Program Notes
Juniper Chamber Music Festival
Saturday, February 2, 2008, 8 p.m.
Southern Theatre

            Sang-Hee Lee, piano
            Sang-Jin Kim, viola
            Marjorie Bagley, violin
            Roger Braun, percussion
            Anthony DiSanza, percussion
            Joseph Van Hassel, percussion
            Kristin Agee, percussion
            Steven Huang, Artistic Collaborator/Conductor
            Mark Phillips, Composer In Residence for the Festival Performance

About the Artists

Founded and directed by cellist Michael Carrera and violinist Marjorie Bagley, the Juniper Chamber Music Festival has brought world class musicians to Logan, Utah, each winter since 2002.  At the time, the husband and wife were on the faculty of Utah State University, where they renamed, for its second season, the USU String and Piano Chamber Music Festival after the state’s abundant evergreen.  In 2002, the couple came to serve on the faculty of Ohio University in Athens.  In addition to its annual Winter Festival in Utah, the Juniper tours internationally and is particularly active with outreach and educational work.  A mini-residency, featuring both informal public school sessions and master classes for student ensembles of the Chamber Music Connection, will be an integral part of the Juniper’s visit to Central Ohio.

Mark Phillips (born 1952)

            Porch Music (composed 2007)                            World Premiere

            I.  Before Dawn

            II.  Morning in Appalachia

            III.  Playing Outdoors

            IV.  Dark Clouds over the Coalfields

            V.  Saturday Night

            VI.  Porch Swing Lullaby

Born in Philadelphia in 1952, Mark Phillips was raised in Parkersburg, West Virginia.  He earned his B.M. from West Virginia University, and his M.M. and D.M. degrees from Indiana University, where he was a Visiting Instructor of composition from 1982 to 1984.  Since 1984, Phillips has been on the School of Music faculty at Ohio University, where he was a Presidential Research Scholar from 1999 to 2004.  In June 2007, he was granted the school’s highest faculty honor, Distinguished Professor.

As a composer, too, Phillips has been showered with honors.  His orchestral work Turning won the 1988 Barlow International Competition.  His Rain Dance won the 1994 Newly Published Flute Music Competition.  He was the 2005 recipient of the Ohioana Library Association’s Music Citation.  He was Pi Kappa Lambda’s Composer of the Year in 2006.  Other honors include the 1990 Delius Chamber Music Award, ASCAP Standards Awards, an ASCAP Raymond Hubbell Award, Meet the Composer grants, and fellowships from both the Ohio Arts Council and the Indiana Arts Commission.

Porch Music is a six movement work based on rural Appalachian folk tales and traditions.  Phillips, who is Composer in Residence for the Festival Performance, described the work as follows:

The inspiration for Porch Music came to me during a stretch of time in the summer of 2006 when storms damaged the electric service equipment at our house and we endured weeks of nearly constant power outages.  As I sat around reading, unable to get much work done on another project I needed to finish on my computer, I began to think about a time before life became so dependent on electricity for comfort, productivity, and entertainment.  Being old enough to remember life before computers and air conditioning were ubiquitous, I found myself daydreaming and time-traveling back to those days.  But then the brakes on my time machine failed and my daydreams careened even further back to a time I know only from reading and listening to the stories of folks much older then myself — a time when electricity and plumbing were scarce; when most Appalachian workers’ days were filled with strenuous physical labor in fields, forests, factories, and coal mines; when Saturday was just another day for hard work and weekends didn’t begin until Saturday night; when porches provided a necessary escape from the heat on a summer evening and a place for informal social gatherings; a time when almost everything was homemade, including music and other entertainments.

Composed in 2007, Porch Music is receiving its world premiere performance this evening, with the composer in attendance.

Roger Braun

           Independent Streams (composed 2007)                World Premiere

Eclectic percussionist Associate Professor Roger Braun is the Director of Percussion Studies at Ohio University.  As an undergraduate, he earned highest honors for his Bachelor of Music at the University of Michigan, and received his Master of Music from Eastman.  He has taught at the University of Michigan -- Flint, Albion College, Interlochen Arts Camp, and the University of Wisconsin -- Stevens Point, where he was Associate Professor of Jazz Studies and Percussion from 1991 to 1997.

Both his performance experience and his teaching stretch across the spectrum of jazz, popular, classical, and world music.  Among his many collaborators have been the marimbist Keiko Abe, xylophonist Bernard Woma of Ghana, Kathleen Battle, and jazz musicians Billy Taylor, Lyle Mays, and Bob Mintzer.  Braun is a founding member of the Biakuye Unity Ensemble, specializing in African music and dance.  He is also a percussionist with Los Viejos Blanquitos, a Latin jazz ensemble.  In addition to his work with the Juniper Festival, he is a member of the New World Percussion Duo and the percussion quintet Galaxy, and is principal percussionist of the Ohio Valley Symphony.

