STRUM & DANCE
In easily one of the funnest concert experiences ever, we open in full strum and dance our way to the finale. Rising, edgy sensation Jessie Montgomery fuses dance rhythms from around the world while William Grant Still cools things off in a beautiful serenade with just a hint of jazz. The Chamber Orchestra continues its exploration of the seasons with perhaps the most exotic season cycle by the Argentinian Tango King, Astor Piazzolla, joined by our dear friend Susan Grace on piano. The program ends with the humorous and playful Suite for Strings by Frank Bridge, arguably the best English string suite. This program doesn’t just have a little something for everyone; it’s all you could ask for in a musical adventure.
In easily one of the funnest concert experiences ever, we open in full strum and dance our way to the finale. Rising, edgy sensation Jessie Montgomery fuses dance rhythms from around the world while William Grant Still cools things off in a beautiful serenade with just a hint of jazz. The Chamber Orchestra continues its exploration of the seasons with perhaps the most exotic season cycle by the Argentinian Tango King, Astor Piazzolla, joined by our dear friend Susan Grace on piano. The program ends with the humorous and playful Suite for Strings by Frank Bridge, arguably the best English string suite. This program doesn’t just have a little something for everyone; it’s all you could ask for in a musical adventure.
Available digitally to subscribers and single ticket buyers March 14
Jessie Montgomery Strum
William Grant Still Serenade
Susan Grace, piano
Astor Piazzolla Las Cuatro Estaciones Portenas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires)
Susan Grace, piano
Frank Bridge Suite for Strings
Jessie Montgomery Strum
William Grant Still Serenade
Susan Grace, piano
Astor Piazzolla Las Cuatro Estaciones Portenas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires)
Susan Grace, piano
Frank Bridge Suite for Strings
How will the video concerts work?
Our musicians will be recording on each originally-announced concert date in a private, physically-distanced session at First Christian Church. The final recording will include information about the repertoire, reflections on what it is like to perform in this time of Covid-19, and more! The concert videos will be made available to our subscribers via private link and you will be able to watch them at your convenience in the comfort of your own home. We hope you’ll sit and relax, grab something to eat and drink, and enjoy these performances, made just for you! In addition to the online video, each concert will be rebroadcast on KCME 88.7 FM. Tune in at 3 p.m. on the Sunday following each video release.
Our musicians will be recording on each originally-announced concert date in a private, physically-distanced session at First Christian Church. The final recording will include information about the repertoire, reflections on what it is like to perform in this time of Covid-19, and more! The concert videos will be made available to our subscribers via private link and you will be able to watch them at your convenience in the comfort of your own home. We hope you’ll sit and relax, grab something to eat and drink, and enjoy these performances, made just for you! In addition to the online video, each concert will be rebroadcast on KCME 88.7 FM. Tune in at 3 p.m. on the Sunday following each video release.
PROGRAM NOTES
by Mark Arnest
Overview: Jessie Montgomery
Born 1981, New York City
Work Composed: 2006, revised 2012
Jessie Montgomery is a composer and violinist whose work blends classical and pop music. She is composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, a touring group affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, a group that supports young African American and Latinx string players. A violinist herself with a degree from the Julliard School, Montgomery’s string writing is incisive and energetic, reminiscent of Stravinsky with the cobwebs dusted off.
Montgomery has written of Strum:
Strum is the culminating result of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006. It was originally written for the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players, then arranged for string quartet in 2008 with several small revisions. In 2012 the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and the ending for the Catalyst Quartet in a performance celebrating the 15th annual Sphinx Competition.
Originally conceived for the formation of a cello quintet, the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound. Within Strum I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinati that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.
Each of the piece’s several sections exploits the contrast between arco (bowed) and pizzicato (plucked) sounds. At the beginning, an almost chant-like melody unfolds over a crunchy pizzicato. The music speeds up to a theme that suggests traveling. The third section is in the same tempo but more lyrical, with simple but effective counterpoint. A slow, chorale-like section marks the piece’s center. In the following dance-like section, the influence of Stravinsky and Copland is audible in the pulsing irregular rhythm. The piece ends with a rousing up-tempo coda.
Overview: William Grant Still
Born May 11, 1895, Woodville, Mississippi; died December 3, 1978, Los Angeles California
Work composed: 1957
William Grant Still’s biography is a list of African American firsts: the first to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra, the first to have an opera produced by a major company, the first to have an opera performed on national television, and the first to conduct a major orchestra in the Deep South. It sounds like a story of triumph; yet Still’s life was complex, and for the past 70 years, his music has been programmed less often than it deserves.
