Our Home

We are only beginning to process yesterday's violence in Boston. Our constant prayers are with all who were affected by the attacks. We are left with so many questions and so few answers. There is so much we don't know. The one thing we do know is that we love our city and its people. Boston is AFC's home. We drive like maniacs, scream at Sox games, and spend too many hours at the pub down the street. We grew into adults at NEC, and Longy, and Harvard, and BU. Between the 18 of us, we've played in every church, synagogue, hall, gallery, theater, library, dive bar, and coat closet in this town and loved every minute of it. More importantly, we live in a city where 150 people trudged through four-foot snow drifts on foot to support us at our last community concert. This city has given us all more than we could ever dream of - a home, a life, a vibrant and open-hearted community, and a chance to make music together. It's a debt we could never hope to repay.

All the thanks we can offer is our music. We hope this will offer some humble amount of hope and healing to this community, which has been generous to us beyond measure.

What kind of cello is that? This Thursday's Avant Gardner Instrument Experiment

At this Thursday's Avant Gardner Concert, we'll be playing Francesco Geminiani's "La Folia" on a complete set of carbon fiber instruments, generously loaned to us for the month by Luis and Clark Carbon Fiber Instruments. Imagining our audience might be curious about this idea, we checked in with Jae Young Cosmos Lee, who fathered this exciting brainchild.

Q) Where did the idea come from? A) The initial idea came to me while AFC was on tour a couple of years back playing at an outdoor venue in Louisiana with 98% humidity and light rain and our musicians were freaking out... A few of the artists were very reluctant to continue playing on their precious instruments and most of our instruments sounded like they were under water.. We still finished the concert by sheer will, but the experience inspired me to look for a solution.

Q) How did you come across Luis and Clark instruments? A) Well the very first time I ever saw and heard a Luis & Clark instrument was in 2006 - the Canadian cellist, Shauna Rolston, was playing hers at Banff. Then a few years later after our concert in Louisiana, to my surprise, I found out that the company was located in the Boston area and that one of our board members already knew Luis Leguia, founder and owner of the Luis & Clark company and a former cellist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Moreover, it turned out that he had already seen A Far Cry perform, and was an enthusiastic supporter of the group. At my first meeting with Luis & his wife Stephanie, they generously loaned me a carbon fiber instrument, which I ended up playing a couple of chamber music concerts on in the fall.

Q) On a concert largely made up of music written in the past 20 years, why specifically play the one Baroque piece on the program (Geminiani's La Folia) on these new "space age" instruments? A)The title of this "Avant Gardner" program "Folly" is taken directy from the context of "La Folia", in its literal translation meaning "Madness".. What could be more "Avant-Garde" or even "Mad" than playing on a set of instruments that the 17th-century violinist and composer, Geminiani,"Il Furibondo" himself, or even Jascha Heifetz would never have imagined hearing.. Believe it or not, this is the very first time a professional ensemble would be playing on a set of carbon fiber instruments in a concert setting.. ever. I gotta say that is pretty sweet. Maybe The Guinness Book of World Records will come calling us. In all seriousness though, it seemed like the best way for us to really try these instruments was to use them to play the most "conventional" piece on a new music concert..

Q) How is it different playing a carbon fiber instrument? A) Carbon fiber responds very differently than wood and possess a completely different voice of its own without the loss of sound quality. The response time is quicker and it resonates 360 degrees around the instrument in comparison to the wooden instrument relying mainly its "f" holes as the sound output. It is virtually unbreakable & can resist the most dramatic of weather conditions.. Some people lament over the fact that its color palette is a bit more limiting than a wooden instrument, but in my opinion, one can find many different colors with judicious use of the bow. I heard a story that a couple members of the Louisiana Philharmonic who played on Luis and Clark instruments were able to retrieve their instruments in sturdy condition after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the instrument locker flooded. The only parts that had to be replaced were the bridge and soundpost, which are the only wooden parts. It really is a modern marvel.. I can imagine the experience perhaps feeling like the first time Buddy Holly plucked the strings on an electric guitar and began drooling over its distortions...

