On November 5, 2022, the Kaufman Music Center and the John J. Cali School of Music will co-present a concert by the Cavani String Quartet. As part of the Bridges concert series, the Cavani String Quartet will be performing a program that includes Shostakovich, Henderson, Washington, and Mendelssohn. Tickets can be found here.

The Josh Henderson work, entitled A Bop for Bridge, will receive its New York debut with students from Kaufman Music Center's Special Music School & the John J. Cali School performing alongside the Cavani String Quartet.

The Violin Channel had the chance to chat with Henderson and the Cavani String Quartet about working together, their inspiration, and their processes!

Violin Channel: What was your idea or inspiration behind the work? 

Josh Henderson: These days with my composing, I am very much interested in the musical exploration of lesser-known tales, places, and people of the world. So when approached to create a work for the wonderful Cavani Quartet as part of their Beyond Beethoven project, I was excited to delve into one of the lesser-known, but terribly interesting tales surrounding Beethoven and his chamber works. This would be the tale of George Bridgetower, the British violin virtuoso of African descent, who holds the esteemed position of being the original dedicatee of Beethoven’s famous Kreutzer Sonata. However, after a successful premiere of the work, the performer and composer found themselves in an altercation, and the dedication was renounced and subsequently given to another virtuoso of the day, Rudolphe Kreutzer. Unfortunately, Mr. Kreutzer declared the Sonata too difficult to be played (despite the recent successful premiere by Mr. Bridgetower), and never actually performed the work. And sadly, after a few more years of fame, Mr. Bridgetower spent the rest of his life in obscurity, and died penniless in Peckham.

VC: How did this premiere opportunity come to you?

JH: Like many things, I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Last season, The Cavani quartet was in the midst of a very exciting Beethoven project –essentially, a Beethoven cycle that not only featured performances of all of the quartets but also included new commissions on each concert and heavily involved local Cleveland communities as part of the project through their many education initiatives. They had many awesome composers lined up for each concert in the series, but due to an unfortunate family circumstance, the composer affiliated with the final concert had to remove themselves from the project somewhat late in the game. At this point, the cellist of Cavani and good friend Kyle Price, himself a wonderful composer/arranger (among many other things), approached me to jump on the project, as we have had many collaborations involving creating works under time constraints in the past. And of course, I was more than happy to write something for this incredible group!

VC: What was your personal/compositional process of taking the concept from your mind through to the premiere?

JH: This piece is not only inspired by the story mentioned previously, but also draws extensive inspiration from the motivic and harmonic languages of Beethoven (with a bit of a modern flair), and in honor of Mr. Bridgetower, is also meant to be a vehicle of virtuosity for the solo string quartet.

VC: What do you hope listeners will take away with them?

JH: I'm always hoping that an audience will leave a performance with themselves ever so slightly stretched in new directions – personally, musically, creatively, does not matter, just some kind of growth. If they can learn a little bit of history, connect with the music and message, and apply that to their own lives in a positive way, then that is fantastic.

Comprised of violinists Annie Fullard and Catherine Cosbey, violist Eric Wong, and Kyle Price, the Cavani String Quartet is the recipient of The Naumburg Award, Ohio Governors Award for the Arts, Musical America Magazine’s Young Artists of the Year, The Cleveland Quartet Award, ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, and The Guarneri Quartet Award Artistic Excellence.

VC: How important is it to your group to perform new music? 

CSQ: Learning and performing new music offers us a renewed sense of wonder and discovery. We believe the collaborative process with living composers is the life force of every ensemble, and the Cavani Quartet works actively to cultivate these wonderful relationships. We approach the work of living composers with the same reverence as the works of celebrated musicians from the past. At the same time, working with living composers offers deeper insight into the process of interpreting and studying composers from the past. To quote one of our favorite composers, Gabriela Lena Frank, “It is beyond important for chamber music groups to play new music and work with living composers – it is your responsibility as artists.”

VC: Did you get to collaborate with the composer on this premiere?

CSQ: Our collaboration with Josh Henderson was inspiring and creative. We feel grateful to have had the opportunity to commission a work that is so multifaceted, dynamic, and refreshing. Josh even performed with us in the premiere!

VC: How does the group go about programming a concert such as this one?

CSQ: In 2021, the Cavani Quartet inaugurated Beyond Beethoven, an eight-part concert series featuring the complete quartets of Beethoven intertwined with works by some today's most respected and innovative living composers. Beyond Beethoven also included a community engagement extravaganza involving more than a hundred high school-age string players from the Cleveland region. Our goal is to celebrate these young artists through a side-by-side performance on the stage of the renowned Severance Hall. We chose a challenging and joyful movement from a Beethoven quartet and commissioned the extraordinary Josh Henderson to write a work that could include all of our students on stage performing together with the Cavani Quartet. Josh created a piece which tied the Beethoven and Bridgetower story together and offered the students a chance to premiere an exciting and beautiful new work. We are so thrilled to perform the work once again at Kaufman Music Center this week, and once again with the brilliant Josh Henderson.

VC: If you had to give a piece of advice to a young, aspiring quartet, what would it be?

CSQ: We encourage our students to look to the future as well as the past when selecting repertoire. There is a vast array of brilliant and compelling contemporary chamber music and composers who are excited to create new works. As a community of musicians, we must empower young ensembles to develop their joyful side, and encourage passionate communication, critical thinking, effective reasoning, and creative action. We believe playing chamber music is a catalyst for deepening the expressive power of music and connection, and in building the team. Living in a chamber music world illuminates the importance of connecting with each other and strengthens our humanity.

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James Carson's soon-to-be-released debut album The Story of Birds includes eleven tracks that were recorded consecutively, with no edits or alterations. The album grew out of Carson's months of isolation and practice in a remote strawbale cabin that he built in the Canadian wilderness.

The new release is part of a larger project that Carson calls Cabin Music, in which he aims "to transform the way in which music is created by placing it in a space between composition and improvisation, and uniting musician and audience as one."

Audiences can discover this new sound in a new music video below:

James Carson gave The Violin Channel an in-depth look into his creative process and how he found his unique musical voice:

Pianist James Carson on Creating a New Form of Music

When I began the project of remaking the piano, nearly twenty years ago, I had no idea where it would lead. I was pursuing a more traditional path as a composer and improviser at the New England Conservatory, with only a distant sound in my head and a faint vision of what might be possible if I could remove myself fully from the process of creating music. I did not know if it would be possible, but I knew my body and mind could not execute it without change. A plan emerged: to walk away from music, to travel and farm around the world, then build a cabin and practice in it. After that it was not clear what would happen.

I did not know where I would go other than that I wanted to arrive in Asia, slowly. I contemplated my backpack. Could it be smaller? Then I bought a plane ticket to Malaga, Spain for $73. I baked bread in Auvergne, France, and pruned grape vines in Florence, dug ditches with Roma in Transylvania, and delivered baby cows in Northeast Poland. I was arrested (for playing piano no less!) in Rome and swam in the black sea not long after the orange revolution. And I experienced things in Siberia and Hiroshima that changed me permanently. The journey is in my bones: with me always, guiding and informing all that I've done since.

When I made it home, I set out to build the cabin I had originally envisioned at the New England Conservatory. So many things fell into place quickly that it gave the impression that it had always been planned. Still, the work of building was difficult manual labor – I was only working with volunteers, and roofs do not simply build themselves. Finally, when we moved the piano to the cabin and played the first notes, the sound was unlike anything I'd ever encountered. The irregular clay walls and rough-cut lumber in the ceiling let the sound hang right in front of you, with no reverberation, yet somehow it still breathes. If I could sum it up in a word, it would be clarity.

The original idea, of playing the whole piano at once, came to life suddenly, in a flash. My hands, playing ahead of my thinking, ahead of my ears, even, moved “accidentally” across the keys. Nothing was pre-heard, pre-planned, or controlled. At first it was a shock that it could be happening at all, that it could be kept going without collapse. Our bodies are forever in involuntary motion – blinking, readjusting, breathing, glancing, elongating, contracting, shifting, rebalancing – and there is rarely any conscious attention paid to the body being a body as it carries itself forward in the world. To my surprise, wonder, and joy, those processes had fully taken over the piano. The spirits had entered. I only understood it when listening, over and over, to the little recordings I’d made. I would often weep, listening to them, as nothing conscious had occurred while playing, so the recordings meant hearing the music for the first time.

The next challenge was to figure out how to share the cabin with the world. I moved back to the Northeast United States, to New York. Three ideas presented themselves immediately: concerts in equally immersive environments, an album, and a feature film. For a decade, my efforts were channeled into producing and directing Cabin Music, the feature documentary film, which would consolidate and condense the global roots of the project into a single piece, initiating the viewer not only into the cabin but also the places and encounters from which it originates. Creating the film was like building the cabin all over again: we filmed in the cabin and New York in all the seasons and in Spain, France, Moscow, Siberia, and Japan.

And now, with the film complete, all three ideas are coming to life in rapid succession in Manhattan. On October 27, I'm performing through Death of Classical in the Crypt of the Church of the Intercession – an extraordinary space that shapes and melds audience, piano, and music into a single, fused, communion. On October 28, my debut album The Story of Birds will be released on Bright Shiny Things. Its eleven tracks—recorded consecutively, with no edits or alterations—carry a pure channeling of the myriad spiritual traditions and natural forces that have met and merged in the cabin. And, on November 13, Cabin Music will have its world premiere at the Cinépolis in Chelsea, at DOC NYC in a co-presentation with the Canadian Consulate in New York.

The music video I’m sharing with you today features the serene, focused, and timeless dancer Chelsea Hecht. It contains much of what I’ve learned about the craft of filmmaking, the spirits of the cabin, and the light of New York. I hope it is an enjoyable and enriching introduction to my life’s work. But much as I found myself twenty years ago, it’s not clear to me what’s going to come next.

