Agarita Collaborating with Imani Winds
Program Notes
Aaron Copland |
Maurice Ravel |
Reena Esmail |
Julia Wolfe |
David Lang |
Valerie Coleman |
Mark Dover |
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Aaron Copland (1900-1990) had an incredibly varied career as a composer, pianist, conductor, critic, educator and more, and became the most respected American composer of the 20th century. Although the stylistic range varied tremendously and eventually included the atonal, serialist methods of Arnold Schoenberg, by far his most popular and lasting music was produced during the 1930s and 1940s. Using accessible harmonies, American folk melodies and approachable textures, his music throughout these two decades (Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man, and Appalachian Spring) were approachable hits that shaped his legacy as the composer who most closely evoked the ‘American spirit.’ The work was originally a ballet for Martha Graham and her ballet company, but the music has stood on its own, especially in its more concise, 13-instrument version (even less instruments than that on tonight’s program). The wide-open, majestic introduction and playful, exuberant call to action invite the listener into Copland’s colorful music world right away, but the real gem of the work is his variations on the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts,” which blooms so organically that you will find yourself craving another listen minutes, months, and years after this concert.
20th-century French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) created music that was at once incredibly vulnerable and structurally immaculate. Obsessed with formal clarity and textural balance, it’s no wonder that an homage to the 18th-century Baroque composer Francois Couperin would suit him perfectly. Le Tombeau de Couperin, however, is a double homage. Profoundly affected by his horrific experiences in World War I, Ravel dedicated the work to his deceased fellow soldier. Across the light-hearted, jovial Baroque dances are layers of tragic innocence; there is a pain inside the beauty, and often the music in major keys are ones with the most tears. Ravel was as revered of an orchestrator as he was a composer, and his orchestration of Le Tombeau, originally a solo piano work, feels like a brand-new piece in its unique, captivating instrumentation. As a student of Ravel’s once wrote, “This metamorphosis of piano pieces into symphonic works was a game for Ravel, a game played to perfection, so that the transcription outdid the charm of the original” (Alexis Roland-Manual). And so, it is all the more impressive that Australian clarinetist and composer Paul Dean recently managed to capture the profound elegance and contrapuntal clarity of Le Tombeau with his arrangement for Woodwind Quintet, String Quartet, and Double Bass.
Reena Esmail (b. 1983) is an Indian-American composer whose refreshing compositional voice occupies a liminal space. Often blending the improvisatory, open sounds of ragas and other modal styles with more traditional classical musical structures, Esmail delivers poetic works that are inviting, rich, and invite reflection. About her works Saans (Breath), she writes:
In recent years, I’ve realized how deeply inspired I am to write music by the very people I write it for. I’ve always found the story of the Franck Violin Sonata as incredibly moving and romantic as the music itself: Franck wrote the sonata for Ysaye and his wife as a wedding present, and they premiered it at the wedding, sight reading through the score. It is one of my favorite pieces of all time, and the love and intention with which it was written resonates so deeply through the music. As I was finishing my Clarinet Concerto for Albany Symphony in April, I was also planning my trip to Paris for one of my closest friends, Suzana Bartal‘s wedding. As the two women in our year of the Yale DMA program, we supported each other unconditionally through some of the toughest moments of our lives, celebrated our accomplishments with each other, and developed a deep and lasting friendship. As I wrote my last commission of the season, I saw that the slow movement of my Clarinet Concerto could actually be turned into a piano trio as a wedding gift to Suzana and her husband Eric. Suzana is a world class concert pianist, and one of her chamber music specialties is playing piano trios. Our story ended up a little differently from Cesar Frank’s: as I was at Suzana and Eric’s wedding, this trio, in an amazing coincidence, was actually being premiered in Los Angeles on the same day. Even though it was performed a world away, it made me so happy that was premiered by and for some of my dearest friends in Los Angeles.
A beautiful addendum to this story: two years later, Suzana played this trio for the first time in the United States at a concert at the Wallis Annenberg Performing Arts Center, in Beverly Hills, CA, with cellist Peter Myers and violinist Vijay Gupta. And the next day Vijay and I got married. I love that this one piece has played a central role in both of our weddings.
