The Knights Celebrate New Year's Eve 2011

at The 92nd Street Y

Henry Purcell (1659-1695)
Fantasia upon One Note (c 1680)

Terry Riley (b 1935)
In C (1964)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony no. 5 in C Minor, op. 67 (1807-8)

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NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
by James Roe

“There was a time (time out of mind)”
— James McCourt, opening line of Mawrdew Czgowchwz

“Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”
— T. S. Eliot from “Buirnt Norton” no. 1 of the Four Quartets

“Make a joyful noise”
— Psalm 100

“The Joy of C”

Happy New Year! Tonight’s Knights concert features three radically different (and radical) pieces that each focus on the note C. Through these works, we will explore the ways in which music enhances, disrupts, and even suspends our perception of time. New Years Eve—a time of heightened consciousness of time past, passing, and yet to come—is ideal for this exploration.

In our concept of tonight’s concert, the note C and its continual presence throughout the music, represents time. The music’s relationship to this note changes throughout the concert just as our experience of time changes across any specific moment, hour, day, year, or lifetime.

Music only exists in the passage of time. At the very moment a musical sound is created, it is instantly consumed by the listener and transformed into emotion and memory. Music cannot be held. The intricacies of its beauty cannot be examined in the present tense. Music is always in the past or in the future. Memory and anticipation dance while music plays.

Why C?

The note C is a fundamental sound in Western music. Middle C divides the piano keyboard between soprano and bass, right hand and left. The music student’s first lessons are always in C. Schumann described C Major as “simple, unadorned.” Schelling wrote that, “concerning the physical expression of this key, it appears to be completely pure.”

Composers have gone to the key of C for major musical statements. Two of Schubert’s last completed works are in C Major, his Ninth Symphony, “The Great,” and the monumental Cello Quintet. Mozart set the complex splendors of his “Jupiter” Symphony in C. The gripping narrative of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is dramatized in the progression from C Minor to of C Major. (More on this later.)

One of the most famous C Major chords in all of music is in Haydn’s oratorio “The Creation.” After the overture, which depicts the chaos before creation, the chorus quietly intones the words of Genesis 1:3, “God said, let there be light, and there was light.” On the final word “light,” the orchestra and chorus burst forth with a fortissimo C Major chord. An eyewitness to the premiere, wrote that the “enchantment of the electrified Viennese was so general that the orchestra could not proceed for some minutes.”

The note C has pride-of-place in the world of music. It is a starting point and destination, beginning and end, foundation and culmination.

Purcell: Fantasia upon one Note
“Preserving a moment in music”

Henry Purcell was the preeminent English composer of his day. In about 1680, he wrote a group of Fantasias for string ensemble, which demonstrated the 21-year old’s mastery of the current compositional techniques.

The fantasia—or “fancy” as it was called in England—was popular during the 16th and 17th Centuries, and as its name suggests, it showcased a composer’s imagination and wit. These works were intimate entertainments, their principal preoccupation being the harmonious presentation of multiple, equal voices, a compositional technique called counterpoint. The counterpoint of Purcell’s Fantasias achieves an idealization of human interaction in the context of sophisticated musical conversation.

In Purcell's Fantasia upon One Note, a middle C sounds through the entire piece. The other four voices harmonize around this gentle drone, traversing an wide array of sentiments. Listeners may lose track of the sustained C from time to time, but it is there, quietly reminding us that though we may feel time has stopped, it hasn’t. This brief work could make you wish Purcell’s moment lasted forever.

Terry Riley: In C
“Mind altering music”

Terry Riley’s seminal minimalist masterpiece In C erupts with pulsating octave Cs in the piano. The work shimmers and radiates. It can subsume both listener and performer in its trancelike spell.

In his book, "The Rest is Noise," Alex Ross described Terry Riley as, “an easy-going character of the rural-hippie type [who] grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.” Le Monte Young, the maverick pioneer of musical minimalism, introduced Riley to the mind/time altering influences of marijuana and mescaline. According to Riley, Young also introduced him to the “concept of not having to press ahead to create interest.”

