Trey Spruance is best known for his creation and production of Secret Chiefs 3 and Mr Bungle. Recently however he has composed a piece for the Kronos Quartet.
Commissioned for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, where they are commissioning a library of fifty works designed to guide young amateur and early-career professional string quartets in developing and honing the skills required for the performance of 21st-century repertoire. Each of the fifty works will be an artistically complete composition that will be premiered by Kronos with the entire Fifty for the Future body of work becoming a core component of its own repertoire over five performance seasons (2015/2016 through 2019/2020).
This is what he has to say about it:
“Séraphîta sets its roots in the work of three Eranos-era colleagues: Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, and Gershom Scholem. The quartet is a meditation on a specific complex of works bound together by the common interest of these three colleagues, and its raison d’être is in the overarching theme common to all the works. Concrete historical links and associations exist between all of the elements drawn together by the piece, and these give the impression of a very specific inter-textual hermeneutic going on behind the scenes. Due to the broad aperture required, things of this nature resist quick unveiling in open and direct language, so perhaps the musical means of approaching the subject is all the more apropos.”
You can find out more here.
“I listened to a lot of Slayer, you know death metal stuff, watch Trey Spruance talk about his formative musical influences:
