PROGRAM NOTES

Dinuk Wijeratne (b. 1978)
 Two Pop Songs on Antique Poems: 1. “A Letter from the After-life”

In this mashup, centuries in the making, the Sri Lanken-born Canadian composer Dinuk Wijeratne was inspired to weave together a quatrain by 12th century polymath, Omar Khyyam and modern pop music. In the composer’s own words, wanting to create a “kind of ‘collision of old and new,’ where the beauty and meaning of vintage poems might inspire the kind of loops, grooves, and catchy tunes heard in Pop.” As the work opens, we hear a textless melody, set against a repeating syncopated rhythm. This tender and reflective mood picks up intensity as the work progresses. Finally, fragments of Schubert float to the surface and become recognizable as two quotes from his Death and the Maiden string quartet. Wijeratne comments on the inclusion of the Schubert melodies, “Ironically, they struck me as being Pop-like and so I allowed them to emerge as though improvised; then to be improvised upon.”

The text of Khyyam’s quatrain, “A Letter from the After-life,” translated in the 19th century by Edward Fitzgerald, reads:

I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
And answer’d “I Myself am Heav’n and Hell”

Jessica Meyer (b. 1974)
Getting Home (I must be) and Slow Burn

The award-winning composer, Jessica Meyer, maintains a robust schedule in her muti-faceted career, which often (like many musicians) requires a lot of travel. “I wrote most of this piece on a plane,” Meyer’s program note elucidates. “I was traveling a lot, and on this particular flight from the west coast, I had a wave of anxiety pass over me as the plane took off because I really wanted to go home to get to my son, Ethan.” Musically, we hear that emotional drive to arrive and be reunited as well as the mechanical constant hum of engines. “for some reason,” Meyer explains, “along with that feeling came a particular rhythm in my head that wound up being the pizzicato riff that drives the first half of the piece. Thankfully, I didn’t have any devices to distract myself with or have a TV on the back of the seat in front of me…so I grabbed my Expedia itinerary, flipped it over and started writing it out.”

Slow Burn premiered at McCurdy’s Comedy Theatre in Sarasota, Florida. It was originally written as accompaniment to a dancer from the Black Diamond Burlesque company, which Meyer notes is “essentially all you need to know in order to conjure up the appropriate amount of sass you need in order to play it effectively!"

Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) 
Punctum

Caroline Shaw’s extraordinary work, Punctum, ponders the act of remembering and its emotional power via both the human brain, and the music, itself, which uses structural repetition and allusions to familiar note patterns to seemingly, “aspire  to the condition of memory,” as professor of music, Scott Burnham, has said. As Shaw explains in her program note: “Punctum is essentially an exercise in nostalgia, inspired by Roland Barthes’ description of the ‘unexpected’ in photographs and in particular by his extended description of the elusive ‘Winter Garden’ photo in his 1980 book Camera Lucida. Through modular sequences strung together out of context, the piece explores a way of saturating the palette with classicism while denying it form, and of disturbing the legibility of a harmonic progression in order to reinforce it later. One could also say the piece is about the sensation of a particular secondary dominant in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.” 

At the head of her piece, Shaw includes a quote from Barthes (Camera Lucida, part 1.2), which reads, “The photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Hear it is.’”

Eleanor Alberga (b. 1949)
Animal Banter

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, the composer Eleanor Alberga studied in London at the Royal Academy of Music as a pianist and vocalist. As a composer, Alberga has worked extensively with modern dancers, and writes for a broad range of instrumentations and ensemble sizes. In 2021 she was awarded an OBE for services to British music. Her work Animal Banter, offers a new, whimsical take on the classical pastoral scene often depicted in classical music. This time, instead of reflecting on the landscape, we shift our attentions to its non-human inhabitants. In an interview, Alberga remarked, “It’s called Animal Banter because in my imagination I pictured animals in a farmyard talking to each other and frolicking about and just having conversations, if they could talk.” We hear this depicted musically through lively, syncopated flows of shifting rhythms, similar to the cacophony of speech patterns one might encounter in a crowded café.