In C is written on a single sheet of paper. It has no specified length or instrumentation, rather it consists of the repeating octave Cs and fifty-three short melodic “events” that he called modules. The modules are played consecutively with each performer having the freedom to determine how many times they repeat each one before moving to the next. The work's improvisatory and interactive elements ensure no two performances are alike.

“Terry Riley’s In C is one of the definitive masterpieces of the 20th Century,” wrote music critic Alfred Frankenstein in High Fidelity. His San Francisco Chronicle review of the premiere offers a brilliant description of the piece: “Climaxes of great sonority and high complexity appear and are dissolved in the endlessness. At times you feel you have never done anything all your life long but listen to this music and as if that is all there is or ever will be."

Beethoven: Symphony no. 5 in C Minor
“Joy follows sorrow”

Beethoven's Symphony no. 5 in C Minor does not begin with a C. Its first sound is silence. This, the most famous work of classical music, begins with a rest.

Contained in that diminutive unit of silence is the last moment of calm before fate intervenes, the last second before learning life-changing news. It is the end of innocence before Beethoven’s famous four-note motif launches the obsessive, anxious, fateful first movement.

Beethoven was preoccupied with the idea of Fate. This is not surprising, as early as 1801 (three years before his first sketches for the Fifth Symphony) he began informing his friends that he was going deaf. In the Heiligenstadt Testament, his will in the form of a letter written to his brothers that Beethoven closely guarded throughout his life, he wrote, “But what a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing. Such incidents brought me to the verge of despair; but little more and I would have put an end to my life; only my art held me back.” Yet he attained a kind of personal resolve in the face of his condition. “I will seize Fate by the throat," he wrote, "It will not crush me entirely!” It is striking that, in the face of deafness, Beethoven begins this monumental symphony with a silence.

The Fifth shows Beethoven's full mastery of symphonic form, harmonic narrative, and rhythmic propulsion. Variations of the opening four-note motif sound throughout the work, as the music responds to the tension established by the first movement.

The Scherzo leads directly into the Finale through an extended, murky passage in pianissimo. Here, static harmony and melodic fragmentation create an aural haze with quiet echoes of the opening four-note motif in the timpani. From this, the lowest point of the symphony, a dramatic eight-bar crescendo ensues, culminating in the joyful fortissimo C Major of the Finale. Piccolo, trombones, and contra-bassoon expand the ensemble to create a brilliant burst of orchestral color. It is Beethoven’s “Let there be light” moment, and the upsurge of emotional and musical energy can be transcendent.

Just as the transformation of fate to joy is nearly complete, the murky Scherzo music makes a disquieting reappearance in the middle of the Finale. These dark clouds last only a moment before the triumphal music from the opening of the movement returns. The symphony ends with an impressive fifty-five bars of C Major played by the full ensemble.

“Many assert that every minor [tonality] piece must end in the minor,” Beethoven wrote to his student Archduke Rudolf, “Nego! On the contrary, I find that … the major [tonality] has a glorious effect. Joy follows sorrow, sunshine—rain. It affects me as if I were looking up to the silvery glistening of the evening star.”

Hugues Cuenod (1902-2010)

It was impossible to feel down around Hughie. Remembering him this quiet, bright morning, I am grateful to have known this musician, whose irrepressible joy in life and art expanded the humanity of everyone he met.

German Knights

Die Ritter is headed to Germany. Home on 9 October.

See you then, or there!

Two Summer Knights

There are two upcoming Knights performances next week in New York City.

Tuesday • 3 Aug • 7:30
Naumberg Bandshell, Central Park at 70th Street

After being rained out in June, The Knights return to the Naumburg Bandshell with a free concert perfect for a New York summer night in August. It's been a distinct pleasure to rehearse this week with Vera Beths who will both lead as concertmaster and play the solo part in Beethoven's eloquent Romance in F Major.

