The West Coast’s first reed quintet has officially been at it for 10 years! Come celebrate a decade of contemporary music mayhem with us and some of our favorite Bay Area composer/performers, including Theresa Wong, Jordan Glenn, Mario Godoy, and Zachary James Watkins.
This casual program will feature favorites from our repertoire, collaborative performances with special guests, and the premiere of Watkins’ "Treatment V."
Tickets are only $10. If you're moved to slide up the sliding scale, you'll be helping us continue to commission new works and champion local creativity. Many thanks!
Splinter Reeds is: Kyle Bruckmann, oboe | Bill Kalinkos, clarinet | Nicki Roman, saxophone | Jeff Anderle, bass clarinet | Dana Jessen, bassoon
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Splinter Reeds formed in 2013 with the coming together of five colleagues highly active in multiple facets of the New Music scene throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and internationally. The sum of their wide ranges of experience – in settings including free improvisation, electronic music, pop, punk, and metal as well as classical – has enabled them to rapidly zero in on a distinct aesthetic identity. Distinguishing themselves amongst even the relatively small number of professional reed quintets currently active worldwide, the ensemble is explicitly dedicated to cutting-edge composition and expanding the existing reed quintet repertoire through the collaborative development of new works by emerging and established composers.
As a relatively new chamber music genre, the reed quintet is an evolutionary detour from the traditional woodwind quintet with the advantages of a more closely related instrument family. Splinter Reeds has explored the genre's expansive possibilities in close work with such composers as Amadeus Regucera, Eric Wubbels, Sky Macklay, Paula Matthusen, Marc Mellits, Michael Gordon, Theresa Wong and Ken Ueno, while presenting North American premieres by European-based composers Dai Fujikura, Matthew Shlomowitz, and Yannis Kyriakides, among others.
Notable performances have included appearances at Time:Spans (NY), Music Current (Dublin, Ireland), Vancouver New Music, Frequency Series at Chicago's Constellation, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archives, SF Music Day, Festival of New American Music (Sacramento), Blue Sage Center for the Arts (Paonia, CO), and Indexical (Santa Cruz), as well as numerous academic institutions across the country.
Splinter Reeds’ “impressive” (Steve Smith, The New Yorker) album Hypothetical Islands (2019) was released on New Focus Recordings; that and their debut album, Got Stung (2015), feature exclusively commissions and premiere recordings. The ensemble is fiscally sponsored through InterMusic SF, and has received grant awards from Chamber Music America, New Music USA, the Alice M. Ditson Fund at Columbia University, the Copland Fund, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s USArtists International, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and Intermusic SF’s Musical Grant Program.