Legacies II: Influence & Confluence
This concert is generously supported by Ronni Lacroute, Multnomah County Cultural Coalition & New Music USA
Monday, March 20, 2023 at 7:30pm | The Old Church Concert Hall
As with every concert this season, Legacies II: Influence and Confluence begins with a work by a distinguished alum of our Young Composers Project. Following YCP alum, Ian Guthrie's duet for viola and piano, Legacies II presents string quartets by Angélica Négron & Katherine Balch, ending with Beethoven's Op. 130 string quartet, a quartet that echoes throughout Balch's work. At nearly 200 years old, Beethoven's quartet again proves to be alive and well in the 21st century.
Pictured (left to right): Keiko Araki, Monica Ohuchi, Michael Roberts, Nancy Ives, Inés Voglar Belgique, Amelia Lukas, Kenji Bunch
PROGRAM
Ian Guthrie — The Tempest Long Foretold (2018)
Kenji Bunch, viola; Monica Ohuchi, piano
Angélica Négron — Marejada (2020)
Keiko Araki & Inés Volgar Belgique, violins; Kenji Bunch, viola; Nancy Ives, cello
Tonia Ko — Breath, Contained (2013)
Michael Roberts, bubble wrap, live electronics
– Intermission –
Aaron Jay Kernis — Air (1996/2008)
Amelia Lukas, flute; Inés Voglar Belgique & Keiko Araki, violins; Kenji Bunch, viola, Nancy Ives, cello
Katherine Balch — With Each Breathing (2015)
Inés Voglar Belgique & Kekio Araki, violins; Kenji Bunch, viola; Nancy Ives, cello
Ludwig van Beethoven — Cavatina (mvt. III) from String Quartet no. 13 Bb, op. 130 (1825)
Keiko Araki & Inés Voglar Belgique, violins; Kenji Bunch, viola; Nancy Ives, cello
Notes on the Program
From Kenji Bunch, artistic director
The Tempest Long Foretold (2018)
IAN GUTHRIE
A distinguished alum of Fear No Music’s Young Composers Project, Ian Guthrie resides in Kansas City, MO, where he teaches at Cavalry University. Also an active pianist wth an interest in improvisation and collaboration, Guthrie is a prolific composer comfortable in a wide variety of contexts.
About The Tempest Long Foretold, Guthrie writes: “When my pre-collegiate friend Tonya Burton experiencing Hurricane Harvey and I was surviving Hurricane Irma, I thought, “I have to write a piece about this!” Over the course of Fall 2017 to 2018, I came up with some ideas, but I composed the majority of this work at the Centrum Foundation in December 2018. We premiered the work in July 2019 on All Classical Public Media in Portland, OR, and subsequently performed it in Washington State.This work represents my fascination to combine sounds of nature with contrapuntal rhythms, extended techniques in a harmonic and/or melodic fashion, and angular Romanticism with creative narratives. I hope you enjoy experiencing the work, and feel enveloped in the storms themselves.”
Marejada (2020)
ANGÉLICA NÉGRON
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1981 and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Interested in creating intricate yet simple narratives that evoke intangible moments in time, she writes music for accordions, toys and electronics as well as chamber ensembles and orchestras. As the first composer-in-residence at the New York Botanical Garden, she composed an immersive work for electronic soundscape and 100 voice chorus performed in the Thain Family Forest. Upcoming premieres include works for New York Philharmonic (Project 19), Dallas Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, and San Francisco Girls Chorus. Negrón continues to perform and compose for film.
Négron writes: "Marejada is a piece written for Kronos Quartet inspired by the pixelated landscapes of artist Justin Favela and the desire to escape to a place that feels and sounds like home. The piece combines field recordings from the waves in Seven Seas Beach in Fajardo, and birds from La Jungla Beach in Guánica, both located in Puerto Rico, along with undulating gestures in the strings reminiscent of the sound of waves.
“I wanted to capture the feeling of joy and calmness I feel when I’m in Puerto Rico in these beautiful places while also expressing the complexity of the diaspora experience for those who like me cannot be physically present in those places and close to their friends and family most of the time.
“When Kronos approached me in March 2020 to write a piece for them to rehearse and perform together during this difficult moment of social isolation, I wanted to create something playful and rhythmic yet flexible and malleable that would be fun to put together. Something that responded directly to the challenges during this time of performing music together while not being able to be together in the same room. But also, something that took into consideration the limitations of the video communications platforms and use those challenges as compositional material and creative impulse. The natural delay, the canceling of sound frequencies and the inability for everyone to fully play together at the same time and in perfect synchronization, are all challenges that I decided to embrace as unique elements that make this piece thrive even within the limitations of the medium.
“Marejada is an invitation to sonically escape from your room and to actively imagine and immerse yourself in a different place and time.”
Breath, Contained (2013)
TONIA KO
Tonia Ko’s creative evolution is largely guided by three conceptual pillars: texture, physical movement, and the relationship between melody and memory. These ideas permeate her work across a variety of media—from instrumental solos and large ensemble pieces, to improvisations and sound installations. No matter how traditional or experimental the medium, Ko's work reveals a core that is at once whimsical, questioning, and lyrical. She was born in Hong Kong in 1988 and grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii. In the attempt to follow aural, visual, and tactile instincts in a holistic way, Ko mediates between the identities of composer, sound artist, and improviser. This has sparked interdisciplinary connections— most prominently “Breath, Contained”, an ongoing project using bubble wrap as a canvas for both art and sound.