The son of teachers, Still’s musical talent became manifest early, and by the age of 21 he was performing in the band led by W. C. Handy, the self-proclaimed “father of the blues.” But Still always straddled the worlds of classical and popular music, also making time for studies with George Chadwick at the New England Conservatory. Chadwick espoused Antonín Dvořák’s idea that a truly American music could not merely imitate European models, but must encompass Native American and African American styles. Later, Still took lessons from the French avant garde composer Edgard Varèse. These studies gave him a firm academic foundation, and while Still never embraced Varèse’s aesthetics, there are modern elements in his 1925 orchestral piece Darker America, the first of Still’s works to attract widespread attention. He wrote in his autobiography:
Although my compositions in Mr. Varèse’s dissonant idiom brought me to the attention of metropolitan critics, I soon decided that this was not representative of my own musical individuality, and adopted a racial form of expression. Quite a few of my compositions were the result of this decision. I made an effort to elevate the folk idiom into symphonic form, though rarely making use of actual folk themes. For the most part, I was developing my own themes in the style of the folk.
Still achieved national fame in 1931 with his Afro-American Symphony, which for the next two decades was the most popular American symphony in the repertoire, regardless of the composer’s color. Even as his classical work flourished, Still kept one foot in the world of popular music, working in Hollywood and arranging music for bands ranging from Paul Whiteman’s to Artie Shaw’s.
There are two reasons for the decline in the number of performances of Still’s music in the 1950s. First, modernism flourished during this period, and orchestras looking for new music were less likely to be interested in Still’s relatively conventional idiom. But there was also a political angle. The conservative Still was so opposed to communism that in 1951 he requested an appearance before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (which turned him down), and went on to name friends and colleagues he believed were communist sympathizers in a 1953 speech. That ended his support from the American left. But he was also a black man married to a white woman, which was unacceptable to a significant segment of the American right. Almost overnight, Still’s musically uncontroversial work became politically radioactive, and it’s only in the past 30 years or so that it’s begun to work its way back into the repertoire.
You’ll hear none of the drama of Still’s life in the Serenade. The piece, in ABA form, begins with a languid, sweetly melodic opening that recalls spirituals. The thematically related middle section is more nervous. A transition contains elements of the first two sections, and leads to a calm restatement of the opening theme.
Overview: Astor Piazzolla
Born March 11, 1921, Mar del Plata, Argentina; died July 4, 1992, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Work composed: 1965-1970
Astor Piazzolla was born in Argentina to Italian immigrants. He spent much of his childhood in New York City, where he began his musical studies and his life-long love affair with the Argentine national genre. He was still in his teens when he joined the Buenos Aires orchestra of Aníbal Troilo, one of the greatest masters of tango music, and by the age of 20 was earning enough to take composition lessons with Alberto Ginastera, himself only a few years older than Piazzolla but already a leading figure in Argentine classical music. In 1946 he founded his own orchestra. But Piazzolla was dissatisfied with his music. He disbanded his orchestra in 1950 and spent several years concentrating on classical composition.
The decisive event in his creative life occurred in 1954, when the French government awarded him a grant to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Boulanger had already acquired legendary status through a slew of successful students, highlighted by Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Roy Harris. She was unimpressed by Piazzolla’s classical work, but enchanted by his tangos. Boulanger advised him not to bother trying to become another modernist composer, but to continue cultivating the style he knew best.
Apparently this was just what Piazzolla needed to hear. On his return to Argentina the next year – having strengthened his compositional foundation with Boulanger – he would integrate elements of jazz and classical music into his tango compositions, creating a style that would become known as Tango nuevo.
The Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas is often translated as “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires,” but it’s more accurately rendered as “The Four Seasons of the People of Buenos Aires.” The distinction isn’t pedantic: The work is less about the city’s meteorological climate than its emotional state. At any rate, any reference to seasons is a little disingenuous, since the four movements were composed over a period of several years, and were not initially imagined by Piazzolla as a suite. (The second movement – the first to be composed – began as incidental music for a play.) The several versions of the piece sometimes re-order the movements, although this version by Piazzolla’s colleague José Bragato conforms to Piazzolla’s first recording. (Bragato had impeccable qualifications for arranging Piazzolla’s music: He was cellist in Piazzolla’s groundbreaking ensemble of the late 1950s, and played on the 1972 first recording of the suite’s “Summer” movement.)
“Spring” is propelled by a nervous rhythm over a walking bass line. Its middle section is sweetly sad. When the first section returns, the nervous rhythm is transformed into something almost brutal and sarcastic.
