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a d l o l t 2019 2-3, November w y h o e a u d s a s r w u e n b m ’s e l e m arly light deep im be sile e r nce beauty of a moon un lit n br igh o t t ke he n h e time t art o be starts singing st ill the y c am e i li s k h e a a l l l i b o e n b e a u t t i i f f f u u u l l w w w h h h i i i l l l e e e t t h h h e e e e e e a a a r r r t t h h h l l l a a s s t t t s s s November 2, 2019, 8pm AISD Performing Arts Center November 3, 2019, 7:30pm St. Luke’s United Methodist Church Craig Hella Johnson Artistic Director & Conductor Los Angeles Guitar Quartet Texas Guitar Quartet Austin Guitar Quartet Doug Harvey Cello Season Sustaining Underwriter Formerly South Texas Money Management SAN ANTONIO | AUSTIN | HOUSTON | DALLAS CORPUS CHRISTI | BRENHAM 1 PROGRAM COMPOSER NOTES Dear Friends, Chorale Chorale was originally commissioned by the New York City Classical Guitar Welcome to this very special evening of music for Society for the New York City Guitar Orchestra in 2012. It was re-imagined for voices and guitars! Although it is true to a certain extent guitar quartet in this new version for the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet. Based on a throughout the world, it goes without saying that in simple theme of three notes ascending in whole steps, Chorale is inspired by the Texas, the guitar holds a place of great prominence— Renaissance and Baroque choral music that I listened to in my youth. Although perhaps we could say it is our state instrument. The I’ve integrated some of my favorite jazz harmonies and rhythms into the fabric of guitar is at the heart of so much of the expression of the music, I feel that, at its core, it very much has an “early music” sensibility. who we are. It feels extraordinarily special that the two – Frederic Hand www.frederichand.com central works on tonight’s program were birthed here in Texas: Conspirare premiered Nico Muhly’s How Little You Are in 2014 and tonight we will premiere a work we commissioned: Kile Smith’s The Dawn’s Early For the Guitar Light. And tonight is also the premiere of a new instrumentation of Reena Esmail’s This piece is about that first moment of trust, of softening. About the most piece, When the Guitar. You will also here Reena Esmail’s “To the Guitar,” in a new inward moments of the human experience, of realizing that ‘breakthroughs’ often instrumentation created for this performance. don’t have the hard edge, the burst of energy that the word implies, but that they can be about finding tender, warm, deeply resonant spaces within ourselves Poets and songwriters have long written about the guitar’s distinctive, plaintive as well. When the guitar can forgive the past, it starts singing. emotive qualities. Some of you remember Cary Ratcliff’s setting of Neruda’s “Ode – Reena Esmail www.reenaesmail.com to the Guitar”, part of Ode to Common Things that Conspirare recorded in 2014 (and which our Symphonic Choir performed the Austin Symphony Orchestra The Dawn’s Early Light performed two years prior). Of all the national anthems, “The Star Spangled Banner” is the only one that’s a question. Is the flag still there? The flag we saw yesterday, before night and We are honored and delighted to collaborate with the Los Angeles Guitar bombs fell on this land of the free and the brave, is it still there? Quartet, the Texas Guitar Quartet and the newly formed Austin Guitar Quartet. Within these works, the guitars play across a broad spectrum of musical style and I pondered this while reading Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims technique and are woven throughout the program in extraordinary ways, both by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. Her 1883 autobiography is the first book musically and symbolically. by a Native American woman. Sarah was born Thocmetony (“shell-flower”) A world premiere is always an exciting moment. We are delighted to welcome Winnemucca around 1844 in what is now Nevada. Through lectures and writings back Canticle composer Kile Smith. His music is compelling on many levels; his she became a tireless advocate for her continually oppressed people. compositional voice and musical contributions are significant and deeply impactful. Sarah Winnemucca’s text addresses the significant divisions in our human family. Good and bad interactions between Paiutes and whites fill her memoir. Surprising You, our cherished listeners, become the midwives of the new work and listeners to me was her learning “The Star-Spangled Banner” from her grandfather, the are partners in launching this new Austin-born work