The Knights
Eric Jacobsen, conductor
Vera Beths, violin

Rossini Barber of Seville Overture
Beethoven Romance for Violin and Orchestra in F Major, op. 50
Shostakovich Two Waltzes (arr. Ljova Zhurbin for the Knights)
Debussy Children's Corner Suite (arr. Mouton)
Haydn Symphony in D major, No 101, "The Clock"

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Wednesday • 4 Aug • 7:00
AppleApple Store, SoHo

The Knights
Lara St. John, violin soloist
Eric Jacobsen, conductor

This concert celebrates the release of a new CD of Mozart Violin Concerti played by Lara and Scott St. John with The Knights conducted by Eric Jacobsen.

Koolhaas & Lohengrin in a Beijing Taxi

Heading to the Beijing airport, our taxi driver spoke no English (and we no Mandarin), nevertheless, he was determined to give us a parting tour of the city. We spoke back and forth in different languages, the conversation moving quickly and incomprehensibly, articulated with brief moments of clarity.

"Rem Koolhaas, CCTV."

Our driver said as we passed the Dutch architect's delirious addition to the Beijing skyline. It was not the most practical vocabulary, but we were glad he knew it.

Then we passed a caravan of cars covered in ribbons. Our driver honked and waved and smiled and told us many things in excited Chinese.

We weren't getting it.

He wrinkled his brow for a moment and then sang, Treulich geführt. Of course! Gamely, we all sang along and waved at the be-ribboned wedding procession passing us on the highway.

As we sang, my mind raced between other instances of this melody in my life, from Beijing to Lima to backstage at The Metropolitan Opera.

Years ago, I played with an opera company in Lima founded by my Juilliard classmate, Miguel Harth-Bedoya. Some members of the opera orchestra were hired to play a wedding. In Peru, Mendelssohn's Hochzeitsmarsch is played as the bride processional, while Wagner's march accompanies the newly-minted couple's first stroll down the aisle on the way out. Richard Wagner and Felix Mendelssohn combined with South American Roman Catholicism in a Peruvian Baroque cathedral; playing "Here comes the bride" at the end of the wedding only enriched the admixture.

Years later, I would play in the stage band for Robert Wilson's contoversial production of Lohengrin at The Metropolitan Opera based in part on Japanese Noh Theater. The stage band musicians wait to play late into the night, there are hours between entrances. (It is actually possible to leave the theater and play a different concert during these breaks.) When the time finally comes, the musicians gather in the dimly-lit wings to play strains of Treulich geführt. Pretty lofty for "wedding gig," I thought, walking up the stairs backstage at The Met, another cathedral in its own right.

How could I have expected to find myself singing Wagner with a Chinese cabbie in Beijing, but I hardly could be surprised.

Would Wagner?

Happy Fourth of July

Surprise parade on the East River.

Seven Four

Waiting on the subway platform at 14th Street for the F train to Brooklyn, I heard a young woman in full-Williamsburg hipster regalia playing the accordion.

Her selection? "Ring of Fire" from Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash.

I love this song for so many reasons, but leading them is the instrumental refrain in seven-four time. Count it out. Once the entirely unexpected Mariachi trumpet passage starts, the song is in seven. (Da-dut da dah dah dee dah daaa - 5 - 6 - 7, Da-dut da dah dah dee dah daaa - 5 - 6 - 7) I'm not sure which is more surprising the meter or the orchestration.

Maybe fifteen years ago, I heard Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash at Irving Place. Wonderful, amazing concert. They came with the best sidemen in the biz; country-western 2/4 back beat was elevated to poetry.

If you listen to June Carter and the Carter Family, you'll find a flexible metrical music that easily moves through odd-number bars and playfully skips over an eighth-note here and there.

Seven-four on the subway platform. I love New York City.

China!