“Summer” begins almost as a continuation of the first movement, but with a more brooding, almost hypnotic mood. The middle section, aside from an eerie modulation near the beginning, projects an aching sense of loss. This mood infects the first theme when it returns, giving the music an almost desperate feel.
The opening theme of “Autumn” is jaunty with a slightly sinister tinge. The mood of the middle section borders on desolation.
While the other movements reserve their most poignant music for their middle sections, “Winter” begins mournfully. It’s constructed as a series of waves, twice building to a strongly rhythmic section that then peters out, though it peters out differently the second time, and only after overlaying the poignant opening theme over a propulsive rhythmic background. The consoling final section is surprising: Although it’s clearly related to earlier material, it bears a strong harmonic similarity to Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D. When this movement was composed in 1970, the Pachelbel was not yet ubiquitous, and the resemblance is probably coincidental; but today it’s a little jarring.
The Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas may lack the expressive range of great music, but it never lacks for expressive intensity. The themes are memorable, and although Piazzolla doesn’t develop them in the sense of transforming thematic elements to create something new, the variety of colors – for which Bragato takes his cue from Piazzolla’s original – holds the listener’s interest.
Overview: Frank Bridge
Born February 26, 1879, Brighton, England; died January 10, 1941, Eastbourne, England
Work composed: 1909-1910
For two centuries after the 1695 death of Henry Purcell, England’s best composers were foreign imports. Handel moved there from Hanover in 1712 and remained there until his death in 1759; a generation later, Johan Peter Salomon brought Haydn to London from Austria to compose his last and greatest symphonies; and in the 1830s and ‘40s, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn was practically a national hero.
The Renaissance of English music began in the late 1890s with the maturity of Edward Elgar, and continued with such composers as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, and Frank Bridge.
Bridge remains one of the least known of this group. This is certainly not due to any defects in his craftsmanship: Bridge’s works exhibit a master’s touch almost from the get-go. But he’s a difficult composer to categorize, because there is no typical Bridge work. His style varied from work to work, even as it changed dramatically over the course of his creative life; and his later works display a modernist bent to which audiences haven’t yet taken a fancy. In the concert world, the piece for which he’s probably best known isn’t even by him: It’s the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, an early success by his star student Benjamin Britten.
Both Bridge’s appeal and his difficulty are both on display in the relatively early Suite for String Orchestra. His creative personality is strong but not yet distinct; that is, the movements are individually vivid, but each could almost have been composed by a different person.
The mood of the Prelude is lyrical but elusive. There’s a fair amount of rhythmic ambiguity, only partly due to the not-quite-standard 9/8 meter (three groups of three), and while the harmonies aren’t actually Impressionistic, the frequently divided string groups give the movement a hazy texture.
The Intermezzo is something of an English-folk-song-tinged scherzo, with propulsive rhythm and genial harmonies.
The textures of the Nocturne are the haziest of all, with darkly muted strings playing slippery chromatic harmonies reminiscent of Wagner’s Parsifal. After this searching chromaticism, with the music using all twelve notes of the chromatic scale as it suggests one key after another, an interlude in pure F major feels like balm; but it’s brief, and the ending, although a major chord, feels inconclusive.
The buoyant Finale ties everything together, with hints of previous movements (more than a hint in the case of the Intermezzo), climaxing in a jubilant orchestral trill near the end.
by Mark Arnest
Overview: Jessie Montgomery
Born 1981, New York City
Work Composed: 2006, revised 2012
Jessie Montgomery is a composer and violinist whose work blends classical and pop music. She is composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, a touring group affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, a group that supports young African American and Latinx string players. A violinist herself with a degree from the Julliard School, Montgomery’s string writing is incisive and energetic, reminiscent of Stravinsky with the cobwebs dusted off.
Montgomery has written of Strum:
Strum is the culminating result of several versions of a string quintet I wrote in 2006. It was originally written for the Providence String Quartet and guests of Community MusicWorks Players, then arranged for string quartet in 2008 with several small revisions. In 2012 the piece underwent its final revisions with a rewrite of both the introduction and the ending for the Catalyst Quartet in a performance celebrating the 15th annual Sphinx Competition.
Originally conceived for the formation of a cello quintet, the voicing is often spread wide over the ensemble, giving the music an expansive quality of sound. Within Strum I utilized texture motives, layers of rhythmic or harmonic ostinati that string together to form a bed of sound for melodies to weave in and out. The strumming pizzicato serves as a texture motive and the primary driving rhythmic underpinning of the piece. Drawing on American folk idioms and the spirit of dance and movement, the piece has a kind of narrative that begins with fleeting nostalgia and transforms into ecstatic celebration.
