Kronos Quartet and Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA) will present its second-annual hometown music festival, Kronos Festival 2016: Explorer Series, at SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco, February 4–7, 2016. The festival features seven concerts over four days connecting area audiences to a wide range of musical voices and traditions from around the world. With virtuoso pipa player Wu Man as its artist-in-residence, the festival includes more than a dozen works, including four world premieres, two US premieres, four West Coast premieres, and two SF premieres.

Guest performers are David Coulter (born in the UK), Fodé Lassana Diabaté (Mali), Ritva Koistinen (Finland), Mariana Sadovska (born in Ukraine), and Vân-Ánh Võ (born in Vietnam). The San Francisco Girls Chorus and musicians from Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts join Kronos onstage to perform KPAA–commissioned works, and the festival culminates in a daytime family concert celebrating the Lunar New Year.

For more than 40 years, Kronos has explored the spectrum of human experience by engaging with countless musical cultures, and with Kronos Festival 2016: Explorer Series, the group shares some of these discoveries with Bay Area audiences. (In 2014, Nonesuch Records released a five-disc box set titled Kronos Explorer Series, which the Independent called "extraordinary," comprising five classic albums from five different parts of the world.) Kronos’ concert programs feature new and recent works by internationally-renowned contemporary composers, including Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Sahba Aminikia, Donnacha Dennehy, Philip Glass, Nicole Lizée, Karin Rehnqvist, and Aleksandra Vrebalov. In many of these works, the sounds of the string quartet blend with traditional instruments such as the West African balafon, the Indian harmonium, the Chinese pipa, the Finnish kantele, and the Vietnamese đàn Tranh.

Mariana Sadovska’s Chernobyl.The Harvest reflects on the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster in the composer’s native Ukraine, drawing on themes from traditional songs, rituals, and ceremonies to create a work of healing and renewal. Sahba Aminikia’s Sound, Only Sound Remains explores the forbidden sound of women singing in public in modern-day Iran, their recorded voices interwoven with Kronos’ sound. And Donnacha Dennehy’s One Hundred Goodbyes remembers some of the forgotten sean nós songs and Gaelic speech of his homeland. Innovative arrangements for Kronos of traditional and popular music from Sweden, India, Mexico, and other countries complement the new compositions on the programs.

True to the spirit of an inventive 21st-Century global music festival, recordings and recording devices also play a role in telling these stories, as composers draw from field recordings, archival media, and crowd-sourced audio to commune with voices spread across generations and continents. Albert Behar’s new work, Lost Wax, pays homage to Bartók’s wax cylinder field recordings of the early 20th Century, and Nicole Lizée pays tribute to a pioneer of radio sound design with The Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop [Fibre-Optic Flowers]. For his work, Sahba Aminikia asked women in Iran, through social media, to send him recordings of themselves singing into their cell phones. Donnacha Dennehy’s composition is inspired by archival field recordings, made nearly 100 years ago, of rural Irish people singing a cappella songs passed down for generations.

Kronos Festival 2016: Explorer Series also marks the Bay Area debut of KPAA’s new education program, Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire. Beginning in the 2015/16 season, Kronos’ Fifty for the Future will commission 50 new works—10 per year for five years, by 25 women (including Rhiannon Giddens) and 25 men—devoted to contemporary approaches to the quartet, and designed expressly for the training of students and emerging professionals. The first 10 composers were announced early in 2015, and the festival will feature three of these new works, by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh (world premiere), Fodé Lassana Diabaté, and Wu Man, all performed in the Bay Area for the first time.

Festival artist-in-residence Wu Man has collaborated with Kronos since 1992, most recently on the acclaimed works A Chinese Home (2009) and The Cusp of Magic (2004). She performs with Kronos in four of the festival’s concerts, including in the world premiere of Quintet for Pipa and String Quartet, a series of Michael Riesman’s arrangements of works by Philip Glass, Ravi Shankar, and Riesman. Four Chinese Paintings, Wu Man’s own new work written for Kronos’ Fifty for the Future project, also has its Bay Area premiere on the festival’s opening night.

The festival will also include a series of intimate afternoon concerts on Saturday, February 6, in the Joe Henderson Lab.

The inaugural Kronos Festival took place earlier this year, in celebration of composer Terry Riley's 80th birthday. Nonesuch Records marked the occasion with the release of the five-CD box set One Earth, One People, One Love: Kronos Plays Terry Riley.

For all the details on Kronos Festival 2016: Explorer Series, visit kronosquartet.org. For tickets, go to sfjazz.org.