Extending String Quartet: Island Suite Solem Quartet + Ayanna Witter-Johnson

Songwriter, composer, pianist and cellist Ayanna Witter-Johnson was inspired by Jamaican folk song and tells the story of her ancestors with her Island Suite for the Solem Quartet. Nearly a century before her, Bartók was also concerned with folk music, that from Eastern Europe. And again a hundred years earlier, Beethoven transcended time in his Grosse Fuge; music that – as Stravinsky said – will always sound contemporary.