Q) Part of the inspiration for this project came from the Landfill Harmonic. Right? Can you tell us more about that? A) Back in my days when I was living out in west coast, I worked for a violin dealer for a couple of years, and was very fortunate to play on super fine, 17th and 18th century Italian instruments for clients every week. There were Strads, Guarnerius, Gaglianos, Amatis, you name it.. They were already priced in the multiple millions of dollars even back then, and I look at auction reports now a days and find that a lot of these prices have doubled and tripled.. HOW, WHY.. WHO CAN AFFORD THAT!!

Especially not me and a lot of the best musicians I know, who should be playing them. Then on the flip side of that equation, I recently watched a YouTube video of a student orchestra in the slums of Paraguay, called Landfill Harmonic. These under privileged kids play on instruments made by recycled garbage parts, but I have to say that it is one of the most inspiring videos about music I've seen in a long time, since it puts the love of music, the person's musicianship and soul before all the other things that preoccupy our business presently. There should be something in between a $20 million Stradivarius and a violin made out of a gas canister, not only that sounds great but is more affordable, because the aim of young musicians should be one of lofty goals such as creating beauty, excitement and having fun - not "When I grow up, I want to play so well, a foundation will buy me an expensive Montagnana cello!" There needs to be a equalizer in our present day, which is not that different from an electric car that forces us to move away from fossil fuel, to save our environment and economy. In a sense, I see carbon fiber instruments leading this movement for classical music as a whole, in the years to come. I want to think of them as even-ing the playing field - research into new materials might make it possible for people all over the world to experience the music we love, and we want to support that.

Patchwork Rescheduled

Saturday afternoon's concert has been moved to Sunday at 6pm, at St. John's Church in Jamaica Plain. The Gardner Museum concert has been canceled, so this is your ONE CHANCE to see this innovative and moving program!

Back in Jordan Hall Jan. 11!

After a fall of nationwide touring and our first tour to Europe (!), A Far Cry returns to Jordan Hall with "The Long Gaze" - a wide-ranging program that is a veritable hometown LOVE FEST! Tufts University composer John McDonald presents the world premiere of his newly-commissioned work. “Gentle but Uneasy Dance Music.” Benjamin Britten’s haunting “Les Illuminations” features not one but two local stars: soprano Kristen Watson and tenor Zachary Wilder. Anton Webern’s early String Quartet (1905) provides an otherworldly interlude before Kristen and Zachary return for a rocking selection of Kurt Weill songs, in new arrangements by Nicholas Urie.

A Far Cry in Jordan Hall | TICKETS January 11 2013 8pm New England Conservatory, Boston, MA

*McDonald: Gentle but Uneasy Dance Music Britten: Les Illuminations - (feat. Kristen Watson, soprano; Zachary Wilder, tenor) Webern: String Quartet (1905) Weill: Songs - (feat. Kristen Watson, soprano; Zachary Wilder, tenor)

Fiddlers Program Notes

The old fiddler

Program notes for this weekend's concert "Fiddlers" are here. Thanks, Kathryn!

Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928) :: Pelimannit (“The Fiddlers”) A work from the student days of Finnish composer, Einojuhani Rautavaara, The Fiddlers is an ode to both the folk music, and also the stories of the musicians—the fiddlers—he found in a book, Album of Tunes, by Samuel Rinda-Nickola.

An ebulliently dissonant opening illustrates the arrival of the fiddlers. Kopsin Jonas, portrays the fiddler who preferred to practice out in the woods, alone. Klockar Samuel Dikström (“Bell-Ringer Samuel Dikström”) was not only a fiddler, but also an organist. Here, we find him practicing Bach. Pirun polska (“Devil's Schottische,” a dance like the polka) is both foreboding, and melancholic. Hypyt (“Jumps”) is a playful dance, brief but packed with vivacity.

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) :: Concerto for Four Violins in B minor, RV 580 Vivaldi’s L'Estro Armonico (“Harmonic Inspiration”) op. 3, was one of the more influential collections of concerto form, and further elevated Vivaldi’s reputation from the music teacher at the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, a home for orphaned and abandoned girls. Johann Joachim Quantz, flute instructor and court composer for Frederick II of Prussia, “The Great,” reportedly praised the set with the statement, “as musical pieces of a kind that was then entirely new, they made no small impression on me. I was eager to accumulate a good number of them, and Vivaldi's splendid ritornelli served as good models for me in later days.” Johann Sebastian Bach, an admirer of Vivaldi’s work, transcribed six of the twelve Vivaldi’s L'Estro Armonico concertos for keyboard.