Errollyn Wallen (b. 1958)
Music for Tigers

A vocalist, dancer, and composer, Errollyn Wallen was born in Belize and raised in London. Educated at the universities of London and Cambridge, she was the first black woman to have her work performed at the BBC Proms. Her wide-ranging catalog spans pop to classical. The piano quintet, Music for Tigers, dedicated, “For Volker and John on the occasion of their marriage,” opens with a visceral, prowling, motive in the piano that repeats in an almost looplike fashion. Layered on top are sharp statements and pyrotechnics from the various string parts. A slowly winding upward scale in the strings introduced the second movement, as the piano part responds, shimmering. The gentle movement ebbs and flows, and at times sings almost like a lullaby before consolidating into a repeated rhythmic pattern. This calm is shattered with the dramatic opening of the third, and final movement, which is alternated with low, winding melodies. Throughout, it maintains a dance-like spirit, slow at first, then becoming a passionate, rapid, swirl that hits its final mark on a dime, ending abruptly with a flourish.

Reena Esmail (b. 1983)
Zeher (Poison)

Reena Esmail is an Indian American composer whose music spans and merges the traditions of the European classical structures and the raag, a (prescribed set of notes with specific emotional characteristics) of Indian classical music. She reflected on the gestation of her deeply personal work, Zeher, in a program note, which follows. 

“The word zeher means poison in Hindi. At the time I was working on this piece, I developed a pernicious case of strep throat, that three separate sets of antibiotics over more than a month couldn’t seem to cure. It became increasingly difficult for me to swallow, to speak, and even at times breathe. It was through this frustration, defeat and feeling of complete and literally voicelessness that I wrote Zeher. This piece uses two raags—Todi and Bhimpalas. Todi, at least to my Western ears, sounds dark and sinuous, like reaching into a voice, beyond what can be comfortably seen or understood. Bhimpalas, to me, feels more grounded, if still melancholy. At the end of the piece, I imagine Bhimpalas slowly washing over Todi, and letting it settle and heal. There is no way I could have known that the premiere album of this work, Brooklyn Rider’s Healing Modes, would be released in March 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic—where we would be forced to confront a world where a virus would render so many people unable to breathe—and that the piece would take on a new meaning, a more urgent call for healing.” 

Gonzalo Grau (b. 1978)
Five-legged Cat

Having begun his musical journey as a child in Caracas, Venezuela, Gonzalo Grau continued at the Berklee College of Music, and has built a vibrant career since. For his work, Five-legged Cat, Grau was inspired by the Venezuelan merengue, a form that is in 5/8 meter and, as Grau notes, is “very contagious and beautiful but hard to feel naturally.” In his commentary on the piece, Grau writes, “This piece is overall inspired by [jazz pianist] Chick Corea. Its colors, textures, and accents come from his enduring example. And what about the title, Five-legged Cat? Venezuela is famous for its idioms, lessons, and street sayings. When someone is about to get in trouble, people say: ‘No le busques la quinta pata al gato (don’t look for the cat’s fifth leg).’ This piece was born with a fifth leg, so I think we don’t even have to look for the cat any longer.”

Vijay Iyer (b. 1971)
Dig the Say

When approached to write a piece based on an artist who had inspired him, Vijay Iyer, the genre-crossing 2013 MacArthur Fellowship recipient and three-time Grammy award nominee, immediately thought of James Brown. In his own program note, Iyer writes, “His groove-based music features complex polyphony, expressive virtuosity, and ritual-like intensity. His vocal were electrifying, his lyrics pointedly political, his dance moves revolutionary, his sense of style larger than life, his cultural impact immeasurably huge. Like many, I have studied his music. Of course, it’s best to enjoy it with your body and soul, but there is much to learn from analyzing his music’s interlocking bass, drums, guitar, horn, and vocal parts…So, I humbly offer this small tribute to this musical giant. The title, Dig the Say, and section subtitles come from the lyrics to his song, ‘I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothin’ (Just Open Up the Door, I’ll Get it Myself).’”




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.