About the original version of Breath, Contained, performed tonight, the composer writes: Since 2013, I have been using air packaging as my creative playground for both sonic and visual realms. This overall ongoing project is entitled Breath, Contained as I attempt to release the ‘voice’ of this mundane object without popping (well, only on rare occasions…) My output using bubble wrap ranges from composed works to free improvisation to sound installations.”
Air (1996/2008)
AARON JAY KERNIS
Pulitzer Prize and Grammy-Award winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis draws artistic inspiration from a vast and often surprising palette of sources, among them the limitless color spectrum and immense emotional tangle of the orchestra, cantorial music in its beauty and dark intensity, the roiling drama of world events, and the energy and drive of jazz and popular music. All are woven into the tapestry of a musical language of rich lyric splendor, vivid poetic imagery, and fierce instrumental brilliance. Among the most esteemed musical figures of his generation, he is dedicated to creating music which can be meaningful to other people’s lives, and extend communication among us to make an emotional connection with listeners – while frequently challenging audiences and performers alike.
One of Kernis’ most beloved chamber works, Air has many different instrumental versions, including tonight’s instrumentation of flute and string quartet. Kernis created this version for flutist Marya Martin and the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival in 2008. About the original version for violin and piano, written for Kernis’ wife, pianist Evelyne Luest, Kernis writes: “Air is a love letter to the violin. Songlike and lyrical, it opens up a full range of the instrument's expressive and poignant possibilities. Composed with two main themes and open in harmony, the first poses melodic questions and their response, while the second is very still, rising ever-upward into the highest range of the violin. Following a middle section of dramatic intensity it cycles back to the themes in reverse, developing each along the way, and ending quietly after a final plaintive ascent. Air is dedicated to pianist Evelyne Luest, the composer's wife, and was composed in 1995 for violinist Joshua Bell.”
With Each Breathing (2015)
KATHERINE BALCH
Called “some kind of musical Thomas Edison – you can just hear her tinkering around in her workshop, putting together new sounds and textural ideas” (San Francisco Chronicle), Katherine Balch is a composer interested in found sounds, playfulness, intimate spaces, and natural processes. A recipient of the 2020/21 Rome Prize, Katherine’s music has been presented by leading ensembles and festivals including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Tokyo Symphony, IRCAM ManiFeste, and Tanglewood. When not making or listening to music, she can be found hiking, cooking, or building windchimes.
For this concert, Balch herself suggested the works of Aaron Jay Kernis, Tonia Ko, and Ludvig van Beethoven to accompany her string quartet, With Each Breathing. About her quartet, Balch writes: “This piece is an appropriation and reinterpretation/ obfuscation of some of the sounds and gestures from Beethoven's Opp. 130 & 131. It deals with the expression of breath through music (inhaling, exhaling, panting, pranayama, etc.), the strength in fragility, and my love for and fragmented memories of Beethoven's late Quartets. The form of this piece is a scherzo / rondo hybrid form:
A (mm. 1-34)
B (mm. 35-76)
A' (mm. 77-90)
C (mm.91-159)
B' (mm.160-169)
A" (mm. 170-173)
C' (mm. 174-180)
Coda/ A''' (mm. 181-end)
Each time material returns, it is more fragmented, like a hazy memory.”
The title comes from the following poem by E.E. Cummings:
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
— E.E. Cummings (1923)
Cavatina (mvt. III) from String Quartet no. 13 in Bb, op. 130 (1825)
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) wrote 16 string quartets that are widely considered to be among the most significant contributions to the genre. Of these, the so-called Late Quartets (no. 12-16) were dismissed by performers, scholars, and listeners alike for nearly a century as the unfortunate decline of a deaf, ill, and possible insane composer. Over the last 100 years, these quartets have risen in stature to be regarded as some of Beethoven’s most inventive, inspired, and at times ethereally beautiful work.
The Cavatina (mvt. III from Beethoven’s op. 130 quartet in Bb) falls into this last category. A “cavatina” is a simple aria or song, but there is little that can be thought of as simple in this work. According to violinist Karl Holz, who became Beethoven’s secretary in the last years of the composer’s life, Beethoven himself remarked that he had written the Cavatina “truly in the tears of melancholy,” and that “never had his own music made such an impression on him.” Indeed, in the middle section of the work, the flowing melody of the first violin is interrupted by a throbbing triplet pulse and a fragmented, almost disorienting series of hesitant, stammering phrase beginnings that go nowhere. Beethoven gives this most extraordinary section the equally unusual marking of “beklemmt,” meaning “suppressed, anxious, suffocating,” as if overwhelmed with emotion.
A special THANK YOU to Ronni Lacroute for sponsoring this concert season.
Fear No Music is also supported by grants from:
New Music USA, Oregon Arts Commission, Multnomah County Cultural Coalition, and Regional Arts and Culture Council.