IMPROVISATION by us, here and now

This is a very special occasion for us as we are performing at Studio Saint Phillip for the first time.  We want to pay tribute to you for being here and take the here and now of tonight to pour ourselves out through our instruments in a complete improvisation.

 

LIMESTONE AND FELT by Caroline Shaw

Limestone & Felt presents two kinds of surfaces – essentially hard and soft. These are materials that can suggest place (a cathedral apse, or the inside of a wool hat), stature, function, and – for me – sound (reverberant or muted). In limestone & felt, the hocketing pizzicato and pealing motivic canons are part of a whimsical, mystical, generous world of sounds echoing and colliding in the imagined eaves of a gothic chapel. These are contrasted with the delicate, meticulous, and almost reverent placing of chords that, to our ears today, sound ancient and precious, like an antique jewel box. Ultimately, felt and limestone may represent two opposing ways we experience history and design our own present.

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BUCOLICS by Witold  Lutoslawski

Perhaps the most important Polish composer of the later 20th century, Witold Lutoslawski spent much of his early career arranging Polish folk music and writing music for children. Considered a formalist by many, Lutosławski was heavily influenced by the techniques developed by other composers. Many of his works feature pitch organizations similar to the twelve‐tone music of Arnold Schoenberg, as well as aleatoric passages inspired by the work of John Cage.

The five movement Bukoliki is based on a collection of folk melodies by Father Wladyslaw Skierkowski and showcases the musical maturation of the composer. Chromatic use of successive minor thirds and minor seconds, superimposed passages in distinctly different meters, and embellished harmonic progressions create an energetic and melodic work. The piece was composed in 1952.

 

AVAILABLE STOPS by Igor Santos. 

available stops is a work that takes art of organ registrations—with all of its possibility for timbre variation—as a point of departure. This is heard in the constant change of color for the hocketing unison notes and figurations, as well as an extended “mixture" stops section, with its constant parallel motion voicing and orchestration. Finally the “organ" reference is almost literal in that I use performer vocalization as another kind of registration/color palette—a technique explored in much of my recent work. The music is written, with admiration, for the Quijote Duo, premiered at the 2021 EarTaxi Festival in Chicago.

 

SCHERZINO by Ricardo Lamote de Grignon.

Ricardo L. G. is well known for his works on the traditional Catalan music genre called Cobla. He focused his compositional efforts to develop an independent style that drifts away from the reigning postmodernism and it is closer to expressionism. His Scherzino for viola and piano is a playful work displaying neoclassicism mannerisms with folkloric tints.

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SABANA Venezuelan traditional

Farmers singing to their land. A soulful melody of despair as many farmers faced having to vacate their land in search of economic opportunity in the growing industrial city

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AMERICAN HAIKU by Paul Wiancko

Growing up in California, Paul Wiancko’s Japanese American heritage became increasingly important to him as he grew both as a man and musician. Wiancko was enchanted with Appalachian music as well as Japanese folk music. His American Haiku is an attempt to reconcile these different esthetics. It offers it’s listener an elegant rapprochement of two cultures all the while delving into the emotional depths of the three-part Haiku in its three movements: I. Far away, II. In Transit, III. Home. Each movement brings with it percussive rhythms coupled with rich, spacious chords recalling vast, rugged mountain ranges. The blending of viola and cello also play a crucial role in the composition’s harmoniousness, with the instruments overlapping in range and texture. In many ways, American Haiku is a treatise on the life of Wiancko and his journey into his own roots, showing that the universal language of music is perhaps the clearest way to translate the depths of Haiku.