Lisa Bielawa's Graffiti dell'amante: A World Premiere in Harrisburg

The string quartet that calls itself “Brooklyn Rider” will be performing a program this weekend at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg ranging from the 1820s to the newest of the new, the world premiere of a work commissioned by Market Square Concerts just for this occasion. Philip Glass's 2nd String Quartet (“Company”) from 1984 adds to a program that includes “Achilles' Heel” by the ensemble's second violinist, Colin Jacobsen, and “Lachrymosa” by the Uzbek-born composer Dmitri Yanov Yanovsky.

The program concludes with one of the great quartets from the 19th Century, the Quartet in D Minor by Franz Schubert, known as the “Death and the Maiden” Quartet because it quotes from one of his songs as the basis of a set of variations in the slow movement.

To give you a little information about the world premiere – Graffiti dell'amante by Lisa Bielawa – I'll just quote from Ellen Hughes' press release about the concert.

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Composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa’s Graffiti dell’amante will receive its world premiere in a concert by the string quartet Brooklyn Rider with Ms. Bielawa as vocal soloist at 8 pm on Saturday, February 20, 2010 presented by Market Square Concerts at Market Square Church (20 S. 2nd St., Harrisburg, PA).

Written in Rome, where stories of love echo across centuries of art and poetry, Graffiti dell’amante is an open-ended song cycle for string quartet and soprano, in which the segments (called “Figures”) that are performed at each concert are selected by the audience members.

Ms. Bielawa explains, “Originally inspired by Roland Barthes’ playful yet poignant collection of poems A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, the piece uses various declarations of romantic Love to enact what Barthes calls the “Figures” of the Lover (“Absence,” “Devotion,” “Ravishment,” “Remembering,” etc.). The poems describe a great variety of subjects and narrators: male poet writes to a female Beloved; male poet writes a love poem from a woman’s point of view; female novelist (with a male pseudonym) writes dialogue for a male character in love; male poet secretly writes taboo love poetry to another man. The Lover declares him/herself to, from, and through so many faces!”

Each performance of Graffiti dell’amante can include a different subset and arrangement of the Figures, resulting in a different piece every time – which might be any length, containing any combination of possible predicaments in any order.

Because the audience selects the Figures to be performed, the piece will become a portrait of that group’s combined attitude toward love at that moment.

Lisa Bielawa is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition and is based at the American Academy in Rome until August 2010. Ms. Bielawa has written numerous works for voice, including her piece Chance Encounter, conceived with the soprano Susan Narucki, for twelve migrating instrumentalists and singer. Chance Encounter uses overheard speech and is meant to be performed in public places. It was premiered by Ms. Narucki and The Knights in Manhattan’s Seward Park, and was performed again at the Whitney Museum in February. The work has been recorded by Grammy Award-winning producer Adam Abeshouse for release on the Orange Mountain Music label.

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Ms. Bielawa has also been blogging from Rome - Lend Me Your Ears - not entirely about the composition we'll be hearing but her wide range of topics and interests will give you an insight into the time she was writing it and experiencing life in the Eternal City. The posts are at the WQXR website but they don't have a single link to the entire blog, so here are the four posts, listed in chronological order:

When in Rouen (November 16, 2009)
Extravagant Stories (November 30, 2009)
Voices from Above and Beyond (December 18, 2009)
Musicians Without Borders (January 25, 2010)

Okay, you might be thinking "that's not a lot of blogging," but after all she was living in Rome and supposed to be spending most of her time composing!

Brooklyn Rider: Commuting to Harrisburg

This weekend – which according to the weatherguessers looks like it might be snow-free - a string quartet called “Brooklyn Rider” comes to town. They'll be performing at the Market Square Church this Saturday at 8pm. An added bonus is the OPEN REHEARSAL, free and open to anyone, between 1:30 and 3:30 at the church that afternoon!

They'll be performing some very new works – including one so new it's the World Premiere, a work commissioned by Market Square Concerts. I'll be telling you more about Lisa Bielawa's Graffiti dell'amante in a separate post. In addition to works by quartet violinist Colin Jacobsen and a Silk-Road colleague, Dmitri Yanov Yanovsky, there's Philip Glass's 2nd String Quartet  ("Company," written in 1984) and one of the great quartets by Franz Schubert, the one known as “Death and the Maiden” which will also be the subject of a subsequent post.

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Considering it's probably the first thing an audience gets to know about a new ensemble, a group's name is a very important part of its identity.

It used to be easy to name yourself after your location or home-base (the Budapest or Tokyo Quartets) or after a famous violin maker (the Guarneri Quartet), perhaps a favorite composer who was a feature of your repertoire (the Beethoven or the Amadeus Quartets), a benefactor (the Juilliard Quartet, founded by and in residence at the school of music) or, less commonly in these days of greater equality, after the quartet's first violinist (the Busch Quartet).

But once many of the best or most obvious names have already been taken, then you need to go a little further afield. The Emerson Quartet chose the New England poet because of a common bond with his transcendental aesthetic.

More recently, the Daedalus Quartet took its name from the inventor in Greek mythology who fashioned wings that allowed him to fly and thus obtain his freedom, so it's a good metaphor for an artist looking to soar through this wonderful creation we call art (on the other hand, I don't believe anyone has ever called themselves the Icarus Quartet).

The Enso Quartet takes its name from a Japanese zen painting of a circle “that represents... perfection as well as imperfection, the moment of chaos that is creation, the emptiness of the void, the endless circle of life, and the fullness of the spirit.”

