Joan Jeanrenaud

Joan Jeanrenaud (née Dutcher; born January 25, 1956) is an American cellist. A native of Memphis, Tennessee, she played with the Kronos Quartet from 1978 until 1999, when, after a sabbatical, she left to pursue a solo career and collaborations with other artists, in part due to being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

She has staged and recorded solo performance pieces, playing the cello in tandem with electronic instruments. Her first solo album, Metamorphosis, was described by Greg Cahill in Strings as “visceral, hypnotic, and often compelling.”Jeanrenaud plays a Deconet, ca. 1750. A copy of the cello carved out of ice was used in her four-hour performance piece Ice Cello, a 2004 adaptation of Charlotte Moorman’s Ice Music for London.In 2008, her album Strange Toys (Talking House Records, 2008) was nominated for a Grammy Award. The album was produced by PC Muñoz, with whom Jeanrenaud later collaborated on another album, Pop-Pop (Deconet Records, 2010), which she called “a pop record that wasn’t actually pop.”She also has performed in collaborations with Larry Ochs’ group Kihnoua at San Francisco’s De Young Museum (2008).She has performed in many film scores by composer William Susman and appears on the soundtrack CDs for Oil on Ice (2005), Fate of the Lhapa (2007) and Music for Moving Pictures (2009).

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