Concerts from the Library of Congress 2011-2012 CONCERTS FROM
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Concerts from the Library of Congress 2011-2012 CONCERTS FROM The Leonora Jackson and W. Duncan McKim Fund in the Library of Congress East Meets West Daniel Hope, violin Gaurav Mazumdar, sitar Simon Crawford-Phillips, piano Vishal Nagar, tabla Friday, October 28, 2011 Coolidge Auditorium Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Building THE MCKIM FUND in the Library of Congress was created in 1970 through a bequest of Mrs. W. Duncan McKim, concert violinist, who won international prominence under her maiden name, Leonora Jackson. The fund supports the commissioning and performance of chamber music for violin and piano. The audio-visual equipment in the Coolidge Auditorium was endowed in part by the Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund in the Library of Congress. Please request ASL and ADA accommodations five days in advance of the concert at 202- 707-6362 or [email protected]. Latecomers will be seated at a time determined by the artists for each concert. Children must be at least seven years old for admittance to the concerts. Other events are open to all ages. Reserved tickets not claimed by five minutes before the beginning of the event will be distributed to stand-by patrons. Please take note: UNAUTHORIZED USE OF PHOTOGRAPHIC AND SOUND RECORDING EQUIPMENT IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. PATRONS ARE REQUESTED TO TURN OFF THEIR CELLULAR PHONES, PAGERS, ALARM WATCHES, OR OTHER NOISE-MAKING OBJECTS THAT WOULD DISRUPT THE PERFORMANCE. Thank you. The Library of Congress Coolidge Auditorium Friday, October 28, 2011 – 8:00 pm East Meets West DANIEL HOPE, violin GAURAV MAZUMDAR, sitar SIMON CRAWFORD-PHILLIPS, piano VISHAL NAGAR, tabla PROGRAM Popular Spanish Songs, arranged for violin and piano Manuel DE FALLA (1876-1946) Distance de fée, for violin and piano Tōru TAKEMITSU (1930-1996) Tzigane, for violin and luthéal Maurice RAVEL (1875-1937) Alborada del gracioso, from Miroirs, arranged for violin and piano Homage to Ravi Shankar, for ensemble Gaurav MAZUMDAR Romance, for violin and piano Ellen Taaffe ZWILICH (McKim Fund commission) (born 1939) Intermission Romanian Folk Dances, arranged for violin and piano Béla BARTÓK (1881-1945) Kaddish, arranged for violin and piano Maurice RAVEL Homage to Yehudi Menuhin, for ensemble Gaurav MAZUMDAR ABOUT THE PROGRAM Western composers have always held a fascination with, and have been inspired by folk music of other cultures – from the “Turkish” sound cultivated by Mozart and Beethoven; to the sound worlds evoked by Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky after having heard Italian folk song; to the influence of traditional Spanish music on composers as diverse as Glinka, Bizet and Debussy, to name but a few. But perhaps even more fascinating to consider are those revelatory works produced by Western composers of the twentieth century who have reconciled their modernist language with the indigenous music of their own cultures: i.e., de Falla, Albéniz, Granados and Turina with Spanish music; Musorgsky and Stravinsky with Russian music; Bartók and Kodály with Hungarian music; Szymanowski with Polish music; Takemitsu with Japanese music; Vaughan Williams, Holst and Delius with English music; etc. In each of these cases, the influence of indigenous music has provided the inspiration and the means for extending the expressive languages of each of these composers – who, in fusing contemporary Western compositional techniques with the musical vocabulary of age- old folk traditions, have contributed new and vital works to the repertoire. The works to be performed on this evening’s concert represent their composers’ responses to cross-cultural stimuli. “East Meets West,” writes Daniel Hope, “is an examination of how we are influenced by faraway places. Whether it is Western composers whose eastward glances indulge their creative fantasies, or Eastern composers reaching out to what must seem like strange customs of the Western world, it is my hope to identify some of these influences and their effects, in all their similarities and differences.” Attentive listening to Indian classical music may rightly evoke a sense of familiarity, as it shares with Western music similar structural elements such as melodic patterns (ragas), rhythmic patterns (talas, literally, “clap,” most often performed by the tabla, or drums), and the use of a scalar octave divided into twelve semitones. While Western music employs the “equal temperament” tuning system (where each note is separated from another by an identical frequency ration), that of Indian classical music uses “just intonation” tuning, based on the natural overtone series of a given note, giving rise to notes that in Western parlance may be called “microtones” – infinitesimal divisions between the notes to which our Western ears are attuned, and which endow Indian music with its particular “flavor.” These microtones may create up to fourteen “pitch positions” in a given Indian scale, generating a vast number of possible scales on which a musical work may be based. With its fundamental reliance on the raga, or melodic and harmonic pattern upon which the musician improvises an entire composition, the