Zéphyros Winds is headed to Beijing as part of the the National Centre for Performing Arts' 2010 May Festival.

Click here for details . . . and tickets!

photo by Bell Soto

Questions of Vacation

Questions Of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
--For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

IN CAMERA

A dear flutist friend stopped by for dinner tonight and wanted me to listen to her play a Bach unaccompanied sonata in preparation for upcoming performances. She played from memory and gave me the score, but I didn't follow along, I wanted to watch her play and enjoy this private performance from my couch.

There regularly is music in my place. I practice, but practicing often is repetitive ruckus, metronome aclacking. I have chamber music rehearsals here, too, but what I heard tonight was a full-fledged performance: poised, eloquent, full of persuasive rhetoric. Even the finest hi-fi could not match the aural pleasures of a live chamber music performance in one's own home.

Let me encourage everyone: treat yourself. (Eschew Netflix for a night.) Invite musicians to play chamber music in your living room. Offer a good meal (they will say yes) and invite just one or two special friends to share with you. Not too many.

You will not forget the experience.

An Uplifting Proposal

Right before Tuesday's Imani Winds concert at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park, the director of the series asked the ensemble whether a young man could propose to his girlfriend on stage during the concert.

Of course!

He and his soon-to-be fiancée live in Atlanta and had met at an Imani Winds concert eighteen months ago. They had travelled to New York City for tonight's concert.

Before the last piece on the first half, flutist Valerie Coleman told the audience that before we proceeded, there would be a special announcement. "Hello New York." the young man said into the microphone, his arm around his girlfriend. He calmly went on to explain that they were on stage to thank the Imani Winds for bringing them together and for their music which had continued to be an important part of the couple's eighteen-month relationship. And then he said good night and turned to leave the stage. We thought he had lost his nerve, but he swung back to the mic and said, "Oh, and one more thing . . . " whereupon he reached into his pocket and knelt. The audience exploded with applause and shouts of encouragement. The young woman, clasped her hands to her head, spun around, and before the question could even be asked, she yelled out: YES!!!

The ring placed on her finger, the couple thanked each of the musicians. Everyone was feeling a bit giddy, the audience was nicely stirred up, and before we continued with the program I stepped up to the mic, and asked, "Is there anyone else?"

IMANI WINDS in CENTRAL PARK

It will be a beautiful night for a summer concert in the park.

Naumburg Orchestral Concerts

104th Season - FINAL Concert of 2009

IMANI WINDS

Tuesday August 4th, 2009 at 7:30 PM

PROGRAM
Bozza Scherzo for woodwind quintet, Op. 48

Marquez Danza de Mediodia

Medaglia Suite Popular Brasileira

Schifrin La Nouvelle Orleans

Ligeti Sechs Bagatellen

Barber Summer Music, Op. 31

The Naumburg Orchestral Concert begins at 7:30pm at the Naumburg Bandshell on the Concert Ground in Central Park located south of the 72nd Street cross-drive.

Admission is free.

No rain date.

www.naumburgconcerts.org

The Rest is Silence

Two eighth rests, how long are they?

I have had such a good time this summer playing with the Imani Winds while their oboist, Toyin Spellman-Diaz, is on maternity leave. I've enjoyed learning new repertoire for our concerts, but there is something special about working on pieces I've played for decades with Zéphyros Winds now with new colleagues. In these works—Barber's "Summer Music," Ligeti's "Six Bagatelles," Paquito D'Rivera's "Aires Tropicales," and Lalo Schifrin's "La nouvelle Oreleans"—I reengage my ears to another set of musical imaginations.

In these situations, a musician's opportunity to learn is ripe. And if we don't hear other players and play with other players, our various "chops" can atrophy for lack of attention.

