PLETENITSA BALKAN CHOIR
Christiane Karam, Director
SOPRANOS Steffi Jeraldo - Stockholm, Sweden
Anna Taipe — Beauvais, France
Harsitha Krishnan — Channai, India
Kristen Olssen — Boston, MA
Lyusi Simon — Moscow, Russia
MEZZO SOPRANOS Dana Protsenko — Sacramento, CA
Inna Dudukina — Novosibirsk, Russia
Sofia Lahr — Lighthouse Point, FL
ALTOS Emily Shibata Sanchez — Nagoya, Japan
Nadia Chechet — Saint Petersburg, Russia
Monserrat Guadalupe Garibav Villalobos — Guadalajara, Mexico
TENORS Natalia Karaseva — Moscow, Russia
Nikolas Metaxas — Limassol, Cyprus
Parham Haghighi — Mashhad, Iran
Santiago Miquelajauregui — Mexico City, Mexico

Why “World"” Strings?

Berklee World Strings champions music from all over the world; there are so many musical tradi-
tions - outside of what we consider to be Classical music - in which stringed instruments play an
important role. In addition, there are countless traditions of music whose beauty and allure is so
great that we string players are eager to paint their colors with the instruments we love.

With the burgeoning of creativity in the string community combined with the diverse interests and
accomplishments of the new players, it's only natural to pool our passions in a forum for develop-
ing and showcasing new ideas, combinations and sounds.

There'’s something about the sound of strings that seems to elevate the commonplace to profun-
dity. In BWS we sometimes fight that with aggressive funky-ness, but it's also interesting to employ
strings in playing music from economies where strings were/are not an affordable option or were so
associated with the elite to render them ridiculous in folk settings. (Even if strings were available in
some cases, it’s possible the predominantly European-trained players proved so stiff at playing folk
styles that their music came off like a kind of parody.)

Berklee World Strings aims to change that. Our challenge is to not only expand the repertoire for
strings, but to acquire a flexible instrumental technique that responds to multiple languages of
music, and an ear that is sensitive to regional accents and musical dialects.

And BWS strives to be a kind of greenhouse for the Berklee community; we want to be an ensem-
ble where music is cultivated that nourishes and reflects the unique appetites, inclinations and abili-
ties of our international population, a population that in turn reflects the diversity of the city we
live in and the world at large.

While this may sound ambitious, at the heart is something simple: curiosity. As we explore and inte-
grate new sounds, traditions, rhythms and styles we are really learning new stories, and each one
opens us to perceptions and abilities that reveal new facets of ourselves. This discovery - pondering
the meaning of new stories and expanding our palette of communication as musicians - makes the
intense work we engage in a source of constant renewal.

And finally, BWS is an international consort, we are made up of musicians from all over the world.
This is not a coincidence, but an essential aspect of creating new repertoire and internalizing new
stories. Only by embracing each individual, and each heritage, does the ensemble function at its
peak. This appears easy when practiced by youth, and in fact I'm convinced that if the whole world
knew how much fun it is to be creatively engaged across cultural divides, it would never settle for
anything less.