Why "Extradition"?

When contemplating the start of this series in early 2016, I bandied around a lot of names, but kept coming back to Extradition, a word seemingly untetherable from criminal law and jurisdictional borders. What I liked was the word itself, though, in all its constituent parts. I liked that it included "ex," which is very close to "exp" for "experimental." I liked that it included the word "tradition," since I intended the series to mix both new compositions and pieces from the 20th-century experimental tradition. I also liked the original Latin, where extradition combines "ex" (out) plus "traditionem" (a delivering up, or handing over), because that’s exactly what I wanted the series to do: deliver up the out – taking challenging, boundary-pushing compositions and delivering them to audiences in a setting that’s both formal and intimate, academic and community-based.

The more I think about extradition, the more meanings I find in the word – including the fact that as a series, we're always crossing genre borders to recruit players, drawing (so far) from the classical, jazz, electronic, improvised, and traditional music communities of the Pacific Northwest.

Words are malleable. We're making extradition our own.