In 1998, I was hired to play a single performance of "Annie Get Your Gun." It was a benefit for Lincoln Center Theater featuring Patty Lupone and Peter Gallagher. The audience was filled with notables, Rosie was there, Barbara Walters seemed unpleasantly shocked by how politically incorrect the show was, Rex Reed was reported to have said, "Well, they didn't have to cut 'I'm an Indian, too.'" (Political correctness? And, yes, it did have to be cut.) And the orchestra, contracted by Red Press, was filled was the finest cats on the scene. I was pretty green (OK, very green). Out of Juilliard for just three years, I didn't know any faces in the band, but over the next decade I would come to. The first rehearsal began, naturally, with the overture. It looked pretty straight forward to me. Often in "tutti" sections (times when the whole orchestra is playing), orchestrators will give the oboe the same line as the first trumpet. The oboe doesn't make its most important contribution during these sections—you can't really hear it—so, we end up playing along with the loudest instrument, and that way we stay out of the way. Though I didn't know him at the time, one of New York's top lead trumpet players, Bob Millikan, was on the job. The overture started and I began to play my part, pretty much exactly how it looked on the page, in other words, totally square. The lead trumpet was playing in such a different style, and with so much style, I had to just stop and listen. "How does he know how to do that?" He knew. I didn't, but wanted to, and here, I realized was my opportunity to learn how it really went.

Each year in his Juilliard class, Albert Fuller would pick up a violin part to a Beethoven sonata and ask the students what he was holding. Always someone fell into the trap, "It's music." "No," Albert replied, "you cannot hold music. You can only hear music." Bob Millikan's trumpet playing brought that point home.

Lalo Schifrin's wind quintet, "La nouvelle Orleans," ends with an elaborate oboe cadenza meant to imitate the sound of a blues harmonica. After several performances with the Imani Winds, their flutist, Valerie Coleman, asked whether she could offer me a suggestion for that solo. It was a small thing, she assured me, but it would really help. The oboe cadenza begins after a loud chord played by the whole ensemble. There are two eighth rests between the chord and the oboe solo. "Could you wait a little bit longer before you start?" Valerie asked. One of the most challenging sounds for a musician to make on stage is silence. Modulating the right amount involves some risk. Concerts are about sound, after all. That night, I held onto those rests, the silence, just a little longer. The tension increased, and the solo landed with much more force.

When I was performing with Issa (Jane Siberry) a few years ago for her Carnegie Hall debut, she was coaching me on passage I was improvising. Again her urging was for less sounds, fewer notes, and more silence.

Listening to Albert Fuller's harpsichord recordings, again and again I am amazed at the role silence plays in his music making; especially as a tool to highlight a particular musical moment. He prepares that moment with a break in the sound, the silence features the next music.

Those two little rests written by Lalo Schifrin, how long are they, then? It depends on knowing what you are about to say next.

On Whitman

This passage opens the second chapter of Susan Sontag's "On Photography."

As Walt Whitman gazed down the democratic vistas of culture, he tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness, importance and triviality. It seemed to him servile or snobbish to make any discriminations of value, except the most generous ones. Great claims were made for candor by our boldest, most delirious prophet of cultural revolution. Nobody would fret about beautify and ugliness, he implied, who was accepting a sufficiently large embrace of the real, of the inclusiveness and vitality of actual American experience. All facts, even mean ones, are incandescent in Whitman’s America—that ideal space, made real by history, where “as they emit themselves facts are showered with light.”

36 Hours in Aguascalientes

Our concert in Mexico was a great success. We signed autographs and posed for pictures for at least an hour after the performance.

The historic city center of Aguascalientes is a romanticized picture of Baroque, colonial decay mixed with 21st-century urban renewal. Low stucco buildings in pink, robin's egg blue, and pale yellow, impressive 19th-century French-style government buildings, and elaborate Baroque churches were interspersed with modern structures, cell-phone stores, and ATMs for world-wide banks. (North American chains were mercifully rare, the only exceptions were Starbucks and KFC.) Planted, manicured parks with fountains offered shade from the sun, and though the gardens were in the French style, the flora was decidedly Aztec.

