The Next Festival of Emerging Artists with Kronos Quartet

Founded in 2013 by composer and conductor Peter Askim, The Next Festival of Emerging Artists is committed to advancing contemporary music and cross-disciplinary artistic creation through performance, creation, audience engagement, and the nurturing of emerging artists with a passion for 21st-century artistic creation and collaboration. Initially a one-week intensive, The Next Festival quickly expanded into a two-week festival consisting of performances, individual lessons, coaching, masterclasses, multidisciplinary collaborations, and professional recording sessions. With one week in New York’s Hudson Valley and a second in New York City, The Next Festival brings together early-career string players, composers, dancers, and choreographers from around the country and around the world.

Since its inception, The Next Festival of Emerging Artists has provided more than 250 young artists with opportunities to learn, collaborate, and launch their careers. Festival Fellows work closely with a selection of renowned artists and mentors, including GRAMMY, Pulitzer, and MacArthur winners. Previous seasons have featured some of the most prominent figures in new music today: including guest artists Yvette Young, Matt Haimovitz, Jennifer Koh, Nadia Sirota, Richard Thompson, Pamela Z, Curtis Stewart, Seth Parker Woods, and the string quartet ETHEL; as well as choreographers Sidra Bell, Christopher D’Amboise, and S. Ama Wray. The Festival has appeared at venues such as National Sawdust, Roulette, (le) poisson rouge, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance, as well as on WQXR.

Learn more at www.next-fest.org

PETER ASKIM

Artistic Director Peter Askim is a composer, conductor, and bassist and Music Director of the Raleigh Civic Symphony and Chamber Orchestra, as well as Director of Orchestral Activities at North Carolina State University. Championing the music of our time, he has premiered works by Richard Danielpour, Nico Muhly, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Christopher Theofanidis, and collaborated with the Miró String Quartet, Matt Haimovitz, Vijay Iyer, Jeffrey Zeigler, Nadia Sirota, and Sō Percussion. The Strad has called him a “Modern Master” of composition, and his commissions and performances span soloists and groups from the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the Honolulu Symphony, Cantus Ansambl Zagreb, the American Viola Society, ETHEL, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, flutist/conductor Ransom Wilson, and violinist Timothy Fain.

Askim is the founder and Artistic Director of The Next Festival of Emerging Artists, a summer festival dedicated to cultivating the next generation of performers and composers. Focusing on the music of living composers, the festival artists frequently perform at World Premieres and collaborate closely with prominent composers on performances of their works. Led by Mr. Askim, since its inception in 2013 the Next Festival has received numerous grants and awards for performances of American music, adventurous programming, and educational outreach. In conjunction with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis and Tony-nominated choreographer Christopher D’Amboise, Mr. Askim founded the Next Festival Composer and Composer/Choreographer workshops, connecting early-career performers, composers, and choreographers in an innovative and highly collaborative laboratory for the creation of new works.

KRONOS QUARTET

David Harrington, violin
Gabriela Díaz, violin
Ayane Kozasa, viola
Paul Wiancko, cello

For 50 years, San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet has reimagined what the string quartet experience can be. One of the most celebrated and influential groups of our era, Kronos has given thousands of concerts worldwide, released more than 70 recordings, and collaborated with many of the world’s most accomplished composers and performers across many genres. Kronos has received more than 40 awards, including three Grammys and the Polar Music, Avery Fisher, and Edison Klassiek Oeuvre Prizes. Through its nonprofit organization, Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA), Kronos has commissioned more than 1,100 works and arrangements for quartet. KPAA also manages Kronos’ concert tours, local performances, recordings, and education programs, and produces an annual Kronos Festival in San Francisco.

In its most ambitious commissioning effort to date, KPAA has recently completed Kronos Fifty for the Future. Through this initiative, Kronos has commissioned—and distributed online for free—50 new works for string quartet designed for students and emerging professionals, written by composers from around the world.

PASCAL LE BOEUF

Described as “sleek, new” and “hyper-fluent” by the New York Times, Pascal Le Boeuf is a GRAMMY-award winning composer, jazz pianist, and electronic artist whose works range from modern improvised music to hybridizing notation-based chamber music with production-based technology.

Recent compositions include “Imprints” for Alarm Will Sound; “Playground” commissioned by Orchestra of St. Lukes; “Triple Concerto” for violin, percussion duo and orchestra featuring Barbora Kolářová and Arx Duo; “I Am Not A Number” commissioned by New World Symphony; and “Out of the Gate” commissioned and premiered by Nu Deco Ensemble.

