Youthful Inspirations

Friday, June 14 | 11:00 a.m.

Kirk in the Hills
Sponsored by JPMorgan Chase

*Lunch is included with the concert ticket.

Artists | Philip Setzer, Katharina Kang Litton, Dillon Scott, Peter Wiley, Amnis Piano Quartet

BRIDGE Lament for Two Violas
BACH Six Preludes and Fugues, K.404a arr. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
WALTON Piano Quartet in D minor

Followed by a Lunch and Learn with oboist and author Merideth Hite Estevez about Finding Joy Through Creativity.

Spark your creativity and rediscover the joy of self-expression! This talk will equip you with a toolbox of practical ideas to unleash your creativity, regardless of experience or skill level.

• Learn how creative activities can reduce stress, boost mental well-being, and bring enjoyment to your life.
• Discover the “Creative Toolbox” with easy-to-follow prompts for Exploration, Experimentation, and Expression.
• Explore ways to incorporate creativity into your daily routine, from meal planning to home décor.
• Overcome creative blocks and get inspired to keep creating, no matter your age.

Bonus! Leave the talk with a handful of creative prompts, examples of online resources for continued exploration, and an advanced copy of Merideth’s new book The Artist’s Joy.

Dr. Merideth Hite Estevez is a dynamic oboist, writer, coach and creative catalyst. With a distinguished performance career that includes playing with the Met Opera, PhillyPops, and the Chamber Orchestra of NY, Dr. Estevez has shared her passion for music and creativity on stages worldwide. As an educator, she has taught at top institutions like the University of Delaware and Yale School of Music. Dr. Estevez’s coaching has empowered countless artists to overcome creative blocks, and her award-winning podcast, Artists for Joy, has gained international acclaim. Don’t miss her insights from her upcoming book, “The Artist’s Joy: A Guide to Getting Unstuck, Embracing Imperfection, and Loving Your Creative Life.” Merideth resides in Metro Detroit with her family and continues to inspire joy through creative expression.

This concert explores childhood memories and their impact on adult identities. It examines how reflecting on our upbringing can change those memories and shape our sense of self. In music, Mozart’s transcriptions of Bach’s fugues show deep respect and learning rather than mere influence. Frank Bridge’s “Lament for Two Violas” reflects his complex feelings about his strict violin training by his father, blending nostalgia and resentment. William Walton’s Piano Quartet, revised throughout his life, retains the boldness and energy of his teenage years, showcasing a rebellious spirit and a desire to recapture youthful exuberance. (Read the full Program Note below.)

PROGRAM NOTES | © Ty Bouque 2024

This morning marks the first of a pair of programs—tonight is the second—devoted to an excavation of childhood and its memories. Under inquiry here is reflection: at the moment when we, as fully grown adults, turn critically towards our upbringing, do the memories themselves change? What is revealed and what stays hidden? And how does hindsight interrogation help us to better clarify our mature senses of self?

Frequently in music, when we talk about childhood attractions, we default to the loaded language of influence or inspiration. What we often mean by doing so is an imported genetic likeness: we say that Mozart was inspired by Bach as a means of understanding how Mozart’s music inherits—bloodline-style—compositional sensibilities begun before his birth. But, leaping an etymologic step backwards to inspirare, a word originally signifying “the breath of truth given to humanity by a deity,” we would be better suited to think about what Mozart never dared to call his own. Our American sense of casual inspiration falls flat here: Mozart does not just like or pick up a few tricks from or mimic J.S. Bach. He treats it like doctrine, like truth.