Names, then, become a kind of mission statement. Many of them create a sense of mystery (“I wonder what that means?”), something hopefully catchy in this age of intense marketing and box-office accountability.

The string quartet calling itself “Brooklyn Rider” (and not, at least officially, the “Brooklyn Rider String Quartet”) combines the obvious and the metaphysical. Yes, they're from Brooklyn but even if “The Brooklyn Quartet” wasn't already taken, it didn't really seem to cut it with a group that had its roots in Yo-Yo Ma's “Silk Road Project.” Their repertoire spans all styles and centuries of the quartet's legacy, standard and otherwise, infused with a sense of world music and international guests they'd worked with on “the road.” And since “Musicians Without Borders” already belongs to another organization, they had to find some middle-ground between the historical context from the 18th and 19th Century string quartet to its present-day relevance in the 21st Century.

So, is the “Rider” in deference to a Haydn quartet by that nickname? Not exactly. Is it evocative of the New York City subway system because they are frequent commuters between home and performance venues (as most musicians in New York City are)? No. Despite the fact it makes it sound like an Indie Rock Group, it's actually updating an early 20th Century interdisciplinary concept promoted by a Munich-based group of eclectic artists who combined painting and music, calling themselves “The Blue Rider” or “Der Blaue Reiter” which in turn took its name from a 1903 painting by Wassily Kandinsky. One composer associated with them was Arnold Schoenberg, who was both composer and painter (later, you can read my post about his ground-breaking 2nd String Quartet and its relationship to paintings as well as his not-exactly-suitable-for-Valentine's-Day personal life).

In this spirit, Brooklyn Rider has created an art gallery on their website showcasing the work of some of their friends in which the proceeds are used to support new commissioning projects.

While more traditional quartets might add a pianist for the Brahms Piano Quintet or another cellist for the Schubert C Major String Quintet, “Brooklyn Rider” is more likely to add one of their colleagues from “The Silk Road Project,” like the Chinese pipa virtuoso, Wu Man or the Persian composer and kamancheh player, Kayhan Kalhor. They also draw inspiration from the exploding array of cultures and artistic energy found in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, a place they also call home.

I hope you'll be able to join us for the wonderful, wide-ranging program Saturday at 8pm at Market Square Church in downtown Harrisburg. And please consider taking advantage of that open rehearsal – it's free, too – especially considering it gives you the opportunity to become a little better acquainted with brand new and very likely unfamiliar repertoire.

Dr. Dick

What do you do when you're in Rome?

If you're composer Lisa Bielawa, you'll be writing a new composition, whatever other Romans may be doing.

In 1884, Claude Debussy won the Prix de Rome, one of the most important and influential honors to be granted to young French artists. Before him, Hector Berlioz won the prize in 1830, where he put the finishing touches on a little something called his Symphonie fantastique.

Rome was always a destination for creative artists, whether it was painters, writers or musicians. In fact, in 1905, the United States got into the act, establishing our own version of The Rome Prize at the American Academy of Rome.

And it was announced today that Lisa Bielawa has received this year’s Rome Prize in Musical Composition. And she will be writing a new piece that has been commissioned by – drum roll, please – Market Square Concerts of Harrisburg PA which will be premiered at the February concert of the 2009-2010 season.

Here’s the official press release which you can also read here, and also find out about three premieres she has coming up in the next few weeks along with a new CD coming out in May!

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April 16, 2009—New York, NY—The American Academy in Rome announced today that Lisa Bielawa is a recipient of the 2009 Rome Prize in Musical Composition. Established in 1894 and chartered by an Act of Congress in 1905, the American Academy in Rome is a center that sustains independent artistic pursuits and humanistic studies. Annual Rome Prize fellowship winners are selected through a national competition, and travel to Rome to refine and expand their own professional, artistic, or scholarly aptitudes. The Academy's Rome Prize winners are at the center of a multi-disciplinary environment, where artists and scholars are encouraged to work collegially within and across disciplines.

This September, Ms. Bielawa will join 14 other artists (working in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Design, Historic Preservation and Conservation, Literature, Musical Composition, or Visual Arts) as well as 15 scholars (working in Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and early Modern, or Modern Italian Studies) for a year-long fellowship at the Academy, located on the Janiculum, Rome's highest hill. While there Ms. Bielawa will compose an extended work for the Brooklyn Rider string quartet and herself as vocalist. The piece, which has been commissioned by Market Square Concerts in Harrisburg, PA, will be modular, performable at different lengths and in different venues and contexts, with or without vocal sections.

Composer-vocalist Lisa Bielawa was born in San Francisco into a musical family. She played the violin and piano, sang, and wrote music from early childhood. Ms. Bielawa moved to New York two weeks after receiving her B.A. in Literature in 1990 from Yale University, and became an active participant in New York musical life. She began touring with the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1992, and in 1997 co-founded the MATA Festival, which celebrates the work of young composers. Ms. Bielawa takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. The New York Times describes her music as, "ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart," and Time Out New York praised her "prodigious gift for mingling persuasive melodicism with organic experimentation."
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Join us in February 20th, 2010, for another world premiere with Market Square Concerts and hear Lisa Bielawa’s brand new (and as yet unwritten) work which she and the Brooklyn Rider will perform at Market Square Church along with Philip Glass’s 5th String Quartet, Schubert’s “Death & the Maiden” Quartet as well as works by members of the Silk Road Ensemble.

I'll be telling you more about this concert and the up-coming season in future posts - not to forget SummerMusic 2009 this July as chamber music returns to the Mill - so just because the season is "ended" with the Guarneri Quartet doesn't mean there's nothing going on here till the Fall...

- Dr. Dick