“Limitless” thrives in the space between restriction and innovation, where the repetition of ideas transforms the mundane into the profound. Each piece explores the power of a simple musical motif, from Liu’s birdsong as a commentary on the pressures of modern society, to the whiffs of melody in Lancaster’s our streets as a commemoration of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Ultimately, “Limitless” is about the potential inherent in each of us.

Shaw Pong (b. 1979)
Arise

Arise (2023 edition) is the fruit of almost three years of birdsong research, an intensive, three-month collaboration between the incredible musicians of A Far Cry, myself, and our environment (including 14 bird species, three national park/forests, the Internet, and Calderwood Hall)—and a decade of quiet maturation.

Arise is site-specific and player-specific with 18 individual parts for 18 musicians. Originally choreographed in 2013 for Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Calderwood Hall, it has been retooled for tonight’s performance in Jordan Hall. It is comprised of four sections: a sunrise walk through the Arnold Arboretum; a dialogic alternation between birds and growing bass; a text-based groove that moves from busy-ness to chaos (using verbal phrases transcribed from the 2013 Criers, including the melodic contour and rhythm of their speech); and an extended melodic unfurling of finding synthesis and one-ness.

The piece explores three-dimensional listening, birdsong, and the calm mind versus the stressed-out “monkey” mind. In reshaping this piece to this current moment, this 2023 edition also explores the connection between the divine in nature and the divine in our human selves.

A lot can change in a decade. 10 years ago, I did not have a meditation practice, I was not married, and I was not yet a mom. Yet so much of what concerned and absorbed me back then still feels urgent—and liberatory—to explore today.

The concepts for Arise evolved out of my project, A Bird a Day: a creative exploration of birdsong, sunrises, and composition started in October 2010. For the first year of A Bird a Day, I took a walk every day, usually at sunrise, in search of a bird. I listened intently to it and the environment, recorded it, then made a creative response: a compositional sketch, an improvisation, a few sentences of ideas. I transcribed many of the birds for the violin, and kept a blog of my adventures (www.abirdaday. org). Between 2010-2013 I recorded hundreds of birds all over New England, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest, including Acadia National Park, Mt. Hood National Forest, and Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, and created several birdsong-based compositions for solo violin, violin + looping pedal, and string quartet.

A Bird a Day helped me develop a daily practice of walking, listening, and creative generation, feeding my physical, mental and creative health. The listening meditations deepened my fascination with the three-dimensionality of listening, and the precision with which the human ear can detect direction, space, and distance. It’s a phenomenon I explore with “live surround-sound” in many of my compositions, and for which Jordan Hall offers an enticing playground.

In summer of 2012, A Bird a Day brought me to Mt. Hood, Oregon, where I had the chance to retreat to the wilderness with a group of artists, unplug from an Internet-rooted world, and experience my mind unwinding, slowing down, becoming calm. It was a rare state, and I grew hungry for it in my urban environment.

In a world that runs ever faster, ever hotter, I see beautiful minds racing, trembling, on the verge of burning out. I feel my own excitable mind cross the threshold from productive stimulation to numbing frenzy. It frightens me.

Arise is my attempt to ask how we survive our constant acceleration and disintegration—as individuals, as communities, and as a planet.

For me, pockets of calm are my safeties in this frenetic game of tag. A morning walk. A listening meditation, focused on one bird. A week in the wilderness: unplugged, de-gridded (back in pre-parent days!). In recent years a daily meditation practice has become my ground. When I meditate every day, I can be the most grounded and intentional version of myself. And now, as a new mom to a miraculous 16-month old, my beloved child is my mindfulness bell, from wondrous moment to wondrous moment.

It has been an incredible gift once again to collaborate with my dear friends and remarkable musicians of A Far Cry, whose curiosity and open-mindedness match the high bar of their musical prowess. From answering my initial 2013 survey questions (ranging from vocal range, to whistling abilities, to what their stressed-out minds say), to enthusiastic participation in readings and acoustical spatial experiments, to their vibrant, focused, and dedicated rehearsals, it has been a dream to bring this vision to life with such a team of collaborators.

~Shaw Pong Liu

Yaz Lancaster (b. 1996)
our streets (AFC Commission)

Yaz Lancaster is a Black transdisciplinary artist. They are most interested in practices aligned with relational aesthetics and the everyday; fragments and collage; and anti-oppressive, liberatory politics. Yaz performs as a violinist, vocalist, and steel-pannist in a wide variety of settings including DIY/indie venues, contemporary chamber music, and steel bands. Their work is presented in many different mediums and collaborative projects, and often reckons with specific influences ranging from politics of identity and liberation to natural phenomena and poetics.

Yaz’s program note for our streets follows:

This piece was written for the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Following the American Civil War, enslaved Black people were gradually emancipated from chattel slavery. This included thousands of Black people enslaved by Indigenous peoples on First Nations and “Indian” territories. Some Black-Indian Freedman were eventually granted citizenship, as well as reparations (money and Land) that allowed them to generate wealth. On Memorial Day weekend, tensions rose as armed Black residents protected 19-year-old Dick Rowland from a lynch mob when he was accused of assaulting a young white girl. Fearful of Blackness and the threat of Black prosperity and “freedom” white supremacist mobs attacked and killed Black residents; and destroyed the Black-owned Land and businesses of Tulsa, Oklahoma (a.k.a. “Black Wall Street”) over the course of two days.

Neither completely an elegy, or “uplifting” work—nor is it celebrating “Black Capitalism”—the piece moves through several moods, themes, and collections of gestures that arose during my research and reflection of the tragic and complex history. I wanted to remember and acknowledge both the pain and trauma of my people; as well as a stable and prosperous Black community—both of which have largely been historically misremembered, and/or erased.

