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T o celebrate William Bolcom's seemingly endless sonic curiosity, there could hardly be a more fittingly named vehicle than the All Terrain String Festival: Bolcom 4 x 4. In this series of four programs featuring music for string quartet, each concert will highlight one distinctive work by the composer, a modern master with a virtually unparalleled ability to encompass a vast variety of musical traditions with unflagging expertise and originality. Fitting itself to Bolcom's ability to veer off the road of classical tradition while upholding his elastic yet exacting technique, the festival will feature ensembles that follow suit: the Harlem Quartet, the Chiara String Quartet, the Arditti Quartet, and the Shanghai Quartet. "The quartet world is a lot more diverse than people really understand," says Peak Performances founder and executive producer Jedediah Wheeler. "Each group has a specialty it can offer," says Nicholas Tzavaras, cellist of the Shanghai Quartet, which has been in residence with Peak Performances and Montclair State University for 10 years. " It makes this a really unique festival of string quartets for our audiences," he adds. " Everything is done with the audience in mind, to open up their musical palettes to things they are not familiar with, whether it's playing by memory or improvised jazz tunes or cutting-edge contemporary music." Bolcom's music is part of what will be new to most audiences; the festival coincides with the recent publication of six of his early string quartets by Edward B. Marks Music Company and includes the world premiere of his twelfth. While his string quartets are not his best-known works, they form a musical autobiography, spanning Bolcom's career from age 11 to 78. "I tend to want to ask performers to do what I know I can't do," Bolcom says. "If I had my druthers, I would be a string quartet. I'd be an 8-armed, 4-playered entity." Bolcom traces his love of quartets back to the Juilliard Quartet's visit to his hometown of Seattle in 1949 when he was 11 years old, "probably the first time [Alban] Berg's Lyric Suite was played west of the Mississippi." Bartók and Hindemith were early influences, and he went on to study with 20th- century luminaries including Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. Yet relatively early in his career, Bolcom began to stray from the stark, non-tonal traditions of the day. In 1970, he published the first of a collection of ragtime-style pieces. "It was a way to liberate myself from the kind of chromatic style we were expected to write if we were writing up-to-the- minute music," he says. At the festival, the Harlem Quartet will play a selection of Bolcom's rags, arranged for string quartet, alongside Latin and jazz standards and a Mozart work. The quartet is devoted to such diverse programs in order to engage new audiences, and its 2013 collaboration with Chick Corea won a Grammy Award. The liberating effect ragtime had for Bolcom may be similar for the Harlem Quartet musicians—and for listeners. Of its non-classical programming, Ilmar Gavilán of the Harlem Quartet says, "It's very therapeutic, because we let loose, and often we apply the William Bolcom Embracing All Terrain B Y R O N N I R E I C H 42 www.peakperfs.org Shanghai Quartet Photo: Wu-Jun Ji

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