PROGRAM NOTES
Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972)
MILAGROS FOR STRING QUARTET
Born in Berkeley, California, Gabriela Lena Frank experienced the power of sound at age 4, when she received her first hearing aid. She had been born with near-profound hearing loss, and recalled in an interview: “The air just came to life when they turned it on.” Later, the summer before her senior year of high school, a different kind of sonic epiphany dawned for Frank when she walked into the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s hallways for a summer program: “I grew up in that day,” she noted. From that moment on, she shifted her career aspirations to composition.
Frank’s works are imbued with the sounds of her Peruvian-Chinese-Jewish-Lithuanian roots. Milagros (Miracles) is a set of eight movements, each depicting an every-day miraculous moment in Peru. The composer’s note for the work follows:
Milagros (“Miracles”) is inspired by my mother’s homeland of Perú. It has been a remarkable, often difficult, yet always joyous experience for me to visit, again and again, this small Andean nation that is home to not only foggy desert coasts but also Amazonian wetlands. Usually a religious and marvelous occurrence, milagro here refers to the sights and sounds of Perú’s daily life, both past and present, that I’ve stumbled upon in my travels. While probably ordinary to others, to me, as a gringa-latina, they are quietly miraculous, and are portrayed in eight short movements as follows:
I. Milagrito — Capilla del Camino (“Shrine by the Road”): A brief, earnest, and somewhat austere solo violin opening pays homage to the ubiquitous tiny Catholic shrines erected along the highways throughout the altiplano, or highlands, silently honoring those who have been killed in roadside accidents. These shrines are humble standouts against large expansive landscapes, seemingly unchanging through time.
II. Milagrito— Zampoñas Rotas (“Broken Panpipes”): A depiction of ceramic panpipes found at the Cahuachi Temple that were ritualistically broken by a fiery pre-Inca civilization, the Nazca (200 BC to 500 AD), this movement has a violent, jagged-edge quality, employing motifs commonly found in panpipe and other wind instrument music.
III. Milagrito — Mujeres Cantando (“Women Singing”): Inspired by the sound of indigenous women singing, this movement exaggerates their “clustery” pitch and how their voices separate and converge.
IV. Milagrito — Danza de Tingo María (“Dance of Tingo María”): As one who avoids the largely impenetrable selvas, or jungles, I did take away a strong impression of this border jungle town as lively and cacophonous. The relentless rhythm and the melodic line of pizzicatos inspired by water drums drive this movement.
V. Milagrito — Sombras de Amantaní (“Shadows of Amantaní”): The remarkable starry nights of this barren island in Lake Titicaca between Perú and Bolivia made for eerie shadows that I could not dodge on my nocturnal walks.
VI. Milagrito — Adios a Churín (“Goodbye to Churín”): Churín is a small city on the side of a mountain with seemingly little horizontal ground, famous for its healing bath waters. I visited during a time when it was on the verge of becoming a ghost town as its youth were migrating in droves to urban coastal cities. Allusions to guitar music are made against a melancholy singing cello line.
VII. Milagrito — Danza de los Muñecos (“Dance of the Dolls”): Playful in character, this movement is inspired by the brightly colored, almost mannequin-like dolls from the colonial era that are found in small museums and private collections.
VIII. Milagrito — Capilla del Camino: Throughout my travels over the years, these capilla sightings have been constant and unyielding, as I expect they will always be as I continue to travel in the future. Where the second violin introduced the piece with una capilla, it is the first violin who takes up the capilla theme and ends our journey for now. — Gabriela Lena Frank
Jacqueline Nova (1935-1975)
CREACIÓN DE LA TIERRA
Within the relatively short span of the last century, the combination of electricity and music has irrevocably revolutionized composed sound. In 1907, Ferruccio Busoni published a book entitled Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music, in which he talked about the possibilities of using electricity in music. In the 1920s, electronic instruments such as the Theremin, Ondes-Martenot, and Hammond Organ were invented, and integrated into works of avant-garde classical composers. In the 1950s, composers utilized electronic reel-to-reel tape, and a decade later “New York Minimalists” in the 1960s were creating music for magnetic tape alone, experimenting with phasing it between the two reels, looping in and out of sync.
