Archives for May 2021

by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY ON THE WEB:

Trinity Cathedral’s Virtual Brownbag Concert today at noon is a “Brahms-Fest,” and also an organ-fest. Working from the Flentrop and Aeolian-Skinner instruments, Todd Wilson and Nicole Keller will present that composer’s eleven Chorale Preludes, Op. 122, via stream.

Oberlin Conservatory faculty violinist Francesca dePasquale will be featured at 6:00 in a concert from the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. The program begins with Mozart’s K. 360 Six Variations for violin and piano, then adds electronics to that combination with On the Blue Shore of Silence by Gity Razaz, Gloria Justen, and Sayo Kosugi. That piece, receiving its Philadelphia premiere, also includes visual art by Johanna Andruchovici.

Later this evening, at 7:30 pm, flutist Brandon Patrick George — a member of the Imani Winds and an Oberlin graduate — joins pianist Bryan Wagorn in a recital presented by 92nd St Y. The program includes music by Schubert, Carl Reinecke, Lili Boulanger, William Grant Still, and Valerie Coleman (who is also George’s predecessor in the flute seat of the Imani).

Also at 7:30, Piano Cleveland ramps up to this summer’s Cleveland International Piano Competition with a listening guide called Prelude to Piano, intended to “help enthusiasts of all levels not only understand classical music better, but learn what to listen for during the CIPC competition this summer.”

Finally, to help mark the festivities on the calendar today, the Celebrity Series of Boston presents the “Verónica Robles Cinco de Mayo Celebration” at 7:30 pm. Robles and her all-female mariachi band celebrate Mexico’s national holiday commemorating the country’s victory over the French at Puebla in 1862.

Watch that last one here, and find all the other links in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

On May 5 of last year, we celebrated the anniversary of the opening of Carnegie Hall, which held a gala concert featuring a pretty decent musician as guest conductor: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

This time around the sun, we’ll focus on a couple of lesser-known but interesting figures born on this date in history.

First, when’s the last time you heard music for guitar ensemble? How about a 36-piece guitar ensemble? (That’s assuming I correctly counted all the little heads in a YouTube video to be unveiled in just a moment.) Well, that genre — as well as guitar solos, duos, and concertos — has inspired a great deal of productivity from Tokyo-born composer Reiko Arima, who turns 88 today.

And here’s the video I so tantalizingly hinted at earlier: a performance of Arima’s Rainy Blue by Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University Guitar Ensemble. Not only was the work written for them, but it served as a required piece for the Japan Guitar Association’s National Guitar Ensemble Competition in 2012.

If you haven’t heard much music before from a guitar ensemble of this size — I certainly haven’t — when the melody comes in, you’ll enjoy the surprise of how intense the timbre can be from a collective of what is generally a fairly gentle solo instrument.

Slightly more well-known on these shores but still underrecognized is composer and Madison, Wisconsin native Bunita Marcus, who turns 69 today. She was widely performed a few decades ago, writing commissions for such groups as the Bang On A Can All-Stars and the Kronos Quartet, and receiving awards from the National Endowment of the Arts and other organizations. She’s also famous for her close collaboration with Morton Feldman.

In an extensive interview with Frank J. Oteri for NewMusicBox, she opens up about being derailed from her career around 1989 or 1990, when she began to have flashbacks to sexual abuse, only to then struggle with an abusive psychiatrist when she sought treatment.

“In the course of trying to recover memories from my childhood, this man also tried to take over my life,” she told Oteri. “…And he refused to let me compose…I could not write music for 15 years. And I was at my prime. I was 40 years old.”

What saved her, she said, was John Cage. When she went to him and explained the flashbacks and her difficulty concentrating, he suggested writing short pieces:

He said, “What’s that they give horses to get them to do tricks?” I said, “Sugar cubes.” He said, “Yeah, give the composer in you some sugar cubes.” So I totally took this literally. I went out, bought a box of sugar cubes, and put them on a nice little plate on the piano. And I said, “O.K., simple: Cage. C-A-G-E. These are the only notes I’m going to use in this piece, and it’s all going to be quarter notes. It can’t be simpler.”

Naturally, the piece is full of counterpoint, something she loves. And though it took her years to finish — in part due to her emotions around Cage’s passing shortly after that meeting — one day during the Jewish High Holidays, she decided to finish it.

I started writing counterpoint that started breaking the rules…leaping to and from dissonance, leaping to perfect intervals, leaping to imperfect intervals, crossing voices, I mean everything you could do wrong, I was doing. It just got worse and worse and worse, until the piece ended. But for some reason, it ends beautifully. I guess I knew the rules well enough; I knew which ones to break. That’s all I can say.

Listen to the three-minute Sugar Cubes here in a performance by Marc Tritschler.

by Daniel Hathaway

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

May 4 in classical music history marks some important beginnings that ultimately led to the modern grand piano, the phonograph record, and the international orchestral tour.

