PROGRAM NOTES

Did you know that cacti are native only to the deserts of the Americas? Sparked by this fun bit of trivia, “Cactus” is a musical tour from the landscapes of Patagonia to the deserts of the American Southwest, and inspired by the resilience of the people, fauna, and prickly flora that brave these harsh environments.

Juantio Becenti (b. 1985)
HANÉ (STORY)

“It’s really strange. I just had that desire, almost since I can remember,” Juantio Becenti recalled in an interview for the Navajo Times. Of Diné (Navajo) descent, Becenti grew up in Aneth, Utah, near the Four Corners, Navajo Nation. As a child he would stay late at school to practice on the piano and took lessons from a teacher who traveled to give him instruction. Driven to absorb all he could, he would order CDs and scores for study, eventually moving toward composing around age 12. By age 15, Becenti received his first commission from the Moab Music Festival. Since then, he has been commissioned by artists Dawn Avery (North American Indian Cello Project), Raven Chacon (Native American Composers Apprenticeship Program), Michael Barrett (New York Festival of Song), amongst others, and had his works performed by the St. Petersburg String Quartet, Chatter, and the Claremont Trio at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In the spring of 2023, A Far Cry will present the world premiere of a new commission from Becenti, The Glittering World, that portrays Diné Bahane’, the Navajo creation story.

Hané (Story) has a special place in Becenti’s heart, as it was composed during a summer he spent at the Walden School for Young Musicians in New Hampshire, which he attended on full scholarship, when he was 17 years old. Since then, Becenti has been largely self-taught to preserve and express the intuitive nature of his individual compositional style.

Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940)
SENSEMAYÁ, ARR. STRING QUARTET AND PERCUSSION

At just 14 years old, Silvestre Revueltas was sent over 600 miles away from his hometown of Santiago Papasquiaro, Durango, to Mexico City. There, he would enter the Conservatorio Nacional de Música before eventually heading up to Saint Edwards Academy in San Antonio, Texas, and the Chicago Musical College in Illinois, where he studied violin and composition. Early in his career, composition was on the back-burner as he pursued opportunities as a violinist and conductor around the United States before returning to Mexico in 1929, where he would become a leader in establishing and shaping its modern cultural life.

Most of Revueltas’ compositions come from the 1930s when he began to commit more time to the craft, and since he died of complications of alcoholism in 1940 this means almost all his works emerged from a compressed period of 10 years. In 1937, Revueltas met the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén at the Congress of Writers and Artists hosted by the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR), of which Revueltas was serving as president. Shortly afterward he began work on Sensemayá, a work that brings to life Guillén’s poem about a ceremonial snake killing. Scholars have argued about just how much Revueltas tried to translate the poem and its rhythms directly into musical terms, but it is clear from the composer’s own notes in the score that certain sections and rhythms were meant to directly invoke words from the text, which follows.

SENSEMAYÁ
(CHANT TO KILL A SNAKE)
BY NICOLÁS GUILLÉN, TRANSLATED BY WILLIS KNAPP JONES

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!

The snake has eyes of glass;

The snake coils on a stick;
With his eyes of glass on a stick,
With his eyes of glass.
The snake can move without feet;
The snake can hide in the grass;
Crawling he hides in the grass,
Moving without feet.

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombe!

Hit him with an ax and he dies;
Hit him! Go on, hit him!
Don’t hit him with your foot or he’ll bite;
Don’t hit him with your foot, or he’ll get away.

Sensemayá, the snake,
sensemayá.
Sensemayá, with his eyes,
sensemayá.
Sensemayá, with his tongue,
sensemayá.
Sensemayá, with his mouth,
sensemayá.

The dead snake cannot eat;
the dead snake cannot hiss;
he cannot move,
he cannot run!
The dead snake cannot look;
the dead snake cannot drink;
he cannot breathe,
he cannot bite.

¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!
Sensemayá, the snake . . .
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!
Sensemayá, does not move . . .
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!
Sensemayá, the snake . . .
¡Mayombe-bombe-mayombé!
Sensemayá, he died!

Ennio Morricone (1928-2020)
”ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST,” ARR. STRING QUARTET

Ennio Morricone’s career in music began in Rome, the city where he was born and died. Famously, he almost never left, taking part in his first concert tour of the United States at 78 years old. His father, who was a musician, was his first instructor. At the age of 12, Morricone (whose main instrument was the trumpet) began formal studies at the Saint Cecilia Conservatory where one of his teachers was the esteemed Goffredo Petrassi. Though he completed his degree in 1946, he continued at the conservatory to specialize in composition. Soon, he was a working composer, starting first in radio and moving into film music. Throughout his career, Morricone continued to compose a wide variety of concert pieces (around 100 of them exist) including orchestra, chamber, solo instrumental, and voice.

