Creative Connections

Saturday, June 15 | 7:00 p.m.

Seligman Performing Arts Center
Sponsored by Josette Silver

Artists | Andrew Litton, Shai Wosner, Tai Murray, Philip Setzer, Katharina Kang Litton, Peter Wiley, Han Lash, Kevin Brown, The Dolphins Quartet, Hesper Quartet

LASH Excerpts from A Journey Through the Underworld: Counterpoint
SCHUBERT Impromptu in G-flat major, D. 899
GERSHWIN Impromptu in Two Keys
GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue
RAVEL String Quartet in F major
MUSTONEN Nonetto II (2000)

Tonight’s concert explores the theme of this year’s Festival, Creative Connections, focusing on how different musical elements coexist and interact. We start with Han Lash’s “Excerpts from A Journey Through the Underworld,” where old and new melodies intertwine. Schubert’s Impromptu in G-flat major follows, showcasing the interplay between melody and accompaniment. Gershwin’s Impromptu in Two Keys and “Rhapsody in Blue” merge jazz with classical styles. Ravel’s String Quartet in F contrasts rhythm and technique, and Olli Mustonen’s Nonetto II blends past and present musical forms. Each piece highlights the dynamic relationship between opposing forces in music.

PROGRAM NOTES | © Ty Bouque 2024

It is our titular night, the heart of the festival theme, and so tonight, we’re going to think about connections. Each piece on this program animates economies of two- ness: systems of bartering, bargaining, trade and transfer, exchange and interception that occur when a pair of opposing objects are forced to negotiate cohabitation in the same musical space. There is, in each of these works, some thing—a melody, a sound, a reference, a genre, a general musical object—dropped in too-close proximity to its Other, its problematizing opposite. Reconciliation has to be arrived at, whether by force, by love, by destruction or by contortion, but reconciliation nonetheless because the two can never last as one and one: we need to find a plus somewhere to finish the equation. And so we’ll see across the program that the additive composite of being two is always arbitrated according to what can be given and what can be taken in return.
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[Pair 1: composer+composition]:

We begin with Han Lash’s Excerpts from A Journey Through the Underworld: Counterpoint—like so much of their music—finds their independent musical sensibility by transforming or transcribing existing historical objects: what we might think of as “the music of Han Lash” almost always emerges in the cracks of a dialogue with other, older melodies and models. In this case, the denuded scaffolds of the old forms becomes a blank drawing board, against which the ornamentations (arpeggios, glissandos, shimmers and flickers) come material for Lash’s articulation of musical selfhood. What at first sounds like the discovery of long-forgotten melodies— the glimpses of the past that float in and out of perceptibility—is actually the inverse: the composer discovering themself by organizing what slips through history’s newly opened crevices.

[Pair 2: melody+accompaniment]:

The slippery relations between arpeggio and melody lead us neatly into Schubert (a composer who, incidentally, has been a life-long love of Lash’s). The G-flat major Impromptu belongs as the third in a set of four improvisations that, true to their name, are governed by an overwhelming sense of “pulling it out of thin air.” A long, traipsing melody in the upper fingers of the right hand unfurls itself over a slow bass line, while between the two, a rocking arpeggio fills in the chasms between notes. But this accompaniment doesn’t stay subservient for long. Forced by the impossible slowness of the melody to fill more and more of the texture, the arpeggio gradually begins to reach out and take control, pushing and pulling the melody along with it like an independent force. This assertion of character arrives, right at the end, at an astonishing feat of rebellion: the accompaniment strays so far from the melodic center that Schubert is forced briefly (it lasts a bar and a half) to change keys to accommodate the digression. Accompaniment has overstepped the melody. And while the two quickly return home, that assertion of the accompaniment’s autonomy keeps them both as active and equal characters right through to the final note.

[Pair 3: key+key]:

Next, we’ll break key signatures entirely. The “two keys” in the title of George Gershwin’s own short Impromptu refer to the irreconcilable harmony separating the hands: the right-hand melody lives in a key one half-step lower than the left-hand bass. Each phrase is thus an experiment into routes of realignment for a form that always starts in adjacency. What Gershwin gradually realizes is that, in parallel systems, all it takes is a single point of overlap for the whole thing to collapse into unity. Here, the fluid absorption of dissonance on which so much of jazz is predicated works in Gershwin’s favor: the “blue note” (what jazz musicians call a particular moment of dissonance) in one key can become a green light for another.

[Pair 4: genre+genre]:

And ending the first half is a work whose twoness is synonymous with the nation that brought it forth. Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin’s eternal marriage of American jazz and classical music, turns 100 this year, offering a fresh chance to reevaluate that genetic exchange. After so many years in the public eye—the Fantasia cartoon cemented its American ubiquity—it’s hard to remember how audacious and risky that work was when it was written. Gershwin attempts a reconciliation between what was then considered “high” and “low” art. He achieves a blend so effortless and thrilling because he locates, in the values of the Roaring Twenties, a common ground on which the pair could absolutely agree: excess, glitter, virtuosity, brashness, and a certain love for drama are traits that jazz and classical music share in spades.

[Pair 5&6: rhythm+rhythm and technique+technique]:

Like Rhapsody, the Ravel String Quartet in F, one of the most recognizable instances of French fin de siècle music in the repertoire, hardly needs an introduction. But it is the second movement—marked “rather lively and very rhythmical”—that has garnered the most attention in the years since its composition. Ravel’s musical wager is simple: two pairs of opposite objects placed in constant juxtaposition. Between the melody and the accompaniment is an ongoing argument over whether dividing six is easier as 2+2+2 or 3+3. That debate gets personal as two playing techniques— pizzicato (the plucking of the string) and ordinary bowing—begin to overlap, and what is gradually revealed is that opposition and temporary disjunction form the very ground on which the quartet stands. As with Gershwin and with Schubert, the roles of accompaniment and melody are never so clear as we’d like them to be.

[Pair 7: then+now]:

Finally, Olli Mustonen’s Nonetto II brings all these strands of our diverse and exhilarating program into a tidy final flourish. Mustonen, like Lash, is a composer of our time with one foot firmly grounded in the language of the past; we are bookended by compositional outlooks which see the act of writing music as a fundamentally historicist behavior. The Nonet, like Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence or the Mendelssohn Octet, is an old-style showpiece for string players, a chance to play together in consort, to feel the thill of virtuosity among a group of peers. But its two-ness—as is ours at this festival—is the split of now and then: nostalgia for the forms and the melodies of a long-since-bygone time, finding new meaning in the imaginations and freedoms of our own age. (And is there a better hope for classical music than that?) © Ty Bouque 2024