Eighth Blackbird & Kronos Quartet
Biography Eighth Blackbird & Kronos Quartet
eighth blackbird
hailed as “one of the smartest, most dynamic ensembles on the planet” (Chicago Tribune), began in 1996 as a group of six entrepreneurial Oberlin Conservatory students and continues today under the leadership of founding members Lisa Kaplan (executive director) and Matthew Duvall (artistic director).
Eighth Blackbird has won four Grammy Awards for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance over its 25-year history and has become “a brand-name defined by adventure, vibrancy and quality” (Detroit Free Press). It has commissioned and premiered hundreds of works by established and emerging composers, including Steve Reich’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Double Sextet and works by Andy Akiho, Viet Cuong, Bryce Dessner, Jennifer Higdon, Amy Beth Kirsten, David Lang, Nico Muhly, Carlos Sanchez-Guittierez, Julia Wolfe, Xuan and Pamela Z. Through performances in its Chicago home base and at venues across the U.S. and around the world, Eighth Blackbird has brought innovative presentations of works by living composers to tens of thousands of music lovers.
The ensemble’s extensive recording history, primarily with Chicago’s Cedille Records, encompasses more than a dozen acclaimed albums. Its most recent release, Singing in the Dead of Night, written for Eighth Blackbird by Michael Gordon and Pulitzer Prize winners David Lang and Julia Wolfe, was released on Cedille Records in 2020 and was described by Cleveland Classical as “propulsive, chaotic, and remarkably poignant.” 2019’s When We Are Inhuman (7d03d/Secretly Canadian), was a collaboration with The National’s Bryce Dessner and Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy) that features new arrangements by Lisa Kaplan, who also co-produced the album with Dessner. Other collaborations with some of today’s most well-regarded artists include heralded performers such as Dawn Upshaw and Jeremy Denk, seminal composers such as Philip Glass and Nico Muhly, and genre-fluid composers and performers Dessner, Oldham, Gustavo Santaolalla, Pamela Z, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, My Brightest Diamond frontwoman Shara Nova, and Iarla Ó Lionáird of The Gloaming.
In addition to its Grammy Awards, Eighth Blackbird’s many honors include winning the 1998 Concert Artists Guild Competition; pioneering a year-long residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art—Chicago in 2016, during which the ensemble served as a living installation with open rehearsals, performances, guest artists, and public talks; receiving the prestigious MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions and Chamber Music America’s inaugural Visionary Award; and being named Musical America’s 2017 Ensemble of the Year.
The members of Eighth Blackbird value their roles as curators, educators, and mentors. The ensemble was named music director of the 2009 Ojai Music Festival, has held long-term residencies at the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of Chicago, and the University of Richmond. In 2017 and 2018, Eighth Blackbird led its boldest initiative yet, the Blackbird Creative Laboratory, an inclusive, two-week summer workshop and performance festival for performers and composers in Ojai, California. During the 2018–19 season, some of the Lab’s network of 60 alumni presented regional events and side-by-side concerts across the U.S. and in Melbourne, Australia with members of Eighth Blackbird. After a hiatus since 2018, the Lab will return in 2023. In the 2020-2021 season, Eighth Blackbird introduced its latest series, the Chicago Artists Workshop (CAW). Initially conceived with the purpose of creating work for artists during a time when the performance industry was enormously threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic, CAW continues as a series defined by its extraordinary caliber and creativity rather than by genre or discipline. Past guest artists include performance poet J. Ivy, tenor Karim Sulayman, genre-bending trio Chaos Hands, soul singer Tarrey Torae, and composer Ayanna Woods. During the summer of 2021, Eighth Blackbird and new media artist and filmmaker Xuan collaborated to create the light of the dark, which features music by renowned composer and Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon, written for and recorded by the ensemble, as the inspiration for projections by Xuan. In 2022, Eighth Blackbird will give the world premiere of Vital Sines, a new work for sextet and the U.S. Navy Band by Creative Lab alum, Viet Cuong.
The name “Eighth Blackbird” derives from the eighth stanza of Wallace Stevens’s evocative, imagistic poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: “I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know.”