It was his work in film, however, that made him famous. By the time of his death, he had written around 500 scores for movies like The Untouchables, Cinema Paradiso, In the Line of Fire, Days of Heaven, and The Hateful Eight. He was the winner of multiple awards, including two Golden Globes, four Grammy Awards, and two Academy Awards including one for lifetime achievement, and one for The Hateful Eight.

Of all his achievements, his partnership with “Spaghetti Western” director Sergio Leone is amongst his most enduring. In addition to writing for all three films in the Man with No Name Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), he lent his distinct sound to Once Upon a Time in the West. The main theme, tinged with nostalgia and a sweep as broad and epic as Leone’s vision of the American West, has secured a life of its own alongside many of the most beloved melodies in film history.

Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983)
STRING QUARTET NO. 2, OP. 26

Arguably one of the most significant composers of the 20th century, Alberto Ginastera blossomed in his native Argentina and grew an international career. After his dynamic student days, commissions and opportunities to teach followed in quick succession, and when his life was interrupted by war and political unrest in the 1940s, Ginastera was able to travel to the United States on a Guggenheim Foundation grant. From 1945-1947 he visited multiple conservatories and colleges, including Juilliard and Harvard, and re-connected with Aaron Copland, with whom he had briefly studied at Tanglewood in 1941. During his Guggenheim years, Ginastera also met Harold Spivacke, Chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress.

One of Spivacke’s responsibilities was overseeing the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation’s annual festival. The event’s namesake was the philanthropist Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, a Chicago native who married a Bostonian and went on to make an indelible impact on chamber music by commissioning works by a stream of composers (Stravinsky, Britten, Copland, Ravel, Hindemith, Bartók, etc.). Each year the festival took place in the Library of Congress’ Coolidge Hall, another of her contributions. After having had the chance to hear Ginastera’s String Quartet No. 1, Spivacke approached him about writing another one. Through his response, we learn something about Ginastera’s creative process, as he qualified to Spivacke, “…creation is always for me a painful and slow process. I cannot write quickly, as other composers do, and I am never satisfied with my first ideas. I am always struggling with my own self and trying to attain perfection…That is why I dislike promising fixed dates, because in many cases it would be almost impossible to keep my word.” Spivacke strove to assure Ginastera, “We know that the creative activity of a composer is something that cannot be geared to a clock…I shall continue to hope that the work will be ready on time, but if it is not, I shall not hold it against you.” It would take another two years and continual re-planning of the festival programming, but Spivacke kept his word and the premiere took place on April 19th, 1958, with the Juilliard String Quartet performing. (Tonight’s performance uses the revised version Ginastera made in 1968.)

That year also signaled the arrival of Ginastera’s “neo-expressionism” period, in contrast with his more nationalist style of the previous decades. The String Quartet No. 2 displays many of the traits of this new modernist era for the composer. The opening movement is centered around stark, percussive, unison octaves contrasting sharply with the plaintive spirit of the second. The third movement is a captivating centerpiece of exquisite craftsmanship that has sometimes been compared to the “night music” of Béla Bartók, a composer Ginastera admired. Here, a plethora of extended techniques are the tools he uses to set the mood: pizzicato glissandos, sul ponticello (at the bridge), and col legno (playing with the wood of the bow). The fourth movement is structured as a set of theme and variations executed through a mix of soliloquies for each instrument contrasted with tutti sections. Explosive churning energy drives the final movement to its conclusion.


Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate (b. 1968)
PISACHI (REVEAL)

A classical composer and citizen of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate is dedicated to the development of Native American classical composition. Tate studied piano performance at Northwestern University and piano performance and composition at The Cleveland Institute of Music. His music has been sought after and performed by numerous performing organizations across the country, including the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus, the National Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Beyond the stage, Tate won an Emmy Award for his work on the documentary, The Science of Composing, and his music has also been featured in Westworld, the popular television series on HBO. Additionally, Tate was recently appointed as a 2021-2022 U.S. Department of State Cultural Ambassador, for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Comfortable writing for a variety of ensemble sizes, Tate’s catalog includes everything from opera to ballet scores, choral, film, and chamber works. The composer’s own note for Pisachi (Reveal) follows.

“Pisachi (Reveal) is composed in six epitomes (sections) and was originally commissioned to be performed within a slide show exhibit for ETHEL’s touring project entitled Documerica. For this project, Pisachi was assigned to accompany images of the American Indian Southwest. In doing so, the work draws specifically from Hopi and Pueblo Indian music, rhythms, and form. The opening viola solo is a paraphrase of a Pueblo Buffalo Dance and becomes material throughout the work. Later, the work refers to Hopi Buffalo Dance and Hopi Elk Dance music. It is the composer’s intent to honor his Southwest Indian cousins through classical repertoire.

Pisachi is the Chickasaw word for reveal and is pronounced pee-sah-chee.”

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.