into the world. tribal chief. He had welcomed the newcomers enthusiastically, and had worked with the U.S. Army. He believed that light-skinned and dark-skinned peoples, It is our ongoing intention that tonight’s program, and our offerings throughout separated at the Creation, were now being reunited in one family. the season and in coming years, engage women’s voices which have been silenced and under-represented. It is a major Conspirare priority to commission, perform When Sarah finally heard white people sing this anthem, though, it was different and champion music that contributes to the forward movement of equality and from the song she had learned. And so I wondered what a “Star-Spangled justice for all. Banner”—untethered to memory, feeling its way through pride, atrocity, and respect for an ideal—might sound like. I imagined a wonder at our now We are so grateful for your presence and engagement with us tonight. I look well-known words in this early light, with their questions and fear. Does the forward to experiencing this wonder-filled music and to sharing music with you flag still fly? Are the people still free and brave? But the wonder is Sarah’s, throughout the season. who will see herself—and everyone—as beautiful. She wants everyone to be Warmly, happy with her. – Kile Smith kilesmith.com (see bio page 19) 2 3 COMPOSER NOTES CONT. How Little You Are Part five begins with some remembered music from the first movement, How Little You Are is an extended meditation on the words of pioneer and as this settles, a solo alto begins telling a story — a nocturne — about women in the 19th century. Organized in five large sections, it is scored for hearing a cowboy singing songs in the distance. A single guitar begins chorus and three guitar quartets. The text for the first movement has a typical playing in an explicitly folk style, and the remaining eleven instruments fight combination of an intense reverence for nature combined with the practical him harmonically, and then give way. This guitar outlines a simple harmonic realities of living on a frontier; the chorus functions, here, in a declamatory cycle of thirteen chords, and then the chorus enters, first wordlessly, and then fashion, and there are extended sections for guitars alone. The music pauses with further narration. We hear a distant fragment of “O bury me not on the and repeats the text, “We could see the silvery gold of the willows, the russet lone prairie,” and after a short silence, another guitar enters with a 12-bar and bronze of the currants, and patches of cheerful green showed where the cycle, and we hear a fragment of ‘I’m thinking of my dear old mother, ten pines were.” The movement ends simply, with the voices of two women. thousand miles away.’ These two traditional songs then dissolve into a wash of songs delivered in infinite individual tempi. A thousand tiny percussive The second movement describes the everyday horrors of losing a child. insects appear, staccato and arid, and the chorus sings wordlessly. The Musically, the piece is an extended rhythmic process, spinning and guitars dissolve and fade. turning around a single repeated text fragment: “do you remember?” This movement is dedicated to the composer David Lang, whose music I would like to thank Tyne Rafaeli for her help in culling this text. is particularly adept at describing the abstractions of grief, and whose – Nico Muhly nicomuhly.com music was an explicit influence on me here. Under the text describing the construction of a little boy’s coffin, we begin to hear dry, anxious guitar chords, which reappear later in the work. Nico Muhly (b.1981) is an American composer whose influences range from American minimalism to the The third movement describes a moonlit night with a strange ghostly animal Anglican choral tradition. The recipient of commissions presence. The writer describes a “weird beauty,” and here, the strange from The Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, Los chorus-like effect of many guitars playing the same pitch tremolando evokes Angeles Philharmonic, Tallis Scholars and St. John’s this sentiment. After an extended instrumental introduction, the key shifts, College, Cambridge and others, he has written more and the chorus enters, singing the text simply. Over this, some of the women than 100 works for the concert stage, including the and men start imitating distant howls: alluring and sad. Between the third opera Marnie (2017), which premiered at the English and fourth movements is an interlude — a brief expression of fast music, National Opera and was staged by the Metropolitan rare in this piece.