-James

The post Pianist James Carson on Creating a New Form of Music appeared first on World's Leading Classical Music Platform.

The Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music is open to composers worldwide with the aim of encouraging creative and critical engagement around the question: "What is Jewish Music?"

The 2022 Laureates of the Azrieli Music Prizes will be celebrated at the Azrieli Music Prizes Gala Concert — taking place on October 20, 2022, at 7:30 pm ET. There, audiences will be able to hear the premieres of all three prize-winning works.

In 2020, Composer Yotam Haber won the Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music, which lead to the creation of his Estro Poetico-armonico III.

More recently, The Violin Channel had a chance to gain Haber's personal insights into his compositional process...

The Mysterious Possibilities of Writing for Stringed Instruments

By Yotam Haber

In high school, I touched a string instrument for the first time. My parents sent me, an aspiring trumpet player, to the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, and my cabin mate let me try out his gleaming cello. I will never forget that feeling of drawing a bow and feeling its sound permeate my body, of the slight pain involved in pressing a string down to the fingerboard for the first time. It was a very different kind of sensation than the agony of playing trumpet with braces.

I was, and still am, in awe of the mysterious possibilities afforded by a string instrument: within the span of an octave lie an infinite series of pitches and colors that a master artist can achieve through years of muscle memory, training, and dedication.

Since that cold, buggy camp summer, my body of work consists overwhelmingly of music for strings.

When I was a young composer, I was under the impression that composing was like that old Gilette antiperspirant ad: “never let them see you sweat.” Performers should never think that you don’t know something. Always give the illusion that you are in full control, and that you have an answer for everything.

But this method proved to be useless to both myself and the performers. Neither they nor I ended up learning, developing, or growing as artists from these early experiences.

In 2008, I was commissioned by the architect Peter Zumthor to write a trio (Between Composure and Seduction) for his friends, Maya Hamburger (I believe she was the concertmaster of the English Baroque Soloists at the time), her husband (the composer and experimental bassist Barry Guy), and Zumthor’s son, Peter Conradin, who is a fine percussionist. I was so in awe of these players that I was too afraid to ask questions. I wrote a part for Maya’s baroque violin that had barely a passing knowledge of her instrument’s capabilities and limitations. After Maya saw the part, she called me and grimly said, “I’ll play it, but I’m passing the doctor’s bill to you.”

It was a turning point.

These days, working with and learning from performers could not be more essential to my process. When I was commissioned by the Kronos Quartet (From the Book), I spent months crafting and refining the piece, to make it a work that, like a bespoke suit, fit the group perfectly. It was music truly for the Kronos Quartet, made to fit, made to accentuate their “curves,” made to highlight their great strengths, and most importantly, made so that they truly enjoyed playing it.

I do not write with an audience in mind, but I do consider my performer. If I am able to transmit meaning and intention to them, there is a chance that they may be able to carry that to an audience. But if there is no connection between me and my players, how can my ideas possibly reach a listener?  There are not many things that I am certain about as a composer. One thing that I do feel very strongly about is creating this connection.

Estro Poetico-armonico III, my work for the Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music was a continuation of my cycle of pieces that investigate, reconsider, and re-discover through my own lens the liturgical music of the Roman Jewish community. EPA1 was for the JACK Quartet and the Berlin-based Quartet New Generation, a recorder quartet. EPA2 was for the Israel-based Meitar Ensemble (Meitar means “string” in Hebrew), and EPA3 (for the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne) is for voice and chamber orchestra. In all three works, strings play a central role, embodying a liturgical tradition that has slowly transformed over millennia.

Why am I so drawn to string instruments, when woodwinds and brass - those instruments that use air - would make perfect sense to recreate disembodied voices from archival sources? I think it is precisely because the relationship between the voice and drawing a bow over a string is not entirely obvious. That connection between the voice and these mysterious instruments I love is not an entirely direct, easy route.
And indirect routes are something I love: in nature, in life, and in music.

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On the eve of his Berlin Philharmonic solo concerto debut, where he performed Mozart's 5th Violin Concerto, Berlin Philh concertmaster, VC Artist Noah Bendix-Balgley shares his tips and insights for composing your own original violin concerto cadenzas.

Violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley Shares Tips on Writing Your Own Cadenza

VC ARTIST NOAH BENDIX-BALGLEY | MOZART VIOLIN CONCERTO NO. 5 IN A MAJOR  | 1ST MVT ORIGINAL CADENZA 

A graduate of Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Munich, where he studied with Mauricio Fuks, Christoph Poppen, and Ana Chumachenco, Noah Bendix-Balgley is former Concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra — and has served as 1st Concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic since 2015.

The post Noah Bendix-Balgley on Composing Your Own Violin Concerto Cadenzas appeared first on World's Leading Classical Music Platform.