Italian craftsman Bartolomeo Cristofori, born in Padua on May 4, 1665, was responsible for inventing the first practical pianoforte, an instrument that looks just like a harpsichord until you raise the hood. Inside, instead of quills that pluck strings, a hammer mechanism strikes them and then retreats, allowing the performer to play soft, loud, or at any dynamic level in between. Thus Cristofori named his invention the “gravicembalo col piano e forte.”

Cristofori’s pianoforte mechanism was so sophisticated that no major improvements were made for the next 75 years, and the basic concept has persisted to today. You can see the 1720 model he built in Florence in the musical instrument collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, read about it here, and listen to Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in d played on it here by Dongsok Shin.

A number of late 19th century inventors were involved in creating machines that would reproduce sound, but on May 4, 1887, Emile Berliner was the first to file a patent application (U.S. patent 372,786) for a device he called the gramophone. His machine “recorded a lateral pattern on lamp-blacked paper wrapped on a cylinder, similar to the phonautograph of Leon Scott, but with an oil applied to the surface mixed with lampblack to make a fatty ink better able to be engraved with a cutting stylus.” Read about it in The Early Gramophone.

That a lot remained to be done before Sony could develop a single disc capable of reproducing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is suggested in the first news story about Berliner’s invention. A two-page article in Electrical World dated November 12, 1887 described a device driven by a weight box and controlled by a paddle-wheeled governor that recorded four minutes of sound on an 11-inch glass disc at 30 rpm.”

And on May 4, 1920, The Symphony Society of New York — which eventually became the New York Philharmonic — played the opening concert of its debut European Tour at the Paris Opera, making it the first American ensemble to perform overseas.

The Symphony Society Bulletin of March 18, 1920 noted that the European Tour was being undertaken “by official invitation from the governments of France, Italy, Belgium and a committee of England’s foremost musicians.” The Orchestra embarked on the transatlantic crossing aboard the Rochambeau on April 22, beginning “a tour which is unprecedented and indicates in a remarkable manner the new position of America in the world of music.”

The May 4 performance, led by Walter Damrosch, included Berlioz’ Overture to Benvenuto Cellini, Beethoven’s Third Symphony, d’Indy’s Istar: variations symphonique, and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe, “Fragment Symphonique.” The Orchestra’s European adventure lasted nearly two months, culminating in a June 20 matinee at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Like the Middle Eastern tour The Cleveland Orchestra was forced to cancel at the beginning of the pandemic, orchestral touring will eventually resume, however slowly. On this May 4th, it’s good to look back and recall that cultural exchanges have until recently been important tools of international diplomacy, and not merely expensive expressions of musical vanity.

NEWS BRIEFS:

Todd Wilson adds the title of Visiting Professor of Organ at the University of Michigan to his positions as Music Director at Trinity Cathedral and Head of the Organ Department at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Heights Arts invites its patrons to host a Random Acts of Art LIVE! event this summer at their home, businesses or community spaces. Born during the pandemic, “Random Acts of Art LIVE! (RAAL) brings local music talent directly to you in private yard concerts, music for patrons at your business, and in partnership with local community organizations. From classical and folk, to world music and jazz this series has something for everyone.” Contact Arleigh Savage at Heights Arts for more information on available ensembles and how to book your event.

HAPPENING TODAY:

The music publishers Boosey & Hawkes present a Zoom webinar about how opera is being reimagined as film. “When the pandemic hit, creators and producers learned to pivot from a traditionally live medium to visually dynamic, made-for-film productions of stage works with sets, soundtrack recording sessions, and directors.”

The Oberlin Guitar Ensemble presents a late afternoon virtual concert of music by Ponce, Britten, Giuliani and Coste.

And Tuesday Musical returns to Akron’s E.J. Thomas Hall for an in-person concert by New York Philharmonic principal clarinet Anthony McGill and the Pacifica Quartet. You won’t find this one online.

by Jarrett Hoffman

TODAY ON THE WEB:

Les Délices finishes off the spring series for SalonEra tonight at 7:30 pm with “La Folia.” That’s something to celebrate, so fittingly, this will be a “party episode” featuring soprano soprano Sherezade Panthaki, countertenor Reginald Mobley, and lutenist Arash Noori, as well as a host of guests and contributing artists in music by Monteverdi, Corelli, Purcell, Marais, Boismortier, and others. Click here at start time. It’s free but a $10 donation is suggested.

ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH:

The history around this month’s celebrations is complicated, thanks in part to Congress.

In the late 1970s, several joint resolutions were introduced calling for an official weeklong recognition of the contributions of Asian and Pacific Americans to American society. What was agreed upon was that two historic dates would anchor the celebration in the fifth month of the year: May 7, 1843 brought the arrival of the first known Japanese immigrant to America, and May 10, 1869 marked the completion of North America’s first transcontinental railroad, built largely by Chinese immigrants.

Here’s where things get complicated: a few of those resolutions had the Heritage Week celebration lasting for ten days. One simply called for it to happen in early May. Another directed President Jimmy Carter to proclaim the week beginning on May 4, 1979 as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week.