The Concerto in b minor for four violins is the tenth (no. 10) of the twelve concertos (all of which are written for numbers of soloists ranging from 1, 2, or 4). The Italian Baroque concerto grosso (“big concert”) form featured in a small group of soloists (concertino) pitted against the larger ensemble (ripieno). This brilliant gem of a piece sparkles in agile, elegant strands of melody that each soloist guides, weaving in and out between each other and the ensemble like ribbons around a maypole.

Ástor Piazzolla (1921-1992) :: Two Tangos (1952) Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla was born March 11 1921 to Italian parents living in Argentina. At age 3 he moved with his family to New York City where he experienced listening to all kinds of music including jazz and the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. At age 13 he acquired and began to master the bandoneón, an instrument related to the accordion (it features buttons rather than a keyboard), which is a standard, and prominent, instrument in a tango orchestra.

In the late 1930’s the Piazzollas returned to Buenos Aires. While there the pianist Artur Rubenstein suggested Ástor study music with Alberto Ginastera (who had studied with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood). Between going to observe orchestra rehearsals during the day and playing in tango clubs at night with his own newly formed Orquestra del 46, Piazzolla composed the score for the film Bólidos de acero (1950) a romantic comedy revolving around tango, and eventually won a grant in 1954 to study composition in Paris with the renowned Nadia Boulanger. She encouraged him to develop his compositional style incorporating his tango background. Piazzolla recalls:

…She kept asking: “You say that you are not pianist. What instrument do you play, then?” And I didn't want to tell her that I was a bandoneon player, because I thought, “Then she will throw me from the fourth floor.” Finally, I confessed and she asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own. She suddenly opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: “You idiot, that's Piazzolla!” And I took all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds.

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) :: Romanian Folk Dances One of the greatest contributions Bartók made to the music world, besides his own array of works, was the magnitude of field recordings of traditional folk music he gathered, collected, and organized over the course of his life. His discovery of their tonal world also was reflected in the scope of his output: “The outcome of these studies was of decisive influence upon my work because it freed me from the tyrannical rule of the major and minor keys. The greater part of the collected treasure, and the more valuable part, was in the old ecclesiastical or old Greek modes, or based on more primitive (pentatonic) scales, and the melodies were full of the freest and most varied rhythmic phrases and changes of tempi. It became clear to me that the old modes, which had been forgotten in our music, had lost nothing of their vigour. Their new employment made new rhythmic combinations possible.”

Realizing that much of the folk music that had found its way into the Romantic music of Liszt, for example, had little to do with the original songs, Bartók set out to write simple accompaniment for the songs, altering the original tunes as little as possible. Thus, rather than dismantling them and repurposing the parts, he simply provided frames in which to showcase the content. Originally written as a work for piano in 1915, he arranged it for string orchestra in 1917.

William Walton (1902-1983) :: Sonata for Strings The Sonata for Strings was written as an expanded version of Walton’s second string quartet, at the suggestion of the conductor Sir Neville Marriner.

The work is a study in concentration and diffusion, portrayed through Walton’s unique musical language (a result of his own endless curiosity toward genre and style), which here blends lush, English pastoral sonorities with Wagnerian tension/resolution, and injects it all with sharply modern gestures. It opens like sheets of organza, billowing, aligning, entangling, sometimes transparent, other times thick with rich tonal color. Then, the reveries crystallize into a ferociously urgent journey through passion, jabbing, and angular—suddenly evaporating, disappearing like an apparition back into the opening material. The work then tumbles forward on a wave of energy over a pedal tone of anxious, obsessive staccato. Following is a melancholic third movement. Elegant, and dark, like a Black orchid, or porcelain the shade of deepest night, undulating with a force field tension of magnets held at a minor distance. It concludes in a frenetic haze out of which occasionally emerge gorgeous threads of melody pulled out from the fabric.

