PROGRAM NOTES

KAREEM ROUSTOM (b. 1971)

Dabke

Kareem Roustom was born in Damascus to an American mother and Syrian father. When he was 13 the family relocated to the United States. It was an uprooting that Roustom sought to heal through music, exploring the creative heritage and melodic syntax of both cultures equally. Largely self-taught in his craft, Roustom has become one of the most sought-after composers of our time. Commissions and performances have included groups such as the Kronos Quartet, The Crossing choir, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and numerous others. Demonstrating remarkable flexibility, Roustom has also composed twenty film scores, including his Emmy Award winning score for the documentary The Mosque in Morgantown, and has worked on arrangements for artists such as Beyoncé, Wyclef Jean, Tina Turner, and Shakira. As an educator, Roustom currently holds the position of Professor of the Practice at Tufts University.

Kareem Roustom’s program note for Dabke is as follows:

Dabke is a folk dance and a type line dance from Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, that is typically performed at joyous occasions. The leader of the dance line, called a hawaash, directs the movements of the dancers behind him. There are many variants of this dance that involve men and women and the rhythms that accompany it. This movement is based on a six beat dabke rhythm called sudaasi. Dabke is an arrangement of the third movement of Kareem Roustom’s A Voice Exclaiming; a work for triple string quartet that was originally commissioned for the Kronos Quartet and Providence R.I. based Community MusicWorks. Dabke has been performed by a wide number of ensembles ranging from professional orchestras such as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, the Württembergische Philharmonie Reutlingen, the Staatstheater Kassel Orchestra (Germany), the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra as well as college and youth ensembles in the US and as far away as Malaysia, Morocco, Chile and elsewhere. Dabke was also recorded by the Philharmonia Orchestra in London’s famed Abbey Road Studio One. It gives me great pleasure to see a work of mine continue to be performed almost ten years after it was written and reaching across both geographical and generational boundaries.

LEOŠ JANÁČEK (1854-1928)

Idyll

Many years before joining Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák as one of the three most famous Czech composers in history, Leoš Janáček was an eleven-year-old being taken by his parents nearly 100 miles from his hometown of Hukvaldy to live at the Augustinian Abbey in Brno. He had been accepted there as a choral scholar (nicknamed “Bluebirds” for their light-blue uniforms) and would receive both a solid academic education and musical training, as well as relieve the financial strain on his large family. Coming from a family of teachers, Janáček eventually followed the same path and completed teacher training at age eighteen. Soon after, he launched into a life and career that was continuously split between teaching and music making. Incredibly industrious, he found pockets of time between obligations to study at the Prague Organ School, the Leipzig Conservatory, and the Vienna Conservatory. Ultimately, he would return to spend most of his life in Brno, where he made an indelible contribution to the cultural life of the town.

The year 1877 proved to be a momentous one. Janáček and Dvořák had become friends and decided to spend the summer on a walking tour of Bohemia. Janáček was twenty-three years old and just starting out, while Dvořák was thirty-six and on the very cusp of launching into a new phase in his career that would result in world-wide fame. Both were organists, and both would play critical roles in championing Czech independence by finding inspiration in the folk music traditions maintained in rural communities. It was also the year Janáček wrote his Suite for String Orchestra, one of his first attempts at writing a larger scale instrumental piece. He followed this up the next year with another similarly structured work for strings, the Idyll, a gorgeous, shimmering, piece of late romanticism. Up to that point, Janáček’s works had been exclusively for chorus or organ, penned during his days at the Abbey for his fellow choristers. The decision to write for a string ensemble was likely influenced by Dvořák’s recent Serenade for Strings (1875), which provided both inspiration and a model to follow.

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.