Page 138 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

ABOUT THE PROGRAM BENJAMIN PESETSKY TIMO ANDRES (b. 1985)
Timo Andres was born in Palo Alto, California, grew up in rural Connecticut, and now lives and works in Brooklyn. He wrote Early to Rise, a roughly ten-minute string quartet, in spring 2013 on a commission from the Library of Congress for the Attacca Quartet. In his program note, Andres writes:
Early to Rise is very productive within a short span of time. . . . It’s also the most recent in a series of Schumann-inspired pieces I’ve written; this time, the seed is a five-note accompanimental figure from his late piano cycle Gesänge der Frühe (Morning Songs). At first, Early to Rise uses this figure in a canon, gently cycling through harmo- nies while its rhythms rub against each other in expanding and contracting patterns.
The following three sections are all built on long crescendi, increasing in register and intensity until they reach “tipping points.”
The first violin instigates the second section with a sped-up version of the five-note figure, forced constantly to modulate by the lower strings’ contrary motion. A chaconne is the foundation of the third movement, though unlike traditional chaconnes, it modulates with each repetition, forming longer, upward-striving wedges.
In the final section, momentum builds in the opposite direction with a simple downward- drifting chorale, picking up speed until it reaches a frenetic conclusion.
GABRIEL KAHANE (b. 1981)
Early to Rise
Gabriel Kahane is a singer-songwriter, pianist, theater artist, and composer who lives in Brooklyn. He was born in Venice Beach, California, and is the son of pianist Jeffrey Kahane and his wife, Martha, a clinical psychologist.
Come On All You Ghosts sets three poems by the San Francisco poet Matthew Zapruder (b. 1967). Kahane wrote the piece
in 2011 on a commission from Bravo! Vail Valley Chamber Music Festival and sang it himself with the Calder Quartet at its premiere. It also appears on his album The Fiction Issue, performed with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider.
In his program note, Kahane writes:
In each of the poems, Zapruder seems to me preoccupied with marrying the mundanity of contemporary life to spiritual and philosophical concerns.
In the first poem, “The Prelude,” Zapruder turns
on a dime from meditations on the qualities of
Diet Coke to the existential loneliness of Samuel Coleridge. The epistolary “Letter to a Lover” begins with an homage to the opening bars of the exquisite slow movement of Thomas Adès’s string quartet Arcadiana, but develops into something of a pop ballad, albeit one accompanied by string quartet only. The last song is the jaunty “April Snow,” depicting a scene of a snowed-in airport terminal; its language is simultaneously naturalistic and absurd, psychologically grounded and yet surreal.
The songs, like the poems, live in a kind of ecstatic purgatory between popular and classical idioms, and it’s my hope that I’ve honored Zapruder’s simultaneous commitment to irreverent and
spiritual concerns in my setting of his work.
Come On All You Ghosts
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The Music at Tippet Rise