Blue Dress by American composer Julia Wolfe (b. 1958) is a powerful representation of her compositional voice. Her music tends to lean minimalistic in structure, with repeated patterns that gradually intensify and develop in complexity over a long stretch. It is often raw and intense, every note full of intention and purpose. About her raucous work Blue Dress, she writes:
My love of American folk music blossomed in the 1980s when I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor is a big folk town with amazing musicians of all kinds. I started to play mountain dulcimer and accompanied myself singing. I picked up the bones, played folk guitar, and assisted an instrument builder in making psaltries. Many of my compositions reference folk songs – like Four Marys (for string quartet) and Cruel Sister (for string orchestra.) For the Bang on a Can All-Stars I wrote Steel Hammer (a deconstruction of the John Henry ballad), and Reeling (featuring Canadian mouth music.) In Blue Dress for String Quartet my folk roots come to the fore with fiddling licks, fragments of song, humming, and bows deep into the string. The work was inspired by a field recording of a woman singing “ pretty little girl with a blue dress on.”
David Lang (b. 1957) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer and co-founder of the NYC-based musical collective Bang on a Can. Of a similar musical family as Julia Wolfe, his music tends to be raw, minimal in nature, accessible in tonality, and experimental in instrumentation, with a wink of playfulness. About his work sweet air, Lang himself writes:
During a trip to the dentist my oldest son Isaac was given laughing gas. The dentist called it sweet air, a gentle name to take the fear out of having a cavity filled. It worked. My son experienced something—a drug—so comforting that it made him ignore all signs of unpleasantness. This seemed somehow musical to me. One of music’s traditional roles has always been to soothe the uneasy. I must say I have never been that interested in exploring this role. It is much easier to comfort the listener than to show why the listener might need to be comforted. My piece ”sweet air” tries to show a little bit of both. In ”sweet air,” simple, gentle musical fragments float by, leaving a faint haze of dissonance in their wake.
Former flutist for and founding member of Imani Winds, Valerie Coleman has steadily become one of the most celebrated composers of our time and was most recently appointed to the Composition Department faculty at The Juilliard School. Her works are immediately appealing for their folk-inspired melodies and rhythms, and loosen up listeners with their infectious grooves. About her short work Red Clay & Mississippi Delta she writes:
Red Clay is a short work that combines the traditional idea of a musical scherzo with living in the South. It referneces the background of my mother’s side of the family that hails from the Mississippi delta region. From the juke joints and casino boats that line the Mississippi river, to the skin tone of the kinfolk in the area: a dark skin that looks like it came directly from the red clay. The solo lines are instilled with personality, meant to capture the listener’s attention as they wail with “bluesy” riffs that are accompanied (‘comped’) by the rest of the ensemble. The result is a virtuosic chamber work that merges classical technique and orchestration with the blues dialect and charm of the south.
The clarinetist for Imani Winds since 2016, Mark Dover (b. 1987) is one of the most versatile clarinetists alive. His talents as an improviser stretch from riffing on Mozart cadenzas to jamming at the top New York City jazz clubs to soloing on albums of the American funk bands like Vulfpeck, all with the most respected musicians in each field. His credits as a clarinetist are too many to list, but he more recently has found additional interest and success in the realms of production and arranging. In addition to his lauded arrangement of Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed, Agarita is honored to be helping to premiere a brand new arrangement of Mark’s commissioned especially for this concert: Someday We’ll All Be Free, by Donnie Hathaway. Both arrangements manage to capture the soul, spirit and style of these legends in the format of a traditional classical instrumentation, and especially feature Kevin Newton, Imani’s horn player, who Dover discovered has a hidden musical talent. His work for bass clarinet and piano, I Am, Here Now, is an original composition that Dover wrote when going through a difficult time. The title was a mantra that was given to him to keep him present and in control. The melody is simple and the chord changes are relatively straightforward – the patient pacing, combined with Dover’s passionate tone and sense of lyricism, form an ocean of expression that leaves nothing unsaid.