Conductor Edwin Outwater returns to lead an all-American Music program, featuring today's leading voices across the nation. Vocalist, pianist and composer PaviElle French makes her NWS debut performing her own A Requiem for Zula, a symphony dedicated to her mother. Viet Cuong’s Wax and Wire is inspired by sculptor Michael Gard, and Gabriella Smith's Riprap is a mini-concerto for marimba.

 

NWS thanks its 2020-21 donors.

 

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Program

Gabriella Smith

Riprap for Marimba and String Quartet (2013)
Approximate duration: 9 minutes

Gabriella Smith identifies herself as both a composer and environmentalist, with much of her music written in response to the climate crisis so as to “provide listeners with an emotional connection to the natural world in a plea for action.” A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, she has already become one of the most in-demand composers of her generation.

Smith composed Riprap in 2013 for marimba and string quartet or string orchestra, taking her title from those piles of chunky boulders that are placed along a shore’s edge to protect against erosion. The writing heightens the changeability of the marimba and especially the stringed instruments, with their many variations on the sliding technique of glissando: plucked and bowed, fast and slow, ethereal and discordant. Different articulations and mallet selections expand the marimba’s sonic range too, from rolled bass chords that blend into the continuity of string sound to a brittle rattling sound played with wooden dowels. The ensemble reaches a form of unity near the end, only to have it dissolve into unrooted sliding once more.

Christopher Cerrone

The Night Mare (2011)
Approximate duration: 9 minutes

Since completing his studies at the Manhattan School of Music and Yale University, Christopher Cerrone has become one of his generation’s most accomplished composers. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 and the winner of the Rome Prize in 2015, Cerrone has written for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Calder Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Eighth Blackbird and the Albany Symphony, where he was a composer-in-residence. Cerrone wrote the following program note.

Nightmares have long inspired artists to embrace the surreal, the disorderly, the senseless—that nebulous yet recognizable concept known as “the unconscious.” When I came across “Nightmares,” a short lecture by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, I was intrigued by his sharply contrasting view of nightmares. Borges accepts that nightmares are a chaotic flash of surreal images remembered from our waking hours, but what was important—artistically—to him was the act of remembering a nightmare—the story that our waking mind only later concocts, with a beginning, middle, and ending.

In my own The Night Mare, the opening sounds are half-remembered sonic fragments of my daily ritual: breathing, noisy clicks, the drone of an idling train. As the piece progresses, these elements are organized into more recognizable and familiar musical elements: first harmonies, then a haunting, recurring melody that forms in the piano and is coated in a hazy texture by the ensemble. The electronics (which are all derived from a field recording of a train) emphasize the blurred lines between the heard and half-heard (what is a train, and what is a flute?) until the work blooms into fully realized musical textures in which all of these elements finally cohere—if only for a moment.

At that moment of coherence, there is a short and sudden shift. Much the way sounds of waking life enter the end of our dreams, this new element jolts the piece into another climax: an abrupt awakening.

The Night Mare is dedicated to my friend and teacher Ingram Marshall, whose straightforward and effective use of electronics inspired me to explore that field in the first place.

                – Christopher Cerrone

Giancarlo Castro D'addona

Festival Quintet (2021; NWS commission)
Approximate duration: 10 minutes

Specially composed for the Beer and Brass concert, the Festival Quintet is a work that invites the audience to have a great sensory experience with this concert. The work begins with a dynamic and sparkling introduction alluding to a TV commercial exposing the main theme, which will be implicit throughout the entire work.

A pause marks the beginning of the slow part, which evokes the search for the perfect mixture of flavors to achieve the final product. The main theme—now exposed with a different harmony—reflects the knowledge that elaboratively passes through generations, continuing to transform over the time; the past and present converge and continue innovating in the future. The following theme first played by the tuba reflects the moment of tasting beer and discovering the variety of elements that make it unique.

The combination of Latin-Caribbean rhythms and Eastern-influenced melodies make allusion not only to the broadness of beer and the brewing industry, but also to Miami as a world-known capital where diverse cultures meet. The final coda brings these various themes together to finish with the same explosion of energy that was heard at the beginning of the work.

