with Cristian Măcelaru, Music Director

Last season, on breaks from some CSO business, Cristian Măcelaru attended banjoist Béla Fleck’s concert at Music Hall. It was, he recalls with equal parts pleasure and astonishment, “a completely different crowd. People, of course, associate the banjo with Appalachian culture. And that’s totally true,” he says.

Lisa Bielawa will lean into that heritage in her concerto PULSE, a CSO co-commission for violinist Tessa Lark. An alum of CCM’s preparatory strings program, Lark enriches her classical career with bluegrass chops from her upbringing in Kentucky. 

PULSE is flanked by three other pieces with folk origins. The most famous of the bunch is Aaron Copland’s “Variations on a Shaker Melody,” from his 1944 ballet Appalachian Spring. The short piece riffs on “Simple Gifts,” a song little-known outside the pacifist religious sect at the time Copland arranged it for orchestra. 

Another is Carlos Simon’s Tales: A Folklore Symphony. Măcelaru first met Simon through the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, where he also serves as music director. The symphony’s roots in the African-American spiritual tradition — Simon grew up in the Black church — deeply appealed to Măcelaru. 

He sees parallels between Simon’s work and Antonín Dvořák’s campaign to create an American school of music based on African-American and Native American traditions. But because of the difference in their identities — Dvořák as a middle-aged, homesick Czech immigrant in late 19th century America, and Simon as a Black millennial living in the 21st century — “their treatment of the same spiritual is a world apart,” says Măcelaru. 

“That’s why it’s important to have different composers talk about the same thing: It has different meanings,” he says. “What’s really beautiful to me is to see how four different composers turn the idea of folklore into a truly personal statement of identity, of who they are as artists.”

—Hannah Edgar