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.