On Sunday morning, handsome couples strolled to church, looking like Italian socialites from the 50s. Cowboys brought their families for a day in the city. Children ran and played everywhere. The churches overflowed with congregants, their interiors clangorous in pink, blue, gold, and silver, and their hefty Baroque spires supporting weightless neon crosses that advertised the resurrection next to gleaming Coca-cola signs.

In this part of the city, little poverty was in evidence, but when it came, it could be shattering. Walking back to the hotel after our concert we were approached by a man begging for money. He had no legs and was pushed in a low cart by a young boy. As they got closer, we realized that the man was made up as a woman, with a blouse, wig, and rouged cheeks. He spoke in an animated, hoarse falsetto. His elaborate appearance and gestures were in stark relief to the boy's affectless silence. What did they need from us? From the world? They were headed out into the city square at twilight; their stage set, though the stakes were higher than any performance I've been involved with. How many pesos should I give them? The contents of my pockets? My wallet? My bank accounts? Do I have empathetic capacity enough to imagine their life? Perhaps for a moment this morning in my Manhattan apartment high above West End Avenue, but hardly equal to the relentless, Baroque difficulties of their lives.

Guest Turn

Last year, the wonderful oboist of Imani Winds, Toyin Spellman-Diaz asked if I could cover her maternity leave this summer. I was thrilled. Imani Winds is the indispensable wind quintet and one of the nation's cultural treasures. On top of that, the members are, to a one, wonderful people and excellent musicians. Often, when I mention my own quintet to someone, the response is, "Oh, aren't you in Imani Winds?" Their cultural penetration is so deep that they have put the genre back on the musical map and made it relevent to new audiences and exciting for the establishment. The evidence is their packed schedule.

The rehearsals this week have been nothing but fun. We have a number of concerts this summer, try to come if you're in the area.

Sunday, July 19, 2009	Imani Winds in AGUASCALIENTES, MEXICO	Festival de Música de Cámara
	Time: 6:00 pm. Festival Opening Performance. PROGRAM Scherzo – Eugene Bozza; Danza de Mediodia – Arturo Marquez; Suite Popular Brasileira – Julio Medaglia; La Nouvelle Oreleans – Lalo Schifrin; Sechs Bagatellen – Gyorgy Ligeti ; Aires Tropicales – Paquito D’Rivera; “Freyleka” from Klezmer Dances – arr. Gene Kavadlo
Monday, July 27, 2009	Imani Winds in CHICAGO, IL	National Association of Negro Musicians Annual Conference
	Time: 7:30 pm. PROGRAM Scherzo – Eugene Bozza; Danza de Mediodia – Arturo Marquez; Suite Popular Brasileira – Julio Medaglia; La Nouvelle Oreleans – Lalo Schifrin; Sechs Bagatellen – Gyorgy Ligeti ; Aires Tropicales – Paquito D’Rivera; “Freyleka” from Klezmer Dances – arr. Gene Kavadlo
Tuesday, July 28, 2009	Imani Winds in BROOKVILLE, NY	C.W. Post, Long Island University Chamber Music Festival
	Time: 8:00 pm. Masterclass 4-6. PROGRAM Scherzo – Eugene Bozza; Danza de Mediodia – Arturo Marquez; Suite Popular Brasileira – Julio Medaglia; La Nouvelle Oreleans – Lalo Schifrin; Sechs Bagatellen – Gyorgy Ligeti ; Aires Tropicales – Paquito D’Rivera; “Freyleka” from Klezmer Dances – arr. Gene Kavadlo
Tuesday, August 4, 2009	Imani Winds in NEW YORK, NY	Naumburg Bandshell, Central Park
	Time: 7:30 pm. PROGRAM Scherzo – Eugene Bozza; Danza de Mediodia – Arturo Marquez; Suite Popular Brasileira; Julio Medaglia; La Nouvelle Oreleans – Lalo Schifrin; Sechs Bagatellen – Gyorgy Ligeti; Summer Music – Samuel Barber; Libertango – Pizzolla/Scott