Each of the piece’s several sections exploits the contrast between arco (bowed) and pizzicato (plucked) sounds. At the beginning, an almost chant-like melody unfolds over a crunchy pizzicato. The music speeds up to a theme that suggests traveling. The third section is in the same tempo but more lyrical, with simple but effective counterpoint. A slow, chorale-like section marks the piece’s center. In the following dance-like section, the influence of Stravinsky and Copland is audible in the pulsing irregular rhythm. The piece ends with a rousing up-tempo coda.
Overview: William Grant Still
Born May 11, 1895, Woodville, Mississippi; died December 3, 1978, Los Angeles California
Work composed: 1957
William Grant Still’s biography is a list of African American firsts: the first to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra, the first to have an opera produced by a major company, the first to have an opera performed on national television, and the first to conduct a major orchestra in the Deep South. It sounds like a story of triumph; yet Still’s life was complex, and for the past 70 years, his music has been programmed less often than it deserves.
The son of teachers, Still’s musical talent became manifest early, and by the age of 21 he was performing in the band led by W. C. Handy, the self-proclaimed “father of the blues.” But Still always straddled the worlds of classical and popular music, also making time for studies with George Chadwick at the New England Conservatory. Chadwick espoused Antonín Dvořák’s idea that a truly American music could not merely imitate European models, but must encompass Native American and African American styles. Later, Still took lessons from the French avant garde composer Edgard Varèse. These studies gave him a firm academic foundation, and while Still never embraced Varèse’s aesthetics, there are modern elements in his 1925 orchestral piece Darker America, the first of Still’s works to attract widespread attention. He wrote in his autobiography:
Although my compositions in Mr. Varèse’s dissonant idiom brought me to the attention of metropolitan critics, I soon decided that this was not representative of my own musical individuality, and adopted a racial form of expression. Quite a few of my compositions were the result of this decision. I made an effort to elevate the folk idiom into symphonic form, though rarely making use of actual folk themes. For the most part, I was developing my own themes in the style of the folk.
Still achieved national fame in 1931 with his Afro-American Symphony, which for the next two decades was the most popular American symphony in the repertoire, regardless of the composer’s color. Even as his classical work flourished, Still kept one foot in the world of popular music, working in Hollywood and arranging music for bands ranging from Paul Whiteman’s to Artie Shaw’s.
There are two reasons for the decline in the number of performances of Still’s music in the 1950s. First, modernism flourished during this period, and orchestras looking for new music were less likely to be interested in Still’s relatively conventional idiom. But there was also a political angle. The conservative Still was so opposed to communism that in 1951 he requested an appearance before Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (which turned him down), and went on to name friends and colleagues he believed were communist sympathizers in a 1953 speech. That ended his support from the American left. But he was also a black man married to a white woman, which was unacceptable to a significant segment of the American right. Almost overnight, Still’s musically uncontroversial work became politically radioactive, and it’s only in the past 30 years or so that it’s begun to work its way back into the repertoire.
You’ll hear none of the drama of Still’s life in the Serenade. The piece, in ABA form, begins with a languid, sweetly melodic opening that recalls spirituals. The thematically related middle section is more nervous. A transition contains elements of the first two sections, and leads to a calm restatement of the opening theme.
Overview: Astor Piazzolla
Born March 11, 1921, Mar del Plata, Argentina; died July 4, 1992, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Work composed: 1965-1970
Astor Piazzolla was born in Argentina to Italian immigrants. He spent much of his childhood in New York City, where he began his musical studies and his life-long love affair with the Argentine national genre. He was still in his teens when he joined the Buenos Aires orchestra of Aníbal Troilo, one of the greatest masters of tango music, and by the age of 20 was earning enough to take composition lessons with Alberto Ginastera, himself only a few years older than Piazzolla but already a leading figure in Argentine classical music. In 1946 he founded his own orchestra. But Piazzolla was dissatisfied with his music. He disbanded his orchestra in 1950 and spent several years concentrating on classical composition.
The decisive event in his creative life occurred in 1954, when the French government awarded him a grant to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Boulanger had already acquired legendary status through a slew of successful students, highlighted by Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Roy Harris. She was unimpressed by Piazzolla’s classical work, but enchanted by his tangos. Boulanger advised him not to bother trying to become another modernist composer, but to continue cultivating the style he knew best.
