JACK Quartet to Premiere Natacha Diels' 'Beautiful Trouble' At Penn Live Arts

The JACK Quartet will make its Penn Live Arts debut in the world premiere of composer Natacha Diels' Beautiful Trouble on Friday, February 2, 2024 at 8:00pm. Based on a five-part video series for choreographed string quartet, this concert-length production merges experimental music, video and theatre to create a sensory experience that considers our ability and desire to consume media. Diels, an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, created the work to examine a moment in time through the power of abstract narrative and music, both heard and seen.

The production is an anthology for instruments, electronics, and video, joining the worlds of experimental chamber music and film by JACK and Diels. The overarching intent is to create a work that understands life for a brief moment in time through the power of abstract narrative and music, both heard and seen.

Throughout each piece, performers inhabit physical, sonic, and visual realms of performance to tell dream-like stories about a human's perception of time. The five-act live performance describes a particular mini plot in the style of television's The Twilight Zone or Robert Ashley's TV opera Perfect Lives. Bringing together the power of live performance with the hypnosis of the screen to confuse the line between hyper-reality and fiction, and between concrete and clouds, the work shares equally in experimental music, video, and theater to create a sensory experience that is relevant and knowable to the current typical audience-goer's ability and desire to consume media.

Representative of the New Discipline, a practice of contemporary art influenced by Fluxus, Dada, the Uncanny Valley, and the social impact of ubiquitous cameras, Beautiful Trouble's focus is on simplicity and beauty. The project exists in two forms- as a live performance, and as a series of short films designed with the purpose of examining a moment in time using the power of abstract narrative and music.

Watch the Music Video for Beautiful Trouble - Episode 1, On Monday

Watch the Music Video for Beautiful Trouble - Episode 2, Nightmare for JACK (a ballet)

Beautiful Trouble was developed with support from Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, TIME:SPANS, The Barlow Foundation, and the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation.

Program Information
Friday, February 2, 2024 at 8:00pm
Natacha Diels' Beautiful Trouble
Penn Live Arts | Philadelphia, PA
Tickets: $42
Link: https://pennlivearts.org/event/jackquartet

Program:
Natacha Diels - Beautiful Trouble (2023) [World Premiere]

More About JACK Quartet

Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK was founded in 2005 and operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of 20th and 21st century string quartet music. Through intimate, longstanding relationships with many of today's most creative voices, the quartet has a prolific commissioning and recording catalog and has been nominated for three GRAMMY Awards and is the 2024 recipient of Chamber Music America's Michael Jaffee Visionary Award.

Through its successful nonprofit model, the quartet has both self-commissioned and been commissioned to create hundreds of new works. The world's top composers choose JACK because of its singular dedication to innovation and experimentation, realized through the invisible labor of extensive studio time and the support of full-time leadership staff and a Board of Directors.

Committed to helping dismantle outmoded classical music pipelines for composers, JACK's all-access initiative JACK Studio funds collaborations with a selection of artists each year, who receive money, workshop time, mentorship, and resources to develop new works for string quartet. JACK receives more than 500 applications each season, and selects up to 15 composers or artists. More than 40 composers have worked with JACK through JACK Studio thus far.

Among many honors, JACK has earned an Avery Fisher Career Grant and Fromm Music Foundation Prize; been selected as Musical America's 2018 "Ensemble of the Year; and received Lincoln Center's Martin E. Segal Award, New Music USA's Trailblazer Award, and the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming.

JACK has been nominated for three GRAMMY Awards, the most recent being their albums of music by John Luther Adams - nominated in the 2022 and 2023 Best Ensemble Performance category. Other albums include music by Helmut Lachenmann, Catherine Lamb, Du Yun, Elliott Sharp, Zosha di Castri, Iannis Xenakis, and an upcoming release of the complete quartets of Elliott Carter.

The JACK Quartet makes its home in New York City, where it is the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music at The New School. They also teach each summer at New Music on the Point in Vermont and at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. JACK has long-standing relationships with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall and spring, as well as with the Lucerne Festival Academy, of which the four members are all alumni. Learn more at www.jackquartet.com.

About Natacha Diels

Natacha Diels' work combines choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes Papillon and the Dancing Cranes, for construction cranes and giant butterfly (Borealis Festival 2018, Dear Antwerp 2021), a collaborative work with Ensemble Pamplemousse (Darmstadt 2021), a solo project entitled Somewhere Beautiful (Klangspuren 2022, Music Current, SwoonFest, nyMusikk, Kongsberg Jazz Festival 2023) and an ongoing 6-part TV-style miniseries with the JACK quartet (TIME:SPANS, Banff Centre for the Arts, Barlow Foundation, Penn Live Arts). With a focus on collage, collaboration, and the ritual of life as art, Natacha's compositions have been described as "a fairy tale for a fractured world" (Music We Care About) and "the liveliest music of the evening" (LA Review of Books).

Natacha is a founding member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003). Pamplemousse specializes in unique aspects of new music composition, from complex virtuosic instrumental performance to experimental theatre to electronic and robotic performance. Notable commissions include those from the Borealis Festival for Papillon and the Dancing Cranes; the Fromm Foundation for Talea Ensemble (2022); Darmstadt International Summer Institute (2021); the Barlow Foundation for Episode 4 of Beautiful Trouble, for JACK quartet (2022); the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the green Umbrella Series [Laughing to Forget] (2018); and Deustchland Radio Kultur in Berlin for Ensemble Adapter [Sad Music for Lonely People] (2019). Natacha's work has been performed globally by Ensemble Adapter, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Nadar Ensemble, hand werk, Ensemble Decoder, TAK Ensemble, Quatuor Impact, JACK Quartet; and soloists Jay Campbell, Laura Cocks, Samuel Favre, Ross Karre, Rane Moore, and Charlotte Mundy, among others. She has also created several short films and music videos which have been screened in Denmark, NYC, Chicago, Budapest, and Hungary. Natacha holds degrees in performance, digital media, and composition from New York University and Columbia University.

Natacha holds degrees in performance, digital media, and composition from New York University and Columbia University. Learn more at http://natachadiels.com/.

About Penn Live Arts

Penn Live Arts (PLA), headquartered at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, is the leading presenter of innovative and transformative performing arts experiences in Philadelphia. A vital resource for the performing arts at the University of Pennsylvania, PLA is an artistic crossroads joining Penn and the greater Philadelphia region through world-class music, dance, theatre, and film on campus and at venues throughout the city, serving an annual audience of over 80,000. Penn Live Arts emphasizes artistic and intellectual excellence and diversity in its offerings; prioritizes broad inclusiveness in the artists, audiences and groups it serves; and expands arts access by actively engaging a wide range of audiences and inclusive communities from campus, the West Philadelphia neighborhood and the surrounding region. PennLiveArts.org.

*Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez

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