What Helicon Understands

By Albert Fuller (November 1996)

“It’s not enough for poetry and song to be beautiful; they must entice the listener’s soul to follow wherever they lead. Just as laughing begets laughter in others, likewise our face responds to the tears of another. If you want me to cry, then you yourself must grieve.” --- Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 99-103, 23-20 BCE

Helicon believes that art works are the principal recorded evidence of humankind’s consciousness. Existing from all periods of human life on earth, art works demonstrate the connectedness of the human family’s imagination in all times and all places.

Helicon demonstrates this consanguinity with evidence of the sources of imagination by showing how the content and form of musical art works are arresting and lure the heart into profound imagination. Art not only offers a form of self-expression, it, in fact, creates an external, concrete vessel in which the souls of our lives can dwell and communicate with others. Just before his death, Albert Einstein noted to a friend: “To us [physicists], the concept of past, present, and future is only an illusion . . . albeit a stubborn one.” Einstein understood how humankind’s soul practices the arts to the benefit of all humankind, everywhere.

Helicon’s musical activities seek to profit from our expanding knowledge of the many and diverse areas exercised by our own human nature. In the case of those composers whose creations strike us strongly and deeply, it is our specific intent to maintain the integrity of their affective messages by seeking musical results that reflect as closely as possible their creators’ expressive intentions. Unlike today’s normal performance practice, Helicon believes that music should be performed so as to preserve the affects of the composer. If the composer’s messages are not to the taste of the conductor, the performer, or the comfort of the audience, and, consequently, are changed to accommodate that, the composer’s intent is eroded if not actually betrayed. Therefore, the music we love must be understood as of greater value to us as a product of its own period, than if subjected to an attempt to bring it “up to date.”

That is why Helicon so often employs the specific instruments (of the finest copies of them), techniques, and expressive interpretive styles that were the coin of our beloved composers. We do that for a single purpose: to recreate by approaching as best we can the emotional or affective content that the musicians form different times and places had in mind. The philosophy, demanding change and growth, has immeasurably enriched our artistic receptivity and experience. From this point of view, affective musical understanding are sharpened by observing them in historical context, integrating the meaning of music’s invisible—but not inaudible—messages with the other arts, and with the contemporary technological, philosophical, and socio-economic milieus of their times.

All knowledge is based on the past; all work stands on what has gone before. However, present technology suggests to many that we are not connected with the same past that has brought us into being. Electricity’s new role in spreading information implies to some that we are only just now beginning to know. The flood of new information, carried around the world principally by the computer-satellite-television complex, has often obscured the role of feelings in human affairs. This leads a consumer-oriented society to care more for the agora than the individual; more for the package than for the content. But we must ponder about the resultant pride in today’s acquisitions and achievements, asking whether they have not led us to feel our inheritance is poor, and that only now are we beginning to pull out of dark-age ignorance.

Sadly today, the role of feeling—of the soul in the life of the world—has temporarily dropped from general public consciousness, in spite of the fact that our souls are the prime source and stimulus of our imagination, the surest guide to mankind’s destiny.

At Helicon we feel that when we ignore our souls we “are starving in the sight of supply” of the vast riches of knowledge and artworks that the human race has created in arriving at the present. Helicon intends to give witness to the strength of our inheritance by engaging in activities that demonstrate the affective, communicative power of those riches and our gratitude for having received them.

Art creates an external vessel in which the souls of our lives can dwell and communicate with others. Musical art, not being concrete or tangible, is thus often misunderstood, and thereby, its central meaning betrayed. Helicon intends to maintain the integrity of composer’s affective messages by seeking musical performances that reflect as closely as possible their creator’s expressive intentions. By these means, we hope to recreate, as best we can, the emotional or affective content that composers from different times and places had in mind. Helicon is a kind of travel of the imagination through past time.