Apparently this was just what Piazzolla needed to hear. On his return to Argentina the next year – having strengthened his compositional foundation with Boulanger – he would integrate elements of jazz and classical music into his tango compositions, creating a style that would become known as Tango nuevo.
The Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas is often translated as “The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires,” but it’s more accurately rendered as “The Four Seasons of the People of Buenos Aires.” The distinction isn’t pedantic: The work is less about the city’s meteorological climate than its emotional state. At any rate, any reference to seasons is a little disingenuous, since the four movements were composed over a period of several years, and were not initially imagined by Piazzolla as a suite. (The second movement – the first to be composed – began as incidental music for a play.) The several versions of the piece sometimes re-order the movements, although this version by Piazzolla’s colleague José Bragato conforms to Piazzolla’s first recording. (Bragato had impeccable qualifications for arranging Piazzolla’s music: He was cellist in Piazzolla’s groundbreaking ensemble of the late 1950s, and played on the 1972 first recording of the suite’s “Summer” movement.)
“Spring” is propelled by a nervous rhythm over a walking bass line. Its middle section is sweetly sad. When the first section returns, the nervous rhythm is transformed into something almost brutal and sarcastic.
“Summer” begins almost as a continuation of the first movement, but with a more brooding, almost hypnotic mood. The middle section, aside from an eerie modulation near the beginning, projects an aching sense of loss. This mood infects the first theme when it returns, giving the music an almost desperate feel.
The opening theme of “Autumn” is jaunty with a slightly sinister tinge. The mood of the middle section borders on desolation.
While the other movements reserve their most poignant music for their middle sections, “Winter” begins mournfully. It’s constructed as a series of waves, twice building to a strongly rhythmic section that then peters out, though it peters out differently the second time, and only after overlaying the poignant opening theme over a propulsive rhythmic background. The consoling final section is surprising: Although it’s clearly related to earlier material, it bears a strong harmonic similarity to Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D. When this movement was composed in 1970, the Pachelbel was not yet ubiquitous, and the resemblance is probably coincidental; but today it’s a little jarring.
The Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas may lack the expressive range of great music, but it never lacks for expressive intensity. The themes are memorable, and although Piazzolla doesn’t develop them in the sense of transforming thematic elements to create something new, the variety of colors – for which Bragato takes his cue from Piazzolla’s original – holds the listener’s interest.
Overview: Frank Bridge
Born February 26, 1879, Brighton, England; died January 10, 1941, Eastbourne, England
Work composed: 1909-1910
For two centuries after the 1695 death of Henry Purcell, England’s best composers were foreign imports. Handel moved there from Hanover in 1712 and remained there until his death in 1759; a generation later, Johan Peter Salomon brought Haydn to London from Austria to compose his last and greatest symphonies; and in the 1830s and ‘40s, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn was practically a national hero.
The Renaissance of English music began in the late 1890s with the maturity of Edward Elgar, and continued with such composers as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Frederick Delius, and Frank Bridge.
Bridge remains one of the least known of this group. This is certainly not due to any defects in his craftsmanship: Bridge’s works exhibit a master’s touch almost from the get-go. But he’s a difficult composer to categorize, because there is no typical Bridge work. His style varied from work to work, even as it changed dramatically over the course of his creative life; and his later works display a modernist bent to which audiences haven’t yet taken a fancy. In the concert world, the piece for which he’s probably best known isn’t even by him: It’s the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, an early success by his star student Benjamin Britten.
Both Bridge’s appeal and his difficulty are both on display in the relatively early Suite for String Orchestra. His creative personality is strong but not yet distinct; that is, the movements are individually vivid, but each could almost have been composed by a different person.
The mood of the Prelude is lyrical but elusive. There’s a fair amount of rhythmic ambiguity, only partly due to the not-quite-standard 9/8 meter (three groups of three), and while the harmonies aren’t actually Impressionistic, the frequently divided string groups give the movement a hazy texture.
The Intermezzo is something of an English-folk-song-tinged scherzo, with propulsive rhythm and genial harmonies.
The textures of the Nocturne are the haziest of all, with darkly muted strings playing slippery chromatic harmonies reminiscent of Wagner’s Parsifal. After this searching chromaticism, with the music using all twelve notes of the chromatic scale as it suggests one key after another, an interlude in pure F major feels like balm; but it’s brief, and the ending, although a major chord, feels inconclusive.
The buoyant Finale ties everything together, with hints of previous movements (more than a hint in the case of the Intermezzo), climaxing in a jubilant orchestral trill near the end.
