A Short While To Be Here (2023)
Colin Jacobsen (based on American Folk Songs as collected by Ruth Crawford Seeger)
I. Whoa, Mule!
II. Hommage a Ruth
III. Peep Squirrel
IV. The Old Cow Died
V. Little Birdie
We have a “short while to be here, and a long time to be gone,” as the lyrics go on the American folk song Little Birdie. Astronaut Loren Acton described his experience looking down at our home planet Earth from above: “Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty – but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That’s where life is; that’s where all the good stuff is.” In writing this piece, I was very much inspired by the example of Ruth Crawford Seeger, one of America’s most forward looking composers of the early part of the 20th century. Then her life took a turn in Depression-era America as she and her husband Charles Seeger began a deep investigation of American folk music alongside the Lomax brothers during the FDR years. She treated folk music with the respect and attention that Bela Bartok had exhibited in a somewhat parallel fashion in Europe, and as an educator became deeply committed to teaching folk songs to children. She published several collections of American folk songs for children, including the Animal Folk Songs for Children. She also raised 4 children of her own during that challenging time, several of whom became icons of the folk-revival movement in the generation to come (step-son Pete Seeger, and her own children Peggy and Mike Seeger). For around 20 years, her personal compositional voice was silent, but in 1952, she wrote one last modernist composition, a wind quintet before falling ill and eventually succumbing to cancer. I like to imagine what would have happened if she had lived longer and had attempted to further integrate her life’s work- her love of folk music alongside her formalist/composerly voice. So this piece, representing Earth in our The Four Elements project, is very much an hommage to Ruth (nicknamed “Dio” by her children) as well as joyous celebration of our home planet. This of course includes all animals and children past and present who’ve been here or will be here a short while and then gone for a long time…
— Colin Jacobsen
Aere senza stelle (2022)
Andreia Pinto Correia
The inspiration for Aere senza stelle (Air Without Stars) was the tempestades de poeira—or dust storms—that travel from the Sahara Desert to the Iberia Peninsula, a phenomenon experienced during my youth in Portugal. From the descriptions of “blood rains” as bad omens epics by Homer, Hesiod, and Plutarch, to scientific observations by Darwin and Ehrenberg in the nineteenth century, up until today, the reporting of desert dust storms has evolved from descriptive narratives to encompassing an entire field of environmental research. Re-reading Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, I recognized a profound poetic connection to climate change, and so I mirrored the structure of Canto III, 22-30 dividing the work into three sections. In the final measures, the string quartet creates a sonic cloud, as though carrying an infinite stream of particles from the desert to other parts of the world. I. Lacrimoso, quasi recitativo – the starless air: lyrical and static. II. Agitato, strepitoso – a tumult of voices: dense, angular and dissonant. III. Misterioso, senza misura. Inquieto – time suspended. A whirlwind of sands, vanishing into infinity. Commissioned by the 2022 Vail Dance Festival, Damien Woetzel – Artistic Director – Aere senza stelle is dedicated in admiration to António Guterres, for his life dedication to climate change issues, and to Catarina Vaz Pinto. A special thank you to Brooklyn Rider.
— Andreia Pinto Correia
String Quartet No. 8 in c minor, Op 110 (1960)
Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich’s explosive Eighth String Quartet was written in just three days in 1960 while visiting Dresden to write music for the film Five Days and Five Nights about the Allied firebombing of that city in World War II. Dedicated to “the victims of fascism and war,” the extra-musical meaning of the work has long been debated. Is it an aautobiographical statement about the composer’s struggles against the Stalinist regime, a reference to the Holocaust, or a rebuke to totalitarianism? While we will never ultimately know, this beloved work has nevertheless secured a place as one of the most important and searingly powerful works of the 20th century. The basic building block of the five movement composition is based on the spelling of the composer’s name DSCH (D-E-flat-C-B), heard in the fugal opening of the first movement. The second movement reveals an iconic Jewish theme also heard in the composer’s famous Second Piano Trio. The composer describes his feelings on the qualitative elements of Jewish music in Testimony “Jewish folk music has made a most powerful impression on me… it can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It’s almost always laughter through tears. This quality… is close to my ideas of what music should be. There should always be two layers in music. Jews were tormented so long that they learned to hide their despair. They express despair in dance music.” Following the third movement’s macabre waltz, the fourth movement unfolds in a series of quotations. Opening with a series of ominous knockings, an inverted DSCH statement is juxtaposed, revealing a fragment of the Dies Irae from the Catholic Requiem Mass. Following this, the lower three instruments play a Russian funeral anthem (…tormented by the weight of bondage, you glorify death with honor…), followed by the two violins sounding the Russian revolutionary song “Languishing in prison.” Later in the movement, a soaringly transcendent cello melody from Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtensk serves as an emotional crest, followed by an elegiac and contrapuntal reprise of the DSCH theme in the concluding movement.
— Nicholas Cords
Tenebrae (2003)
Osvaldo Golijov
I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space. I wanted to write a piece that could be listened to from different perspectives. That is, if one chooses to listen to it “from afar”, the music would probably offer a “beautiful” surface but, from a metaphorically closer distance, one could hear that, beneath that surface, the music is full of pain. I lifted some of the haunting melismas from Couperin’s Troisieme Leçon de Tenebrae, using them as sources for loops, and wrote new interludes between them, always within a pulsating, vibrating, aerial texture. The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.
— Osvaldo Golijov
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