Subtraction Program Notes

Kathryn Bacasmot has once again provided us with great program notes. Thursday at the Gardner Museum should be quite an experience! This is your shovel. The music is your earth. Dig in.

John Cage (1912-1992) For all the innovation the world of music has experienced since 1952, nothing has come close to the watershed moment when 4’33” was first performed. The profundity of its statement regarding sound, listening, and the nature of music remain unmatched.

Providing contextual snapshots to the years leading up to 4’33”, the program today features two other works by John Cage, his String Quartet in Four Parts from 1950, and his Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 Radios from 1951. Like light focusing down to a pinpoint, these pieces exhibit a kind of gathering of fuel for Cage’s ideological fire. One can hear a progression from restrained, quietly oscillating melodic lines, to the absence of melody in favor of partially controlled sound, to sound unfettered. With each step, by subtracting an element he added to our understanding—widening our conceptions.

By 1950, Cage had written his Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, as well as three (there would ultimately be five) Imaginary Landscape works. Those pieces all dealt with the manipulation of sound, either through inserting objects into the strings of a piano or through some electrical means; in other words, some outside element beyond simply a human performer and acoustic instrument. By contrast, it has been observed that the String Quartet in Four Parts also manipulates sound, but through altering the approach to the instruments themselves. For example, the performers are instructed to employ a light touch and no vibrato. As a result, the sound strikes the ear as both ancient and modern, often shrouded in shade, occasionally stabbed with an angular insertion of volume.

The entire work doesn’t deviate far from certain intervallic spans, and eschews overt tension-resolution/dissonance-consonance relationships. Increasingly interested in Eastern philosophy, Cage integrated into the music the concept of the seasons in Indian culture: creation (Spring), preservation (Summer), destruction (Fall), and quiescence (Winter), which are then reflected in each movement: Quietly Flowing Along (Summer), Slowly Rocking (Autumn), Nearly Stationary (Winter), and Quodlibet (Spring).

Imaginary Landscape No. 4 is the elimination of any formal instruments at all, and the sounds being controlled and manipulated by the performers are not self-generated, but rather ongoing—invisible waves that one simply turns on or turns off, turns up (foreground) or turns down (background), tunes in or tunes out. Each performance will be completely different. Even so, here the sound is still dictated by whatever any given radio wavelength is carrying. But, it is these ideas of tuning in or out of an invisible, ongoing performance that were given a test run here, to be fully realized in 4’33”.

"I responded immediately...not as objects, but as ways of seeing. I've said before that they were airports for shadows and for dust, but you could also say that they were mirrors of the air." This statement by Cage refers to the all white paintings of his friend, Robert Rauschenberg from 1951. The same year he visited Harvard University to stand in an anechoic chamber where he was greeted not by “silence,” but rather “heard two sounds, one high and one low”: his nervous system and his blood flow. These two events solidified in Cage’s mind that absence is just another type of presence, and emboldened him to write the piece that David Tutor premiered in Woodstock, New York, August 29, 1952: 4’33”.

Cage has said, “I love sounds, just as they are. And I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don’t want them to be psychological...I just want it to be a sound.” He was interested in the idea of “interpenetration,” that sounds from the environment be accepted just as much as any notes organized on the page the old fashioned way (or, perhaps as Jonathan Kramer has put it, “The situations are the pieces”). There is a bit of old-fashioned organization here, too, as the work is divided into three movements, each given a specified length (the cumulative length is the work’s title).

4’33” effectively breaks down the 4th wall; there is no longer the illusion that the audience is passive whilst the performer is active. One could suggest that this points at another truth, so often forgotten in our entertainment obsessed culture—that we, too, are part of the performance at all times, whether it is Beethoven or Cage. We bring our histories and our emotions into the hall with us, and those are constantly at play, reacting and interacting with the music, whether it is organized on the page or simply mirroring the air.