performing tradition of Indian classical music is a more extemporaneous one than that of Western classical music, which stresses a faithful adherence to the notated score. In its improvisatory tradition, therefore, Indian classical music more closely resembles the performance practices cultivated in Western jazz. The classical music of India is one of the world’s most ancient, based on traditions described in Vedic texts (the oldest Hindi scriptural writings) more than three thousand years ago. Indian music today, reflecting the influences of dozens of cultures that have shaped it over the course of millennia, remains a vital part of Indian culture, where it provides a source of spiritual inspiration as much as of pure entertainment. Indian music first received widespread attention in the West largely due to the vision of two exceptional musicians: American violinist Yehudi Menuhin and Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar, whose legendary collaboration on several performances and recordings beginning in 1966, collectively titled West Meets East, popularized the rich traditions of Indian music throughout the world, effectively demonstrating that the similarities shared by the music of these two great cultures outweigh their differences. Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) was born in New York of Byelorussian Jewish immigrant parents. A violin prodigy at an early age, Menuhin’s parents moved to Paris in the 1920s to allow him to study with composer and violinist George Enescu. Menuhin was soon performing throughout the world; by the age of thirteen, he had obtained a recording contract with the precursor of EMI Music, a contract which was to last until Menuhin’s final recording in January 1999 (with violin soloist Daniel Hope), made only months before his death – a recording industry “record.” Menuhin’s 1932 recording as soloist (at age sixteen) in Sir Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto, conducted by the composer himself, remains in print until this day. Even from his youth, Menuhin’s perspective was a broadly humanitarian one. He performed for Allied troops during World War II; with composer Benjamin Britten at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after its liberation in 1945; and in Berlin – the first Jewish musician to perform in Germany following the Holocaust – under legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, in a demonstration of support both for Furtwängler (who had been criticized for remaining in Nazi Germany during the war, although never as a Party member) and as an “act of reconciliation” for Germany itself. During his first trip to India in 1952, Menuhin met sitarist Ravi Shankar, with whom he went on to collaborate in their legendary cross-cultural recording, West Meets East, which won a Grammy Award in 1967 for Best Chamber Music Performance, and which opened the ears of the world to its diverse cultures’ rich musical traditions – creating an interest and an awareness of world music that continues unabated until this day. Ever the musical egalitarian, and defiant of genre-based categorization, Menuhin also collaborated with jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, and commissioned American composer Alan Hovhaness to write a concerto for violin, sitar and Western orchestra, titled Shambala (1970), for himself and Shankar to perform. Music, for Menuhin, was a vital and life-affirming element of human culture, and to that end he directed untiring efforts into establishing schools, concerts, competitions, foundations and charitable organizations in support of musicians and their training. Menuhin’s legacy also survives through the insightfully considered performance traditions that he established of any work that he approached. [Dingbat] Ravi Shankar was born in 1920 into a Bengali family in Varanasi (Benares), in northern India, the youngest of seven brothers. Shankar was already a well-known sitarist and composer in India when his recording with Yehudi Menuhin catapulted Shankar to international renown. Beginning in 1966, Shankar’s collaboration with the Beatles’ George Harrison (who studied the sitar with Shankar that year) led that group to incorporate elements of Indian music into their own work. In 1967, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, which included a Indian music-influenced song by Harrison, won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, and validated the widespread use of Indian music in Western pop music, a genre known as “raga rock.” Shankar went on to perform at the Monterey Pop Festival, at the Concert for Bangladesh (the recording of which earned Shankar his second Grammy Award), and at the Woodstock Festival – all events that defined the sound of their era. Shankar’s international collaborations, aside from that with Menuhin, included those with Japanese musicians Hosan Yamamoto and Musumi Miyashita (performers on the shakuhachi and koto, respectively), as well as with Western musicians such as flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal and composer Philip Glass. At ninety-one years of age, Shankar continues to perform throughout the world, most often with his daughter Anoushka, and is widely regarded as India’s best known musician and its greatest cultural ambassador.