String Quartet No. 1: Skeleton Leaves
JACK Quartet
Mexico City
Festival Vertice, UNAM
Sala Covarrubias
(c)2018 Cristina García Islas

Skeleton Leaves String Quartet No.1. (JACK quartet)

"I arrived in Mexico city and was whisked off to a concert at El Colegio Nacional. It was the spanish quartet of 4 saxophones Sigma Project playing the world premiere of Alberto Posadas’s new three piece cycle 'Poética del Laberinto'. This was wonderful opportunity to catch up, with the magnificently accurate, inventive and awe inspiring performance by the spaniards. I thought this sort of precision could come only from a quartet of strings". 
Irvine Arditti (june, 2017)

SIGMA PROJECT www.sigmaproject.es is the New Saxophone in Europe, is more than a saxophone quartet. It is the realization of a wish came true, an essential vehicle for instrumental music in the 21st century. Just as the string quartet was the instrument par excellence for art music in past centuries, SIGMA Project claims this role in the 21st century for the saxophone quartet.
During its already long career, SIGMA Project has performed more than 150 concerts across half the world – not only in auditoriums in the United States, Argentina (Teatro Colón), Mexico (Palacio de Bellas Artes), Chile, Germany, Scotland, France, Italy, Poland and Romania but also in festivals such as the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato, the Hannöversche Gessellschaf für Neue Musik, the Gare du Nord in Basel, the ENSEMS in Valencia, the Donostia-San Sebastían Musical Fortnight, the Música(s) Contemporánea(s) in the Teatro Central of Seville, the Temporadas of the CNDM, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Operadhoy-Musicadhoy in Madrid, among others.
SIGMA Project has its own record label, Sigmarecords, and has edited the CD Utopías: New Music for Saxophone Quartet and the DVD The Music for saxophone by Félix Ibarrondo. Additionally, they have recorded for WERGO (Alberto Posadas's 'Poetics of the Labyrinth' cycle), he BBVA Foundation (José Manuel López López and Gerardo Gombau monographs), Orpheus Classical (María Eugenia Luc monograph), Casa Velázquez-Académie de France in Madrid (Víctor Ibarra monograph) and, invited by the German Foundation Ernst Von Siemens Musikstiftung and with the label Col Legno, the Simone Movio monograph.
SIGMA Project’s work is supported by the Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música, the Etxepare Basque Institute of the Basque Government and the German Foundation Ernst Von Siemens Musikstiftung.

Julie Herndon is a composer, performer, and sound artist exploring the body’s relationship to sound.  

Her electroacoustic work has been described as “truly brilliant” (Kulturpunkt), “like a signal from another world” (Tages-Anzeiger), and “blended to inhabit a surprisingly expressive space” (SFCV). Her compositions and installations have been presented at MATA Festival and National Sawdust in New York, Artistry Space in Singapore, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca (MACO) in Mexico, Music Biennale Zagreb (MBZ), Sogar Theater in Zurich, and by Forest Collective in Australia. Recent collaborations include the Decoder Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, and Kukuruz Quartet. 

Julie is the recipient of the Elisabeth Crothers Award for Music Composition, American Composers Forum Bay Area Residency, National Sawdust New Works Commission, Chamber Music America Commissioning Grant, New Music America Creator Fund, and Georges Lurcy Fellowship. As an artist in residence, she has collaborated with institutions such as the Cité Internationale des Arts, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Center for Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at Berkeley, Djerassi, and I-Park artist residency programs.

Julie is currently Assistant Professor of Music Technology and Composition at California Polytechnic State University. She holds a DMA from Stanford University, and her writing, “Embodied Composition: Composing the Body with Sound” can be found in Leonardo with MIT Press.

As a Mexican and Canadian composer, winner of the Beethoven's Legacy composition competition of the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal and Yannick Nézet-Séguin in 2020, she has a very varied catalog, ranging from orchestral repertoire to solo music. The duality between darkness and light is very present in her work as it is in ancient Mexican Philosophy. Also, the theme of legacy, ritual, mysticism and the force of nature are essential in her music. Furthermore, she likes to create rich colored atmospheres using noisy sonorities or very lyrical melodies. García Islas finds interesting the use of both to create a balance between strength and lyricism.