                – Giancarlo Castro D’addona

Viet Cuong

Wax and Wire for Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano (2014)
Approximate duration: 7 minutes

As a high schooler playing percussion and clarinet, Viet Cuong was a self-described “band geek” who recalls how “the high school band room was where I found my place as a person.” Through his studies at the Peabody Conservatory, Curtis Institute and now Princeton University (where he is finishing a PhD), Cuong has built on his love of writing for wind ensembles to become an accomplished composer of concert music in all forms, including orchestral works commissioned and performed by the Albany Symphony, New York Philharmonic and many other top ensembles. Cuong wrote the following program note for Wax and Wire, written for the Music from Copland House Ensemble for CULTIVATE 2014.

About a year ago, I was introduced to the figurative wire sculptures of Michael Gard. Though his sculptures are made of metal wire, many of them are depictions of dancers in gentle poses that impart a delicate quality to their innately harsh material. Gard describes his artistic process: “Each figure begins as a block of clay and a spool of wire. The clay is sculpted. This sculpture is reproduced in wax. Individual lengths of wire are woven and knotted stitch-by-stitch around the wax form. Finally, the wax is melted away, leaving a rigid figure, both light and strong.”

The wax sculpture provides a firm foundation, but disappears from the final work, becoming at first soft and then formless. The wire, at first bent to the will of the wax, preserves the structure, but in a way that gives bounce to the remarkably intricate skeleton. Wax and Wire is a translation of Gard’s process, using musical “smears” as an aural representation of such duality. The smears are constructed of chromatic scales in the piano that are successively destabilized by quartertone embellishments in the clarinet, and then by glissandi in the violin. By the end, these smears melt away, revealing a transformation of a rigid idea presented earlier in the piece.

                – Viet Cuong

PaviElle French

A Requiem for Zula (2018)
Approximate duration: 17 minutes

Born into a musical family in the historically Black neighborhood of Rondo in Saint Paul, Minnesota, PaviElle French has brought her lifelong influences from ‘70s soul and R&B into her wide-ranging and powerful work as a singer, songwriter, poet and theater artist. Commissioned by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, A Requiem for Zula was French’s first foray into concert music, created with mentorship from composer Lembit Beecher and orchestrated by Michi Wiancko. French wrote the following note for the premiere performance during the Tapestry19 festival in 2019.

Brown as the Earth.
Bright as the Sun.
Her beautiful smile touched everyone.
I honor you with these words of my song.

Her name was Zula Young.

I am so proud and humbled to bring you A Requiem for Zula. To be playing a piece that speaks of my mother's life and legacy is something that I could never imagine. And this is something, as a musician, that I have always dreamed of doing… playing my music with an orchestra.

I wanted to write a piece that encompassed what I knew of my mother's life, focusing on the way she made me feel, the way she touched anyone on her life's path and the colors and warmth that come to mind when I think of her. I feel like this piece wrote itself. I opened up and it flowed out... and in my mind that means it's meant to be. Crafting the music and lyrics was a rite of passage.

I had to grow very quickly as a musician and adapt to writing for instruments that I don't play. Having Lembit Beecher and Michi Wiancko as mentors for this project was absolutely imperative and enlightening. I didn't even think about what I may have needed to know but, when I had questions or needed an ear, they were there with encouragement and sound advice.

As it marks eight years since her passing on February 10, 2011, this is my way of creating her monument, to be shared to the world, for the world. My mother loved music, especially jazz and instrumental music. Every movement was suited to her tastes and the sounds I remember her playing as I was growing up. This is her song, which tells quite a bit of her story and also my story that began after her untimely departure. I write/speak about my mom often to keep her alive. This piece is a step forward in my healing, acknowledgement of and gratitude for my mother's light in this world. I am thankful for all of you who have wished me well in this journey and beyond.

                – PaviElle French

-- © 2021 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer, guitarist and writer based in Seattle. Besides providing program notes for the New World Symphony, he has been the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s program annotator since 2005 and also contributes notes to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Seattle Symphony.