied and ecstatic climaxes.” (The New Yorker Magazine) Wolfe’s Cruel Sister for string orchestra, inspired by a traditional English ballad, was commissioned by the Munich Chamber Orchestra and received its U.S. premiere at the Spoleto Festival. Fuel for string orchestra is a collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison, and Spinning is a multi-media work written for cellist Maya Beiser with visuals by Laurie Olinder.
Wolfe has collaborated with theater artist Anna Deavere Smith, projection/scenic designer Jeff Sugg, filmmaker Bill Morrison, visual artist Laurie Olinder, and directors Anne Bogart, François Girard, and Anne Kauffman, among others. Her music has been heard at venues throughout the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, Muziekgebouw (Netherlands), Southbank and Barbican Centres (UK), Settembre Musica (Italy), and Theatre de la Ville (France.) Wolfe’s music has been recorded on Decca Gold, Naxos, Cantaloupe Music, Teldec, Sony Classical, and Universal.
In addition to receiving the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Wolfe was a 2016 MacArthur Fellow. She received the 2015 Herb Alpert Award in Music, and was named Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year. Julia Wolfe is co-founder/co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can, and she is Artistic Director of NYU Steinhardt Music Composition.
Her music is published by Red Poppy Music and G. Ricordi & Co., New York (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by the Universal Music Publishing Group.