Tan Dun (born Simao, Hunan Province, August 18, 1957)

            Elegy:  Snow in June:  Concerto for Violoncello and Four Percussionists (composed 1991)

   Images:  Jeff Widener, Pulitzer Prize Photographer (AP):  “Man in Front of Tanks –Tiananmen Square”  

Having been born in 1957 in Hunan Province, Tan Dun suffered through China’s Cultural Revolution, working in rural rice paddies.  Among his fellow workers, he organized impromptu musical performances using just about any sound-producing object at hand.  Following Chairman Mao’s death, when the Central Conservatory in Beijing re-opened in 1978, Tan was fortunate, and talented, enough to be among the thirty students chosen to fill its first class.  This was Tan’s introduction not only to Western classical music but even to much of the traditional music of China, which Mao had suppressed in favor of what Tan has called “propaganda music or straight revolutionary songs.”

By the early 1980s, Tan had become a leader of the “New Wave” of Chinese creativity, prompting the government to ban his music briefly in 1983.  In 1986, he accepted a fellowship to Columbia University and moved to the United States.  There, he began to accumulate awards, including a 2001 Oscar for his score to Ang Lee’s film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  

Tan’s Elegy:  Snow in June, for cello and four percussionists, was commissioned by the New Music Consort and composed in 1991.  The title image derives from a thirteenth century Chinese drama by Kuan Han-Ching, of which the composer has provided the following synopsis:

The ghost of a young girl has returned to earth to tell her story, and to avenge her wrongful execution.  When she was a child, her father left her in the care of a wealthy widow, who makes her living as a loan shark.  The girl grew up to be beautiful and virtuous, and lived happily until one day the widow was mugged in a dark alley, and rescued by an unscrupulous old man and his son.  As payment, they demand that the widow and her daughter marry them.  The widow refuses, but allows the two men to come home with her.  The widow slowly warms to the old man, but the girl has no intention of marrying his wicked son.  Devising a scheme to kill the widow, the boy purchases poison from the local apothecary and puts it in her soup.  But the widow gives her bowl to the old man, who drinks it and dies.  The son accuses the girl of poisoning his father, and the case goes to trial.  In an effort to spare her adopted mother, the girl confesses to a crime she didn't commit.  As she is led to her death, she proclaims that if she is executed unjustly, the region will suffer a drought, her blood will run up a piece of white silk instead of dripping down to the ground, and snow will fall even though it's midsummer.  Sure enough, snow begins to fall as the girl's spirit leaves the earth.

Tan wrote Elegy specifically in response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, but more generally in tribute to innocent victims everywhere.  It is a set of variations on a theme that gradually comes together at the center of the work, then just as slowly dissipates.  The New Music Consort premiered the work at New York’s Symphony Space on June 26, 1991.  Tonight’s performance will be accompanied by images from the massacre by Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press photographer Jeff Widener.

Antonín Dvorák (born Nelahozeves, Bohemia, September 8, 1841; died Prague, May 1, 1904)

            Piano Quartet in E-flat major, op. 87 (B. 162; S. 108) (composed 1889)

                        Allegro con fuoco
                        Lento
                        Allegro moderato, grazioso
                        Allegro, ma non troppo  

Berlin publisher Fritz Simrock spent five years bugging Antonín Dvorák to write a second piano quartet as a follow up to the Quartet in D major, op. 23, of 1875.  "If you only started working on a piano quartet as you have been promising me for such a long time," Simrock urged in early 1887.  He was referring to a pledge the composer had made in 1885 but intended to fulfill on his own schedule.  Dvorák wanted to complete a number of large-scale works he had planned -- including his oratorio St. Ludmila, op. 71, the second set of his Slavonic Dances, op. 72, and his opera The Jacobin, op. 84 -- before devoting his efforts to another piano quartet.

Simrock wrote again in a summer 1888 letter, "I should like to have from you a piano quartet -- and you promised it to me a long time ago!  What's the matter with it?"  His persistence finally paid off when Dvorák devoted the summer of 1889 to writing the Quartet in E-flat major, op. 87. Twice that year the composer had been invited to join the faculty of the Prague Conservatory, but fearing that such a commitment would interfere with his composing, he twice refused.  Two years later, though, he would accept, only to take a leave of absence for his sojourn to the United States beginning in 1892.  Between July 10th and August 19th of 1889, however, Dvorák worked on little beside the quartet.

Often overshadowed by the more popular Piano Quintet, op. 81, the Quartet, op. 87 actually shares many of the former's virtues, especially a deep and rich folk influence.  The quartet opens with a solemnly vigorous unison string theme answered by the piano in a lighter vein.  This battle of moods is eventually resolved by the end of the Allegro con fuoco.  The emotional journey of the Lento traverses five themes in an ABA structure with a coda.  The cello presents the earnest first theme and the violin the calmer second.  The ardent midsection in C-sharp minor leads to the return of the opening section, but with the last three themes transposed.  The scherzo (Allegro moderato, grazioso) features melodic opening and closing sections surrounding a central "Oriental" passage.  Some listeners hear echoes of the cimbalom, a dulcimer-like Hungarian folk instrument, in this movement.  The forceful finale includes a development that modulates adventurously, not reaching the tonic until nearly the movement's conclusion.  The Quartet, op. 87 premiered on November 11, 1890, in Prague's Umelecká Beseda (House of Art).  Fritz Simrock's patience was rewarded.

Program notes by Jay Weitz, Senior Consulting Database Specialist for music, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio.  He is a contributing performing arts critic for the weekly alternative newspaper Columbus Alive (http://www.columbusalive.com)

| Back to Top | Back to Programs | Chamber Music Columbus Home |