Kronos Quartet has added four new dates to its upcoming tour schedule that will keep the group close to home but, as ever, still exploring music from a wide range of sources. Next week, Kronos will give four concerts over four nights—February 24, 25, 26, and 27—at San Francisco's Z Space @ Artaud. Each performance will offer a different program, each featuring Jon Rose's Music from 4 Fences, along with a work by Terry Riley, pieces by composers from the Kronos: Under 30 Project, and other commissioned works.

Premiered at the Sydney Opera House in June 2009, Music from 4 Fences features Kronos performing on four specially-built fences to create an eclectic aural environment, accompanied by a visual design by Willie Williams, U2’s long time tour designer and director.

About Music from 4 Fences, composer Jon Rose writes, “when I started to play concerts on fences in 1983, I saw fences purely in terms of sonic material. However, the metaphorical significance of fence music soon became evident. To find music in such inherently ugly and unlikely artifacts can be a powerful experience. Fence music often encapsulates the vastness of border country; it is the music of distance. The fence also challenges our perceptions of what a musical instrument can be.”

Kronos' founder and artistic director David Harrington adds, "the variety of sounds and range of musical color that a bass bow can get out of a barbed wire fence, combined with the intensity and expressiveness of those sounds made me determined that Kronos needed to learn to play this instrument, and that we had to bring it into our concerts. The idea that musicians can turn objects of confinement, detainment and violence into musical instruments has inspired me since I first heard Jon’s work. Through our concerts, Kronos attempts to make statements about our world, and that we are surrounded by fences seems to be an essential part of the time we live in. There might be a way to transform the nature of fences, by bowing them. We will try.”

Each concert also features a work by one of the four young composers—Alexandra du Bois, Felipe Pérez Santiago, Dan Visconti, and Aviya Kopelman—commissioned by Kronos' Under 30 Project, a commissioning program developed to cultivate strong connections and lasting artistic relationships with the next creative generation. Also on the program are works by Terry Riley, Damon Albarn, John Zorn, Bryce Dessner, and Clint Mansell. (Mansell is well known for his work with Kronos on the score for the film Requiem for a Dream, which was recently featured in the Vancouver Winter Olympics figure skating short program from Canadian duo Jessica Dube and Bryce Davison, who placed sixth in the competition. You can watch their performance at nbcolympics.com.)

For more information on next week's programs in San Francisco and other upcoming tour dates, including a week of performance at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall next month, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.