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) :: Moz-Art à la Haydn A singularly defining feature of Alfred Schnittke’s oeuvre is his emphasis on “quotation of material of very diverse origins,” or, polystylism (polystyle, “many columns”). What makes Schnittke’s use of polystylism so unusual is the unapologetic forcefulness with which the technique is applied. Where another composer may quilt together disparate styles or quotes, Schnittke rips them out, glues them down, and writes on top of them. Sometimes the results are almost nothing short of bone chilling in their dramatic scope. But Schnittke was also a master humorist. Many times you may find yourself smiling out of shock at a sly moment, a coolly delivered, or a razor-sharp, witty turn. Moz-Art à la Haydn is a wink—but of the slightly unhinged variety that only Schnittke could deliver.

The work is based on the surviving bits of Mozart’s lost "pantomime music" K. 446, which was originally composed for the pre-Lenten carnival week of 1783 (though, you will almost certainly recognize a different, well-known, strain of Mozart also inserted). Schnittke also wove in theatrical elements: it begins in darkness, and ends in darkness. The “à la Haydn” is a nod to Haydn’s “Farewell” symphony—the musicians simply begin leaving the stage as the work concludes.

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) :: Symphony No. 45, “Farewell” Haydn had a way of making a point. Sometime around 1761, at age 29, he was hired by the Esterházy family as Vice-Kapellmeister to Ober-Kapellmeister Gregor Joseph Werner, who was elderly, and becoming increasingly burdened by the workload. Four years later, Werner wrote to their employer, Nicolaus I, Prince Esterházy, complaining (most likely falsely, perhaps motivated by some residual bitterness about becoming too elderly and unwell to excel in his work) that Haydn was “neglecting the instruments and musical archives and the supervision of the singers.” The Prince responded by scolding Haydn, and threw in an extra twist of the knife by adding more work to Haydn’s already full calendar: “Kapellmeister Haydn is urgently enjoined to apply himself to composition more zealously than heretofore, and especially to compose more pieces that one can play” for the baryton, the string instrument the Prince played—a type of viol. Haydn responded with 126 compositions for baryton.

As part of a summer season, Prince Nicolaus moved Haydn and many of the court musicians to his new castle, far out into the countryside (“reclaimed swampland”). The season, as it turned out, did not end with arrival of autumn. Instead, the Prince remained nearly a year—ten months. The musicians began to complain to Haydn about being stranded so far away from their families, and held in suspension from their personal responsibilities. In response, Haydn wrote his Symphony no. 45. It is called “Farewell” for the theatrical stunt woven into the work: as the piece concludes, the musicians begin to leave the stage one by one; a clever way of urging the Prince to let them return home (he got their drift, and did).

36 Hour Power Fundraiser!

Help AFC kick off our sixth season and first international tour with a challenge grant from the Boston Foundation's Giving Common Challenge!

The Boston Foundation has offered a challenge to Boston-area non-profits. For two days, we will run a campaign in the hopes of receiving matching funds from the Boston Foundation. The challenge will run Wednesday, October 10 and Thursday, October 11. We have two days to raise money. Your donations will help us continue to bring exciting, innovative programming to Boston audiences. Here's how you can help!

1) Visit our unique profile on the Giving Common's Website by clicking HERE!

2) Donate anywhere from $25-$5000 You can especially help us by donating at the following times: *Early Bird. Oct 10 8-10AM or Oct 11 8-10AM. $1,000 will be awarded to the first ten non-profits to receive 50 donors. *Lunch Time. Oct 10 noon to 1PM or Oct 11 noon to 1PM. $1,000 will be awarded to the first ten non-profits to receive 50 donors. *Happy Hour. Oct 10 6-8PM. $1,000 will be awarded to the first ten non-profits to receive 50 donors. *Power Hour: Oct 11 7-8PM. $1,000 will be awarded randomly to six non profits who receive donations.

In addition, the non--profits that raise the most money overall will be eligible to receive a $25,000 bonus from the Boston Foundation.

3) Watch every cent of your donation go directly to AFC for more amazing performances, educational, and community programs!

Dreams and Prayers - a Sneak Peak

Please enjoy a sneak-peak at this weekend's program notes, from our brilliant and poetic resident musicologist, Kathryn Allwine Bacasmot and fabulous and dynamic composer, Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol: This is your shovel. The music is your earth. Dig in.