Recent commercial recordings and videos include collaborations with Akropolis Reed Quintet & Christian Euman, Tasha Warren & Dave Eggar, Friction Quartet, JACK Quartet, Hub New Music, Todd Reynolds, Sara Caswell, Jessica Meyer, Nick Photinos, Four/Ten Media, Bec Plexus featuring Ian Chang (of Son Lux), Dayna Stephens, Allan Harris, Linda Oh, Justin Brown, and the Le Boeuf Brothers Quintet (co-led by Remy Le Boeuf) praised by the New Yorker for “clearing their own path, mixing the solid swing of the jazz tradition with hip-hop, indie rock, and the complex techniques of classical modernism”.

As a keyboardist, Pascal has played as support for D’Angelo’s Black Messiah tour and Clean Bandit’s Rather Be tour with Australian pop artist Meg Mac. He actively performs with Le Boeuf Brothers, Jessie Montgomery’s Everything Band, vocalist/technologist Jamie Lidell, saxophonist Jeff Coffin, jazz vocalist Allan Harris, and his piano trio “Pascal’s Triangle“.

Pascal’s most recent awards include 2025 GRAMMY for “Best Instrumental Composition”, a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Copland House Residency Award, and various Independent Music Awards in “Jazz”, “Eclectic”, “Electronica” and “Music Video” categories. Pascal has  received commissions and grants from NEA, New World Symphony, Nu Deco Ensemble, the Lake George Music Festival, Lincoln Center Stage, Chamber Music America, New Music USA, and ASCAP. He composed music for the 2008 Emmy Award-winning movie King Lines, and won first place in the 2008 International Songwriting Competition.

Pascal is currently an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Music and Technology at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music, and a Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellow and Ph.D. candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University.

JAN RADZYNSKY

Composer Jan Radzynsky was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1950. Radzynski immigrated to Israel in 1969 and studied at the Tel Aviv Rubin Academy of Music with Leon *Schidlowsky. From 1977 he continued his studies at Yale University in the U.S. with Krzysztof Penderecki and Jacob Druckman and received his doctorate in 1984. He settled in the U.S.

Radzynski’s music is characterized by the utilization of contemporary techniques in contexts rich of stylistic elements from the past. It is carried by expressive melodies of long chromatic lines and features rich textures and carefully composed structures, paying special attention to the links and interrelations between movements of a single work. Radzynski’s virtuoso writing offers technical challenges to the performing musicians and is often witty and full of verve. By embedding East European-Jewish (cantorial) and Middle-Eastern (heterophonic) musical elements in compositions committed to the past masters, Radzynski aims at a musical language timeless and contemporary alike, culturally unique and universal.

His works have been performed by such orchestras as the Cleveland, Columbus, New Haven Symphony, the Mexico National, the West German and the Saarländische Radio Symphony Orchestras, the Krakow Philharmonic, the Russian Federal, the Moscow Bolshoi Theater Chamber Orchestra; the Israel Philharmonic, Jerusalem and Haifa Symphony and Israel Chamber Orchestras and Israel Sinfonietta. He was composition professor at Yale between 1981 and 1994 and was professor at the Ohio State University in Columbus between 1994 and 2021.

Radzynski’s list of compositions include String Quartet (1977); Kaddish for the Victims of the Holocaust for four amplified flutes, six percussion players, piano and strings (1979); Homage to Itzik Manger for mixed ensemble of nine players (1979); Canto for piano (1981); Psalms for viola and eight celli (1983); Take Five, brass quintet (1984); Hebrew Melodies, piano quintet; Violin/Viola Sonata (1985); David – Symphony in One Movement (1987); Encounters for chamber ensemble (1988); Viola Concerto (1990); Time’s Other Beat for symphony orchestra (1990); Cello Concerto (1990–92); Serenade, Wind Quintet; String Trio (1995); Fanfare; Shirat Ma’ayan for mezzo-soprano, tenor and orchestra (1997); Summer Charms Rag for violin and piano (1998); Personal Verses for violin and piano (1999); Serenade for Strings (2000); Concert Duos for clarinet and cello (2004).

Among the many awards Radzynski received are the ASCAP Standard Awards (1989 and 1997), the Mellon Fellowship (1985), the Research and Creative Work Grant of the Rothschild Foundation (1995), and the Distinguished Scholar Award given by the Ohio State University (1996). In 1983 he was in residence at the Foundation Artists’ House in Boswil, Switzerland.

The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Alice P. Ditson Fund at Columbia University, the BMI Foundation, New Music USA, The Williamson Foundation, The Heineman Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts