Pamela Z and Kronos Quartet (Kronos) collaborated to create And the Movement of the Tongue, which premiered during Kronos’s February 2013 home season at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It also was presented on August 4, 2013 at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz. The 24-minute piece incorporated sampled text, voices, and sonically and gesturally controlled interactive electronics, and celebrated the wide range of speaking accents and dialects present in the Bay Area and beyond.
The composer conducted extensive interviews to gather voices of many Bay Area residents (including members of Kronos) as well as voices encountered in her travels. She then incorporated text fragments from those interviews into the music. The artists took advantage of their close proximity to one another in a work with a distinctly Bay Area focus.
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who has worked for more than three decades primarily in voice, live electronic processing, sampling technology, and video. She’s created solo works combining experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, digital processing, and MIDI controllers.
Kronos was formed in 1973 in Seattle by violinist David Harrington and has been based in San Francisco since 1976. It is committed to mentoring emerging musicians and composers and to creating, performing, and recording new works—expanding the range and context of the string quartet.
Photo: Pamela Z performing at TEDx Stanford, May 2012