To petition and aspire, when we wake and when we sleep, what bubbles up from the deepest wellsprings of the soul? Exploration, through languages visible and invisible, into the mystical—the “mysteries that transcend ordinary human knowledge”; sustaining intimacy with one’s spirit, facilitating renewal of one’s resolve, and imparting the ability to play by heart through our dreams and prayers.

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) :: O ignis spiritus paracliti From the age of five, Hildegard von Bingen saw gloriously vivid visions, but it wasn’t until the age of forty-three that she began documenting them, and then channeling their ecstatic energy into music. By that time, Hildegard was abbess at the Benedictine monastery Disibodenberg, which had been her physical and spiritual home from the tender age of eight, when her family dedicated her to the service of the church.

The monastic life builds the rhythm of a day around the Divine Offices; daily services taking place at designated hours. Sequences (from the Latin, sequentia, “following”) were elaborations of spiritual texts sung between the Alleluia and Gospel. Originally, the last syllable of “Alleluia” was simply melodically prolonged, like a wordless ribbon extending, twisting, and trailing, in order to give more time for processions occurring during services. Eventually poetic text pertaining to the service was added with specific accompanying melodies, and sequences proliferated into the thousands (the Church subsequently trimmed things down into a handful of approved sequences, one of which, the Dies Irae, is well-known to many classical concert goers as the sequence occurring in the Requiem mass).

What is striking about this sequence, and indeed all of Hildegard’s music, is how elaborate it is in relation to most of the Gregorian chant being sung during her time—an early example of sheer artistic expression marrying form and function. Her music is often noted for the soaring lines, the intervallic leaps, and the melodic movement that is more angular than stepwise. The visions, which she experienced her whole life, were often centered around earthly elements of fire, water, and wind, and the texts to her compositions are preoccupied with expressing the spiritual with nature imagery—particularly the blazing light of flames, which is associated with the Holy Spirit.

O ignis spiritus paracliti, written to honor the Holy Spirit, begins with the following text:

O spirit of fire, bringer of comfort, Life of the life of every creature, You are holy, giving life to forms.

You are holy, anointing those perilously broken; you are holy, cleansing foul wounds.

O breath of holiness, O fire of love, O sweet savor in our breasts, infusing hearts with the scent of virtue.

Osvoldo Golijov (b.1960) :: Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind Osvoldo Golijov is a composer whose music goes beyond borders of culture and style to meet a globalized world—roots spreading into intermingling branches. Following is his commentary on Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind.

"Eight centuries ago Isaac The Blind, the great kabbalist rabbi of Provence, dictated a manuscript in which he asserted that all things and events in the universe are product of combinations of the Hebrew alphabet's letters: 'Their root is in a name, for the letters are like branches, which appear in the manner of flickering flames, mobile, and nevertheless linked to the coal'.

"Isaac's lifelong devotion to his art is as striking as that of string quartets and klezmer musicians. In their search for something that arises from tangible elements but transcends them, they are all reaching a state of communion.

"The movements of this work sound to me as if written in three of the different languages spoken by the Jewish people throughout our history. This somehow reflects the composition's epic nature. I hear the prelude and the first movement, the most ancient, in Arameic; the second movement is in Yiddish, the rich and fragile language of a long exile; the third movement and postlude are in sacred Hebrew.

"The prelude and the first movement simultaneously explore two prayers in different ways: The quartet plays the first part of the central prayer of the High Holidays, 'We will observe the mighty holiness of this day...', while the clarinet dreams the motifs from 'Our Father, Our King'. The second movement is based on 'The Old Klezmer Band', a traditional dance tune, which is surrounded here by contrasting manifestations of its own halo. The third movement was written before all the others. It is an instrumental version of K'Vakarat, a work that I wrote a few years ago for Kronos and Cantor Misha Alexandrovich. The meaning of the word klezmer: instrument of song, becomes clear when one hears David Krakauer's interpretation of the cantor's line. This movement, together with the postlude, bring to conclusion the prayer left open in the first movement: '...Thou pass and record, count and visit, every living soul, appointing the measure of every creature's life and decreeing its destiny'.

