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Doors Open!
Festival Concert 1
August 15, 2021
Sunday
One-hour concert at Lincoln Theater
4:00 pm – Socially distanced seating with limited capacity; masks required. Tickets must be purchased in advance.
7:30 pm - General admission / open seating; masks requested. Tickets available in advance or at the door.
PROGRAM
Johann Sebastian Bach Invention No. 4 in D minor and Invention No. 8 in F major
Jessie Montgomery Duo for Violin and Cello
Dawn Avery Decolonization
Nina C. Young There had been signs, surely
Lester St. Louis Ultraviolet, efflorescent
Angélica Negrón Cooper and Emma
Darian Donovan Thomas Inner Child (SBC commission and world premiere)
Maurice Ravel Sonata for Violin and Cello
Jennifer Koh, violin; Wilhelmina Smith, cello
Artists
Jennifer Koh, violin
Wilhelmina Smith, cello
Please note: All ticket sales are nonexchangeable and nonrefundable.
This concert is dedicated to the memory of Phoebe Nichols.
Pre-Concert Lecture by Mark Mandarano:
PROGRAM NOTES
by Mark Mandarano
The arts have long been a forum for the dialogue between cultures and ideas. Embracing new trends, pioneering new avenues, borrowing, stealing, appropriating the building blocks of other individuals and other cultures, are all part of what has established tradition, and will forever be what renews it and steers it in promising directions. In crossing these boundaries, the whole of music is rewired and smelted into a stronger, more tensile alloy that guides the artform into the future.
In a tribute to Claude Debussy after his death in 1918, his publisher sent a request to several prominent composers, such as Stravinsky, Bartók, and Dukas, asking that they each compose a piece of music in memoriam of the pioneering French composer. Ravel’s contribution was a one-movement Duo for violin and cello, which subsequently became the first movement of the complete Sonata. In this work, we can see Ravel engaging with the intersection of various musical materials. Throughout his life, Ravel, like many of his contemporaries, was fascinated with folk song and in particular the way such songs are often rooted in the pentatonic scale. In addition, like most of Europe in the waning days of the war, Ravel had recently encountered jazz through the presence of American GIs in Paris. Jazz has its roots in the “blues” scale, at the core of which is, Ravel noted, the pentatonic scale, inflected by a mixture of major and minor. The final element was the desire to explore modernist approaches to music, to embrace more dissonant harmonies and “exotic” scales. By innovatively melding the elements of traditional folk music with the new combinations made possible with jazz, Ravel builds a bridge, musically, to the distinctive modernist sound, which can be strange and alien territory. Beneath it all is a unity, complexity derived from the utmost simplicity.
In this music, there seems to be evidence of the influence of the Hungarian composers Bartók and Kodály, both a generation younger than Ravel, and another step forward in uncompromising modernism. Ravel heard Kodály’s Duo for Violin and Cello and this may have been the stimulus for Ravel to begin thinking in this form. There are hints of the energy of Hungarian dances and folk songs, but the model of Kodály and Bartók is even more present in the treatment of themes: the insistent repetition of short, unvaried phrases, the asymmetrical repetitions of ideas that add and subtract beats to create tension, the presence of bitonality (the instruments playing in two keys at once). All of these together and an emphasis on the linear combinations rather than the lushness of harmony make this perhaps Ravel’s most stringent, caustic work.
The vacillations between major and minor continue at a furious pace in the scherzo—vacillations that eventually diverge into two key areas being explored simultaneously by each instrument. A tune emerges in slower notes while the instruments trade off playing figuration or dissonant held notes. The cellist introduces a chant in Dorian mode to open the slow movement and, though the violinist follows suit, complexities take hold and cause clashes. The last movement is perhaps the most Hungarian, with dance fragments in odd numbers of beats. Perhaps in an homage to rondo form, each long phrase finds its way to an unlikely but resonant cadence on C major. In the last third of the movement, a fugue breaks out on an angular borderline atonal theme that returns from the first movement. That this melody is treated in counterpoint, in stretto, and inversion reveals what a new (for Ravel) approach he was willing to take, even toward the latter part of his career.
Dawn Avery’s Decolonization refers to the process of reasserting indigenous culture, a process of sharing, learning, and teaching the language, music, and stories of the original nations of North America. Speaking about her interests, Avery said:
As a Mohawk woman, we are about peace, and I started thinking about this question of music as a universal language. What is an academic understanding of language? A word I say to you could mean something completely different to you than it does to me. But if music communicates emotion, it is a way to reach people on a deeper level, instead of just in their head [where] we get stuck in things like dogma, racism, stereotypes, politics. But when we go to our heart, it’s completely different.
The music takes advantage of the wide range of the cello, with fragments of song in a high register interspersed with drumming sounds played col legno, with the wood of the bow bouncing on low strings.
Jessie Montgomery, as a violinist and chamber musician herself, formerly of the PUBLIQuartet and currently with the Catalyst Quartet, knows her way around the possibilities of string instruments, and the delight of creating new sounds together with colleagues. Of her Duo for Violin and Cello, she has said, “It’s an ode to friendship that is meant to be fun and whimsical, representing a range of shared experiences.” The opening movement, with its plucked and strummed syncopations, captures the spirit of dueling guitar heroes. The playful energy comes to a standstill in the slow movement, marked Dirge, which meditates in stillness and quiet. The frenetic energy of the Presto finds the two musicians in a kind of duel, tumbling over one another, intertwined with inversions, sometimes oscillating between the lowest note of the violin, one step below the top open string of the cello. The two follow one another in close, snaking canons until they finally unite in the last few measures with a repeated yawp.
The works for solo violin by Nina C. Young, Lester St. Louis, and Angélica Negrón came about through a project started by Jennifer Koh to keep music alive during lockdown. The description of the project reads:
In response to the coronavirus pandemic and the financial hardship it has placed on many in the arts community, violinist Jennifer Koh launched Alone Together, an online commissioning project that brings composers together in support of the many freelancers among them. 20 composers, most of whom have salaried positions or other forms of institutional support to carry them through this challenging time, agreed to donate a new, 30-second micro-work for solo violin, while also recommending a fellow freelance composer to write their own 30-second solo violin work on paid commission from the artist-driven nonprofit ARCO Collaborative. Ms. Koh premiered these donated and commissioned works beginning April 4 through June 13 [2020]. Each premiere performance is archived on YouTube (/jenniferkohviolin).
Here at SBC, these lockdown compositions are being “released into the wild” in live premiere performances.
Of his new piece, Inner Child, Darian Donovan Thomas has written:
Inner Child is a work that came from a meeting I had with a curandera in Texas. We met for a platica and unearthed the roots of some troubles—all of which integrated into a poor relationship with my inner child. I was given homework: “physically write a song to your inner child communicating the feelings we discovered here today.” This homework sparked a set of pieces of different types all in conversation with my inner child, and all trying to reintegrate him into my present tense. This piece is the process of bringing something so fragile and powerful into a stable, well-grounded embrace. This piece is trying to bring myself back to me.
—By Mark Mandarano