ABOUT THE PROGRAM
inti figgis-vizueta (b. 1993), Talamh (land) for string orchestra
inti figgis-vizueta was born and raised in Washington, D.C. in a cross-cultural household of Andean and Irish heritage to a creative family who were active as community organizers. Since pursuing a career in music, figgis-vizueta has been highly sought after by ensembles around the country, receiving commissions from the Kronos Quartet, Attacca Quartet, JACK Quartet, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and more, with her works being performed in spaces like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Ojai Music Festival, and The Phillips Collection.
A spirit of generosity flows through figgis-vizueta’s music, which is built upon a foundation of inclusivity and welcome. While deeply thoughtful, her compositions manage to bypass the stiff over intellectualism that has occasionally plagued modern music. Instead, their often malleable structure allows for a perpetually vibrant dynamism that spurs continuous conversations between the various performers who collaborate in bringing the scores to life.
figgis-vizueta manages this by constructing her musical material so that musicians can explore and engage with it creatively. Process is part of the music. In the piece Talamh (land) for string orchestra, the score provides general instruction but leaves ample room for interpretation. This means that each performance will be a little different, not unlike the ever changing landscapes of the earth.
Written on a single page, the music is expressed through 8 “systems” or horizontal lines of music, and each system has its own set of guidelines. In the opening, we hear floating sets of chords where the musicians are instructed to move at their own pace, such that the music is passing in shifting durations, like a “long ensemble exhale.” Next, we hear the ensemble in a series of tremolos where each individual chooses which note of the chord to play. Then, we hear pitches bending, and a series of pizzicato (plucked strings), lush as a “pizz forest.” An accelerated glissando pushes the music forward and bursts into more energetic trembling. After becoming “wild, everywhere,” the group returns to the form of chords and silence that opened the work but now expressed with increasing quickness before fading into silence.
In her own notes on the music, figgis-vizueta expounds: “Talamh (land) comes from Irish and is one of the three fundamental spaces of our original cosmology: nem-talamh-muir: the sky, the earth, the sea. This work explores distinct and connected sonic landscapes, using structure and ensemble interactivity to foreground individual choices in pitch, registration, and timbre. It’s a way for me to connect to home and recall many of the rich and magical mountains, streams, and forests I walked through with my papa, Peter, in Ireland since very young.”
Johann Sebastian Bach, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God), BWV 80
In 1723 Bach moved with his family to Leipzig to commence his new position as music director at St. Thomas Church. His responsibilities would be varied. He would be expected to provide sacred music for the city’s four Lutheran churches, oversee rehearsals, and produce music for special occasions as needed. His role also included the job of supervising the education of boys in the St. Thomas School choir, one of the oldest and most prestigious in Europe having been founded in 1212. Initially, the search committee was eager to hire someone else: Georg Philipp Telemann. But, when Telemann turned down the job (he didn’t want to teach Latin to the students) the committee worked their way through a list of additional candidates, finally agreeing to hire Bach, who came in as their 3rd place option.
Because of the demands of his job, which occupied nearly every hour of the day in a constant quest toward the production, teaching, or rehearsal of music, Bach often recycled or repurposed sections of compositions as material that could be built out for other use. This seems to be the case with BWV 80, which may have sprung from an earlier, unfinished, cantata written for the Lenten season around 1715 while he was employed in Weimar. Reworked and repackaged, it reemerged between 1729-1730 as a cantata for Reformation Day.
Reformation Day, celebrated on October 31, commemorated Martin Luther’s posting of his Ninety-five Theses on that date in 1517, an event that sparked the Protestant Reformation and subsequently triggered conflict between Protestants and Catholics for generations to come. As a landmark day in Lutheran churches, it was acknowledged with special music. Because Martin Luther wrote many hymns, Bach was able to tap into that resource and find something that could be appropriately integrated into a larger cantata format.
Luther penned “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” between 1527 and 1529, a veritable battle hymn proclaiming an unshakable faith in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Bach used all four verses by Luther in his cantata. The first verse is sung as the elaborate opening choral fantasia, while the second is brilliantly interwoven as a bright thread into the decorated aria of the cantata text (written by Salomo Franck) sung by the soprano and bass soloists. The fourth and fifth verses are sung by the chorus. Filling out the work are two recitatives, a style of singing that more closely imitates speech, delivered by the bass and the tenor, and two more arias, sung by the soprano, and then the alto/mezzo and tenor in a duet. In contrast to the festive mood of the opening, Bach ends the cantata with a straight-forward delivery, underlining the steadfast nature of belief.
Julius Eastman, Gay Guerrilla
In a pre-concert introduction recorded in 1980 at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, Julius Eastman explained briefly to the audience his methodology as an “attempt to…make organic music.” He goes on to illustrate how it works: “the third part of any part…has to contain all of the information of the first two parts and go on from there…unlike Romantic or Classical music where you have actual different sections…in great contrast to the first section.” Or, as Ethan Philbrick has eloquently described it, “a structural logic of accumulation.”
Broadly speaking, Julius Eastman is part of the cohort of American composers who codified “minimalism” during the 1960s, but this distinct approach gives his music a special place in the genre and is just recently being revived and recognized more fully. He was a precocious talent who grew up in Ithaca, New York, before making his way to the Curtis Institute of Music where he studied piano and composition. He then joined with other experimental composers in the Creative Associates, led by Lukas Foss, at SUNY Buffalo. A multi-disciplinary artist, it was Eastman’s arresting interpretation as a vocalist in Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King that brought him wider recognition. Sadly, Eastman would become increasingly detached from the creative community, and specific details about his whereabouts and activities became increasingly vague before he died at just 50 years old. It was a devastating loss of one of the most original voices in contemporary music.
Written in 1979, and premiered in 1980 at Northwestern University, Gay Guerrilla is a profoundly unique work. It adapts a well-known 16th century hymn by dropping it in the midst of 20th century musical idioms to alchemize a musical ballast toward the cause of preserving and defending the expression of self. The music, as much of Eastman’s output, has also been recognized for its resolute democratization of the creative act, because it is up to each different performing body how they will work together to resolve issues of tempo, pacing, and harmony.
The music is written for unspecified instruments, meaning that any collection of musicians can determine the makeup of the ensemble. However, and relevant to this performance, Eastman also noted in his Northwestern introduction regarding Gay Guerrilla, “…if melody instruments were playing, probably a good number would be somewhere in the area of maybe 10 to 18 instruments, usually of the same family. So, therefore, another version could be for, let’s say, 18 stringed instruments.”
The music grows, organically, out of a single note, “A,” which is then joined by a “D” and then our first hint of a melody, a repeated oscillation between the notes “B” and “A” floating against the established steady pulse. Slowly, rhythmic shifts are introduced into the score, sprinkling in groups of sixteenth notes. From here, the music swells and slowly builds. It culminates in a full throated sequence that quotes a recognizable fragment of Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” made famous through J.S. Bach’s use of it in his Cantata BWV 80 for Reformation Day.
Kathryn J. Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/harpsichordist, musicologist, music and cultural critic, and freelance writer. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.
