Terry Riley is famous in music history for writing In C, one of the most joyous of the seminal works of minimalism. In their upcoming concert, a look back at 20th-century writing for string quartet, the Left Coast Ensemble will go to the dominant, Riley's G Song, originally commissioned by the Kronos Quartet.
Also on the program — besides Bartók, whose contribution to the string quartet in the past century could not be ignored — is a premiere by Carl Schimmel, a young composer whose music shows a lot of humor and wit, as well as invention. (I'd love to hear Schimmel's percussion piece Serving Size: Four Bunnies, but apparently he was on his best behavior for this commission from LCCE.)