The JACK Quartet brings a passion for new music to the Barns of Wolf Trap, where it and clarinetist Derek Bermel will perform the world premiere of Bermel’s “A Short History of the Universe,” a Wolf Trap commission. Also on the program are the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in B minor and Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 2.

As artist in residence at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Bermel became intrigued by famous theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed’s cosmological narrative, “A Short History of the Universe,” so he set about expressing the depictions and diagrams of gravity in musical terms.