Claire Chase is “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” according to The New York Times, and “a rare combination of grace and guts” (Wall Street Journal). Density 2036 is her ambitious and far-reaching 24-year project to create a new body of flute repertory leading up to the 100th anniversary of composer Edgard Varese’s seminal 1936 flute solo, Density 21.5. Her San Francisco Performances debut recital program reimagines music for solo flute.

The Day of Listening is a welcoming, family friendly contemporary, new music experience that blurs the lines between listening, learning, and performing. Led by musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator Claire Chase, the Day of Listening celebrates Pauline Oliveros, the visionary composer and performer known for her concept of Deep Listening. Community members of all ages are invited to engage with several of Oliveros’s important works composed for open instrumentation and interpretation. Dismantling any distinction between performer and audience, Chase will guide participants through some of Oliveros' best-known compositions such as “The Tuning Meditation” and “Sonic Meditations.” Attendees will have the opportunity to use Adaptive Use Musical Instruments (AUMIs), providing access for anyone of any age or ability to create musical phrases through small movement or gestures.

The Crossing with Donald Nally by Charles Grove, Claire Chase by Walter Wlodarczyk

Three-time Grammy winners for Best Choral Performance, The Crossing has been called “America’s most astonishing choir” (The New York Times). In this concert, the group’s “amazing, immaculate sound, both ethereally light and almost tangibly present” is used to stunning effect in Wang Lu’s At Which Point, an arresting and delicate setting of Forrest Gander’s Pulitzer-winning grief poems. In the New York premiere of Singsong, visionary composer Tania León sets to music the hard-edged “cricket poems” of US Poet Laureate (and fellow Pulitzer winner) Rita Dove, creating a rhythmically charged dialogue between the choir’s kaleidoscopic colors and the virtuosic flute inventions of MacArthur Fellow Claire Chase. Infinite Body—by The Crossing’s first-ever resident composer, Ayana Woods—probes a series of difficult questions and arrives at a shockingly joyful conclusion.