~Yaz Lancaster

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
String Quartet No. 2 in C Major, Op. 36 Transc. Jesse Irons

Benjamin Britten was a remarkable composer of instrumental works, on par with colorists like Maurice Ravel, able to coax forth a multitude of sounds, and emotions. His mind was teeming with music from a very young age—making his mother, who dreamed of fame for her son, very happy. By the age of fourteen he had already written upwards of 100 pieces and found a much-needed teacher and friend in Frank Bridge who encouraged Britten’s originality by instructing him: “you should find yourself and be true to what you found,” and pay “scrupulous attention to good technique.” In addition, Britten became increasingly curious about Bridge’s pacifism, eventually adopting the position of renouncing violent action and war, for himself—a tricky position to take in Europe with a second world war looming.

In the mid-1930s Britten met W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood whilst working as a composer for the General Post Office Film Unit immediately after studying at the Royal Conservatory of Music. By January 1939, Auden, and Isherwood, then lovers, decided to leave the old world behind and start anew in America. Britten followed their lead and arrived in April with Peter Pears, a talented tenor. It was during this America sojourn that their relationship would blossom into a full partnership, both personally and professionally, that lasted until Britten’s death. After joining Auden in New York, Britten and Pears became unsatisfied with the city and migrated westward where under the California sun Britten ruminated on an idea that would become the opera Peter Grimes and wrote the String Quartet No. 1. Regardless of the state of geopolitics, craving to be home Britten and Pears returned to England in the spring of 1942. Three years later, in the summer of 1945, Peter Grimes premiered at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London. It was a tremendous success and has become one of the greatest English language operas of all time.

Another British composer noted for his ability to set English words to music was Henry Purcell. Britten admired the Purcell, greatly, and in 1945 was commissioned to write a work for a concert honoring the 250th anniversary of Purcell’s untimely death in 1695 at age 36. For this occasion, Britten produced the String Quartet No. 2, one of a number of works he would complete in his lifetime that paid homage to Purcell.

With the opening movement, marked Allegro calmo, we are confronted with a study in contrasts between lean melodic passages, abundantly peppered with staccatos and accent marks of various kinds, and elongated drone-like passages. These drones are significant, as they were likely a tip of the hat to Purcell’s Fantasia Upon One Note. Throughout, the somewhat unusual interval of a 10th appears frequently, almost obsessively. The second movement, Vivace, churns with nervous energy, sometimes so enthusiastically that it seems to go ever-so-slightly out of sync—a fantastic auditory sleight of hand created by pushing the intervals off from each other by a step. Occasionally, jarringly abrupt walls of chords interrupt. The final movement, Chacony, is where we hear another overt gesture toward Purcell, whose own Chacony provides both the title as well as the stylistic inspiration for the rhythmic and melodic material heard in the opening bars (Britten would write an entire arrangement of Purcell’s Chacony a decade later). Clearly conceived as the focus of the work—the Chacony’s duration is longer than both the previous movements combined. True to its Baroque roots as a variation form built above a repeated harmonic sequence. The movement unfolds as a theme and 21 variations of exquisite uniqueness, dotted with cadenzas that demarcate the variation groupings: four groups of six variations and one of three.

Henry Purcell (1659-1695)
Fantasia Upon One Note

Henry Purcell lived a short life, dying suddenly at the age of 36, and his career took place during a remarkable period of British history. Coming from a family of musicians, he was practically born into service at court. After surviving the 1665 plague and the Great Fire of London the following year, Purcell found himself in service to the monarch singing as a boy treble in the Chapel Royal, the King’s own private ensemble. This was notable since the Chapel Royal, having been disbanded under Oliver Cromwell, had recently been reinstated with the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, the year after Purcell’s birth.

With his career so closely tied to the politics of the nation, Purcell’s output had to adapt with any change of the sovereign. This happened three times during Purcell’s lifetime, and always proved to be a somewhat sticky undertaking. These were tumultuous years that saw a tug of war between Protestant and Catholic factions, as well as clashes of political ideologies. After Charles II came his brother, James II. As a convert to Catholicism, James invited many continental Catholic composers to provide music at court. Purcell then focused on his work as organist at Westminster Abbey. When the Glorious Revolution replaced James II with his Protestant daughter and son-in-law, Mary II and William III, the Chapel Royal effectively folded (again). Though Purcell technically remained on the royal payroll to write occasional birthday odes and funeral music, his attention shifted toward finding work as a composer for the theater. As a result, the last few years of his short life were preoccupied with writing incidental music, masques (a genre closely related to opera and preferred in England), and operas. In fact, between 1690 and 1695 he would write around forty theatrical works.

One bit of mystery in Purcell’s output involves the collection of string fantasias he composed almost exclusively in the year 1680, when he was 20 years old. Why he would have spent so much time producing them is unclear. Charles II, his employer at the time, disliked this more old-fashioned style of instrumental music, preferring the much livelier, dance-like tunes from the 24 violins he had hired to mimic the band at the court of his cousin, Louis XIV. “He could not bear any music to which he could not keep the time, and that he constantly did to all that was presented to him,” observed the contemporary biographer Roger North. This has led some researchers to compare Purcell’s fantasias to Bach’s The Art of Fugue—perhaps deeply personal expressions of craft that he was compelled to complete for his own fulfillment.

The Fantasia Upon One Note represents the only fantasia for 5 voices instead of 4. That extra voice is tasked with holding the “one note” throughout the entirety of the work. All the other parts move in simple, imitative counterpoint in a stepwise motion of ascending and descending 5-note scales that become increasingly elaborated upon, so that by the conclusion a beautiful filigree adorns the simple drone at the core.

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.