The last one passed, and beginning that year and continuing for the next decade, Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush (H.W.) continued the tradition. It wasn’t until 1990 that the observance was extended throughout the full month of May, thanks to a proclamation by Bush. Two years later, it was made permanent: going forward, May would be Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month.

What still shifts is the name. That’s because of something quite remarkable and, in a way, challenging inherent to this celebration: the vast diversity of cultures and histories represented by the term Asian American, let alone Pacific American. In 2009, President Obama named May as Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month. And just a few days ago, President Biden proclaimed this month as Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month.

Still, many have stuck with the original name from the ‘90s, including the official government website. There you can find virtual exhibits — one honors veterans’ history, while another reflects on a Japanese-American internment camp through the lens of Ansel Adams’ photography — as well as classroom materials, and resources relevant to the fight against the rising tide of anti-Asian hate and violence.

Local events include a virtual edition of the Cleveland Asian Festival, which will go live on Saturday, May 22 at 10:30 am on YouTube, highlighting a diversity of foods, performances, and other elements of culture and tradition.

And Case Western Reserve University will celebrate Asian, Pacific Islander, Desi, and Asian American heritage with a series of events in the cultural realm (film, literature, poetry), as well as discussions on issues related to community, human rights, and bystander intervention in harassment.

by Daniel Hathaway

IT’S MAYDAY: 

A variety of traditions, both religious and secular, are associated with the first day of May in most cultures that have slogged through months of winter and are more than ready to celebrate the return of balmy breezes and the reflowering of the earth.

One tradition that’s persisted for over 500 years in England is the May Day morning singing of hymns and madrigals by the Magdalen College Choir from its iconic tower in Oxford (pictured here in a painting by William Homan Hunt).

A brief video puts the celebration in context among appearances by May Day Morris Men and a pagan band, and the Choir’s own video from 2016 documents the event from the perspective of the singers. COVID-19 forced the ceremony to go virtual in 2020, but  this news item from the College tells how the Choir found an ingenious solution for May 1, 2021.

Mayday trivia:

In a delayed response to the adoption in 1899 of May 1 as International Workers Day by the socialists and communists of the Second International, the Vatican created a second religious holiday in 1955 in honor of St. Joseph the Worker.

And how did “Mayday” become an international distress call? Frederick Mockford, a radio officer at London’s Croydon Airport introduced the idea in 1923 because it sounded like the French phrase m’aider (help me).

HAPPENING TODAY:

Out-of-doors events on Saturday include the YSU Wind Ensemble and Horn Choir on Harrison Commons in Youngstown. On Sunday, enjoy al fresco performances by the Oberlin Gospel Ensemble, and the Oberlin Chamber Singers.

One local in-person performance is on the docket: Sunday’s concert by the Dana Ensemble at the DeYor PAC in Youngstown, featuring orchestral reductions by the Schoenberg circle and the premiere of a new work by Jamie Wilding.

Everything else remains online. On Saturday, organist Jan Kraybill in Akron, the Dana Piano Trio, Oberlin Large Ensembles (including a premiere by student composer Natsumi Osborne), CWRU jazz ensembles, and broadcasts from the Detroit Symphony, 92nd Street Y, Friends of Ringwood Chamber Music (Jasper and Jupiter Quartet, and Tulsa Opera (commemorating the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. On Sunday, tune in for the Callisto Quartet from Caramoor, low instruments from the Louisiana Philharmonic, BW Men’s Chorus, Russian Duo from Music from the Western Reserve, and an all-Scriabin piano recital from Oberlin by Jiaqing Luo.

Details in our Concert Listings.

TODAY’S ALMANAC:

In the interest of highlighting some lesser-known figures whose anniversaries pop up on this weekend’s calendar, we’ll acknowledge in passing the demise of Antonín Dvořák on May 1, 1904 (for whom a national day of mourning was declared), Giacomo Meyerbeer (who died with his boots on during rehearsals for his opera, L’Africane on May 2, 1864), and Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian (who died in Moscow on May 1, 1978), the latter with a performance he led in 1972 of his Piano Concerto in D-flat with Nikolai Petrov at the keyboard — a piece that we’d like to hear programmed more frequently).

We’ll also light candles for the birthdays of English composer Alan Rawsthorne and Austrian-American opera director Kurt Adler, both on May 2, 1905, as well as for Belgian conductor Philippe Herreweghe in 1947, and Russian conductor Valery Gergiev in 1953.

In more detail, let’s toast the birth anniversaries of two composers best known for their church compositions — an important but often overlooked stream in the great ocean of music.

Leo Sowerby, born on May 1, 1895 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, figured prominently in the musical life of Chicago, where his works appeared regularly on Chicago Symphony programs, but is remembered today mostly for the music he wrote for St. James’ Church (later Cathedral) where he served as organist and choirmaster from  1927. In 1962, he retired and became founding director of the College of Church Musicians at Washington Cathedral, a position he held until 1968, when he died at Port Clinton, Ohio, enroute to Camp Wa-Li-Ro in Put-in-Bay, the summer choir camp where he had taught for many years.

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