"But blindness is as important in this work as dreaming and praying. I had always the intuition that, in order to achieve the highest possible intensity in a performance, musicians should play, metaphorically speaking, 'blind'. That is why, I think, all legendary bards in cultures around the world, starting with Homer, are said to be blind. 'Blindness' is probably the secret of great string quartets, those who don't need their eyes to communicate among them, with the music, or the audience. My hommage to all of them and Isaac of Provence is this work for blind musicians, so they can play it by heart. Blindness, then, reminded me of how to compose music as it was in the beginning: An art that springs from and relies on our ability to sing and hear, with the power to build castles of sound in our memories."

Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol :: Vecd Vecd (wajd in Arabic) refers to being in a state of rapture or ecstasy. In Islamic mysticism Sufi dervishes would try to attain the state of vecd during their ceremonies in which music plays a central role. Since vecd is the essence of sufi ceremonies in this composition I have tried to capture the essence of several different kinds of Turkish sufi ceremonies. When doing this I refrained from incorporating the sophisticated modal characteristics (or the so-called “microtones”) of Turkish Sufi and Ottoman/Turkish classical music since this piece was being composed for a Western string orchestra. Instead, I decided to base the composition on zikir, the practice of singing repeated rhythmic phrases by Sufi dervishes. Typically, Turkish sufi ceremonies would feature one ostinato in a simpler meter and would speed this ostinato up throughout the course of 5 to 10 minutes, if not more. During the speeding up of the ostinato often a hafız (Koranic chanter) would improvise on top of the ostinato using devotional poetry. In this composition instead of using a single ostinato in a simple meter I used multiple rhythmic cycles ranging from 16 beats per measure to 4 beats per measure. The melodic phrases which develop throughout the piece replace improvisation and these phrases together with the ostinati resemble another kind of Turkish Sufi ceremony: the Sema ceremony of the Mevlevi (whirling) dervishes.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) :: Heiliger Dankgesang, from Quartet op. 132 Beethoven’s “Holy Song of Thanks by a Convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode” (Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lycischen Tonart) is the expansive middle movement of the String Quartet op. 132 (completed in 1825), part of the so-called “Galitzen Quartets” (including opp. 127 and 130) for their commission by Prince Nikolas Galitzen. Proportionally, it is nearly the length of the first two movements combined, and is twice as long as the two movements following. Structurally, it is divided into five distinct parts (perhaps a microcosmic reflection of the Quartet’s five total movements) alternating the three hymn-like “holy song of thanks” (Heiliger Dankgesang) sections with the shimmering melodic lightness of the two “feeling new strength” (Neue Kraft fühlend) sections, forming a set of double variations as each repeats with increasing elaboration. Emotionally, the overt purpose as a song of thanks likely refers to Beethoven’s recovery from an abdominal illness, and perhaps also (as suggested by Maynard Solomon) the general idea of the healing powers of music for a beleaguered spirit. After all, in times of celebration or distress, we inevitably turn to music. Framing our emotions, it gathers the invisible murmurings of our hearts for contemplation; facilitating release, strengthening our resolve, imbuing hope.

What immediately confronts the listener is an opening gesture that expands and contracts like a quiet breath, which is strikingly similar in shape to two other seminal works written within a year or two of each other that and crowned the last three years of the composer’s life: the Adagio from the Symphony no. 9, and the String Quartet op. 130. The Heiliger Dankgesang commences reverently in one of the old church modes, Lydian, which, according to Renaissance music theorist Zarlino, “...is a remedy for fatigue of the soul, and similarly for that of the body.” There is very little dissonance in the first iteration, lending to the floating, otherworldly quality of its sound. Then, with three declamatory unisons that take grasp the listener as if to say, “pay special attention here,” the work shifts in D Major for the first of the two Neue Kraft fühlend sections. Beethoven tends to use trills as a kind of asterisk noting an important shift, and here, the first violin trembles with the onset of joy. Each subsequent restatement of the Heiliger Dankgesang and Neue Kraft fühlend gain confidence, strength, and resolve: passion, via dissonance and resolution, is infused into the Heiliger Dankgesang, whilst the intervallic jumps and increasingly intricate weaving in and out of the two violin parts instills the second Neue Kraft fühlend with enhanced exuberance. Finally, the work concludes with stabbing sforzandos as if pledging to go forward with conviction and purpose buoyed by spiritual and physical renewal.