On her portrait recording "earthing" the Berlin-based composer Clara Iannotta concentrates on the genre string quartet. Therefor she takes inspiration mostly from the idea of an underwater world and the small animals that let their luminous organs glow in the deep. The resulting music seems to be under the pressure of water masses but happens in an environment of expanded time.

Twice GRAMMY-nominated composer and performer Derek Bermel studied with Henri Dutilleux, Dutch avant-gardist Louis Andriessen, and ragtime revivalist William Bolcom. In his music, seemingly antithetical qualities – classical and vernacular, comic and serious – merge and transform each other unpredictably, their inspiration ranging from theatre (Ritornello), to gestalt psychology (Figure and Ground), to meditations on cosmology (A Short History of the Universe). Thracian Sketches explores and reimagines Bulgarian folk music, while the Violin Etudes distill Bermel’s intellectual creativity into its purest form.

If The New York Times calls you “the nation’s most important quartet,” then you must be doing something right… in the case of the JACK Quartet, they’ve established themselves as one of the leaders in new music, giving voice to countless composers, while creating a new body of works that prove classical music has a future far beyond powdered wigs and dusty scores.

Composer John Luther Adams is one of today’s most original voices, often finding a common ground between nature and music, as in his deftly sculpted, Pulitzer Prize-winning orchestral soundscape Become Ocean. In Everything that Rises, written for the JACK Quartet, Adams sets his four musicians on an ever-upward hour-long trajectory as they journey towards, and dissolve into, eternity. The work makes use of both complex harmonics and “just intonation,” a tuning system whose intervals are rooted in earth, corresponding with the vibrations found in everyday physical objects. The resulting sense of timelessness is both unsettling and mesmerizingly beautiful.