The Bach transcriptions—originally keyboard fugues in The Well-Tempered Clavier— were made as compositional exercises for parlor gatherings in Vienna, and Mozart even wrote a few Bach-style Preludes to accompany their performance. But Mozart, playful rebel Mozart, does not pull his usual tricks here. He is a studious and detailed observer, attendant to Bach’s decisions in registration and affect with a fidelity and a reverence that he shows to almost nothing else. This is 1782; he is 26, none of his world-shifting operas have been written yet, and, though he’s already internationally famous for an instantly recognizable voice, he clearly still believes he has things to learn from a music he knew almost from birth. In the F Major No. 3, which will be played last in today’s series, we’ll hear a slow Prelude that, though entirely by Mozart, risks absolutely no games: it strives, in every way, to make its namesake proud. All the fugues that crop up in Mozart’s music after this—the end of the Jupiter symphony, most famously—border on a transcendent spirituality which is actually not all that common in Mozart’s largely humanistic output, because the weight of reverence he feels each time that titan is even peripherally invoked is impossible to shoulder. He cannot bring himself to play around with Bach: there is always a distance of god-like childhood idolatry keeping him in line.

But for someone like Frank Bridge, adolescent musical studies come with their own baggage. Bridge floats as a kind of island-figure in British musical history. Situated somewhere between the waves of French impressionism and late German romanticism, the establishment of the English pastoral, and the onslaught of Viennese modernity, he often gets the short end of the stick for not falling evenly into any one
school of thought. Apropos the dangers of influence, Bridge is perhaps best known as the private teacher of Benjamin Britten; we know Bridge best for what he influenced, and not the other way around. This is especially hampered by an uncompromising austerity and reserve in Bridge’s work that is, on the whole, deeply adult. It is music borne by an intensely plaintive melancholy that can only be acquired with time, a music of age, of maturity, of sense; he is, at least in work, old long before his time.

And so it would be easy to chalk up the throaty keening of the Lament for Two Violas as just the default tenor for a perennially pensive man. But doing so would overlook the very fragile relationship to its creator’s childhood that underpins its mourning. Bridge was taught violin—rigorously, “with an iron fist” he would later say—by his own father. That Bridge enjoyed a successful career as a chamber musician on both violin and viola alongside his composing was due in no small part to the domineering force of his first music teacher, who taught him to hold a fingerboard before he knew how to write. The sound of twin string instruments echoing through time and space is thus a core childhood memory for Bridge, though not an altogether happy one. There is, one imagines, considerable tension in that recollection, both a wistfulness and a resentment. The poignancy of the Lament—admired as one of Bridge’s most direct and devastating works—is in no small part the product of complicated nostalgia for a painful but still sentimental memory. What we hear is Bridge forging an even-ground relationship between the two identical strings that repairs, in some small way, one that did not exist for his childhood self.

Walton’s Piano Quartet is an especially acute iteration of this late-stage self- reflection. The earliest drafts of the quartet date from 1918: Walton was just sixteen at the time, a freshman at Oxford who was only just beginning to find his social circle. Most composers would dismiss anything produced in these early untrained years as mere juvenilia, but Walton clung to the quartet with a certain sense of pride, so
much so that he substantially revised it twice in his later life —once, just shy of his 53rd birthday, and again, just shy of his 74th. But for all this editing after the fact, William Walton never succumbs to intentional self-censorship like the image-obsessed Stravinsky. On the contrary, his adult revisions of the quartet are the opposite of maturations; in every subsequent update, the sense of brazen audacity only crystalizes further. It sounds bizarre, but what he’s doing is sharpening in retrospect his own sense of adolescence.

Which is why—after fifty years of updates—the work is still a little brash: it is meant to be, as a document of the musical imagination of a teenager who knows too much about music for his own good. The ghosts of Ravel and Elgar make appearances so unabashed that their presence verges on camp, but that cheeky transparency is precisely what makes the work so maddeningly ingenious. This is already the William Walton of Façade, of comic theater that does not take itself seriously. The quartet accordingly never plays at profundity; it adores its idols with excess vigor, it pays no mind to social moderation, it is brash and bold, overly excitable, and all the more lovable for it.

Later in life, Walton chided the quartet as the product of a “drooling baby,” but he doesn’t give himself enough credit. The quartet is a rebellious teenager through and through, a time he would later look back on with a wistful sense of pride. The revisions betray an eagerness not only to never spoil its naïve energy with the cynical judgements of age, but to regain, just a little, that reckless sense of youth.

© Ty Bouque 2024