Most of the names associated with electronic music are men, but during this same time period in Bogotá, Columbia, Jacqueline Nova had matriculated at the Bogotá Conservatory, graduating with a degree in composition. She would later go on to study with Alberto Ginastera and Luigi Nono, and would become “one of the finest Columbian composers of the 20th century and a progressive exponent of trends that dominated contemporary music in the 1960, including aleatory and electronic techniques.” She would become an active proponent of the latter through writing and lectures.
Nova completed Creación de la Tierra in 1972. The work is a recording meant to “explore the boundaries between music and noise,” and features the electronically altered sounds of the indigenous U’wa peoples of northeastern Columbia as they chant creation stories of the beginning of the world. One of her most famous electroacoustic works, it was installed as recently as late 2019/early 2020 at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston. Nova died at age 40 from bone cancer.
Paulinho Nogueira (1929-2003)
BACHIANINHA NOS. 1 & 2
Guitarist and composer Paulinho Nogueira came from a musical family, and soon became a fixture of the burgeoning bossa nova scene in his native Brazil, often featured in nightclubs and on the television show “O Fina da Bossa.” After a shift in musical trends, which left fewer opportunities for bossa nova guitarists, Nogueira focused on teaching and writing books on pedagogy. Additionally, he invented an instrument called the craviola alongside his friend, the renowned maker, Giannini, which was eventually picked up by Led Zepplin’s guitarist, Jimmy Page.
Musically, his compositions evolved into a more classical style, and he became known for his “soft” sound, partly a result of a habit for keeping his fingernails extremely short. Like Villa-Lobos, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach was an influence on Nogueira whose first composition for solo guitar was the Bachianinha No. 1. Originally titled Sama no Céu (Samba in Heaven), Nogueira changed the name in homage to Bach, and the hint of resemblance it bears in its opening melody to Villa-Lobos’ own Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5. Bachianinha No. 2 has a slightly more melancholic tinge. Both works are delightful miniatures.
Clarice Assad (b. 1978)
OBRIGADO FOR MANDOLIN AND STRING QUARTET
Clarice Assad builds on a long tradition of Assad family musicians, all hailing from Brazil—her father, uncle, and aunt are all accomplished and celebrated in the field. Assad herself is prolific, and draws interests and influences from an enormous range of genres and international styles. In addition to her work as a composer, Assad leads Voxploration, an exploration of the capabilities and sound possibilities of the human voice. Assad’s program note for Obrigado follows, in full.
“Obrigado” in Portuguese means “thank you.” The idea for this piece came from a desire of mine to explore the music, chants and rhythms of an Afro-Brazilian religion called Umbanda. The music consists of simple melodies, with no harmonic support, which is accompanied by vigorous, complex rhythmic patterns underneath. I was introduced to this music as a child, and some of it, especially the rhythms, make up a significant part of my earliest musical memories.
As I wrote the piece, I found myself being deeply lured into the very source of this faith, which seems to have first appeared in the early African Yorùbá mythology. The Yorùbá religion (originated in Southern Nigeria) is extraordinarily rich, abundant in spiritual philosophy such as life after death and reincarnation. Overall, it carries beautiful messages of substance over matter, intangible values, and it honors the transcendent. Religious practices were common in the worship of divinities called Orishas (in Portuguese, orixás). An orisha is an entity, that acts as an ‘intermediate’ force between people and the supernatural. They can also be viewed as deities, because they can control certain elements in nature.
I have a vague idea of what Yoruba music sounded like in its original form before it was introduced to many parts of the world as a result of slavery in the Americas as early as the 16th century. But it is not wrong to assume that African drumming and its intricate, complex polyrhythm played a huge role in the construction of the mixture it produced while in contact with other cultures and musics of the world. In Brazil, for example, samba and olodum were born out of ‘mother rhythms’ called after African regions such as Angola and Nago, respectively.
In writing Obrigado, I carefully listened to over one hundred chants and chose the ones I resonated the most with. The work is written in 11 movements and loosely follows the traditional religious practice of a Brazilian Umbanda ceremony. From its opening chants, through the honoring of each of the most important Orishas until the final closing anthem, which sends out a powerful message of gratitude for the gift of life. — Clarice Assad
Kathryn J Allwine Bacasmot is a pianist/harpsichordist, musicologist, music and cultural critic, and freelance writer. A graduate of New England Conservatory, she writes program annotations for ensembles nationwide.
