THREE RAGS FOR STRING QUARTET
William Bolcom (b. Seattle, WA, May 16, 1938)
Composed 1989; 13 minutes
The American composer William Bolcom was originally introduced to ragtime music by an academic colleague in the early 1960s. Having never heard of ragtime’s great exponents Scott Joplin or Eubie Blake, he plunged into research of the era, research that led to new possibilities. Bolcom soon found himself composing his own version of piano rags. As he told it:
... from about 1968 on a whole group of young American composers, Peter Winkler, William Albright and several others, joined me in writing new traditional-style rags...I think we all felt the real impetus from our picking up a dropped thread of our emerging American tradition.
...the Ragtime Revival was certainly the beginning of American composers’ serious absorption of our own popular sources into our music in an unself-conscious way....we younger composers internalized rag (and other popular music) in such a way that our subsequent music became profoundly changed, whatever styles we each pursued later.
Ragtime piano burst into the public ear anew in 1973, when the movie The Sting prominently featured the piano music of Scott Joplin. His 1902 piano rag “The Entertainer” became the theme song of a real craze for that sound.
In 1970 William Bolcom had published a work for solo piano, “Graceful Ghost Rag,” that immediately caught the fancy of pianists far and wide. Whether they trained as “classical” pianists or came to the keyboard via their backgrounds in the “popular” world, the “Graceful Ghost” spoke to them, and to their audiences. As the opening work in Bolcom’s 3 Ghost Rags for Solo Piano, the “Graceful Ghost” became the star of the set.
Joplin’s success heightened the interest in Bolcom’s 3 Ghost Rags. The thirst for that musical style became nearly unquenchable. In addition to composing new rags, Bolcom was receiving requests for adaptations of “The Graceful Ghost;” for the duo of Sergiu Luca and Anne Epperson, for example, he set the piece for violin and piano.
By the 1980s Bolcom’s fame as a composer of wide-ranging works for soloists, ensembles and orchestra had steadily increased in other genres; he earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for 12 New Etudes for Piano. Still, the following year, when Emanuel Borok, then the concertmaster of the Dallas Symphony, asked Bolcom to score all three of the piano rags, including “The Ghost,” for string quartet, the composer responded with this splendid set.
Originally, 3 Ghost Rags had comprised (in addition to “The Graceful Ghost”) “The Poltergeist” and “Dream Shadows.” For his string quartet adaptation, Bolcom substituted "Incineratorag” (composed in 1967 for piano) in place of “Dream Shadows.” Both versions of 3 Ghost Rags have been published and recorded.
CUARTETO EN GUAGUANCÓ
Guido López-Gavilán (b. January 3, 1944, Matanzas, Cuba)
Composed 2005/2016; 6 minutes
The family name López-Gavilán has become familiar to Rockport audiences for good reason. The pianist and composer Aldo López-Gavilán appeared on the Shalin Liu Performance Center stage during the 2016 Rockport Chamber Music Festival, performing his own works in partnership with the Harlem Quartet, of which his brother, Ilmar López-Gavilán, is the principal violinist. Ilmar returns this afternoon, once again occupying the Harlem Quartet principal chair. Their father, Guido López-Gavilán, is a leading composer and conductor of international renown who appears with orchestras and in guest appearances at concerts, seminars and festivals throughout the world. Separately and distinctively, Aldo, Ilmar and Guido López-Gavilán have achieved acclaim far beyond the borders of their native Cuba.
The “guaguancó” of the quartet’s title is fundamentally a dance—and no ordinary dance. With obvious characteristics of the rumba, it reverberates as well with the rhythms, melodies, sensuality and mystery of Cuban themes shrouded in the traditions of past generations. Ilmar López-Gavilán has described the piece as a dance that “came from the African slaves to Cuba.” He points out that “like most Cuban music, the rhythmic foundation is based on a rhythmic ostinato that can be arranged in several ways. It is known for its characteristic delay on the third clave [beat in the measure].” The piece opens with a plaintive viola solo, the song, which introduces the dance, which is played with the strong rhythmic propulsion of the cello’s pizzicato. This combination, Western instruments and Afro-Cuban musical elements, makes it a fine example of Cross Pollination.
Guido López-Gavilán composed the work originally in 2005 for a small instrumental ensemble—a chamber orchestra. His son Ilmar explained, “The orchestral version is unique among string orchestra repertoire not only for these Cuban rhythmic elements, but also for the way it traces its sonority back to melodic chanting of the West African Yoruba tradition.” Guido adapted it specifically for Harlem Quartet’s repertoire in 2016.
A NIGHT IN TUNISIA
John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie (b. October 21, 1917, Cheraw, SC; d. January 6, 1993, Englewood, NJ)
Composed 1940-42; 6 minutes
Widely recognized and admired as one of the greatest (jazz) trumpeters of all time, John Birks Gillespie was a particularly versatile musician, composer and instrumentalist. The moniker “Dizzy” and his leading role in the jazz world of “bebop” music may give the false impression that his was a superficial talent. Accepting that impression would be a mistake. Like many jazz musicians, Dizzy had avidly studied and absorbed the works of such European composers as Stravinsky and Debussy.
“A Night in Tunisia” first appeared on his musicians’ charts during the years of bebop’s ascension, when Dizzy’s big band was at the height of its successes. At its composition (ca. 1940-42), Dizzy called it “Interlude.” In disdain, he said later, “Some genius decided to call it ‘Night in Tunisia’.” As “Interlude” it became Dizzy’s signature tune, and he recorded it under that title in 1945. Although he continued to think of it as “Interlude,” the rest of the world accepted the more exotic title, and so it has found a permanent place on the honor roll of great jazz works.
Not only Dizzy, but dozens of other instrumentalists and singers—including some of the most famous in jazz history—have recorded this mesmerizing piece. In January 2004 The Recording Academy (the organization that sponsors the annual ceremony of Grammy Awards) added Dizzy’s 1946 Victor recording to its Grammy Hall of Fame.
STRING QUARTET IN E-FLAT MAJOR, H. 277
Fanny Cäcilie Hensel geb. Mendelssohn Bartholdy (b. Hamburg, November 14, 1805; d. Berlin, May 14, 1847)
Composed 1834; 20 minutes
In the summer of 1820 Fanny Mendelssohn’s father, Abraham, sent his 14-year-old daughter a letter that left her with no doubts about his expectations. Rather than personal rancor or malice, he was representing to her a distillation of the social norms congruent with his position in Berlin society. He took pride in her femininity, as defined by the patriarchal hegemony of his world.
“What you wrote to me,” Abraham explained to her, “about your musical occupations with reference to and in comparison with Felix [then age ten] was both rightly thought and expressed. Music will perhaps become his profession, whilst for you it can and must only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing...[H]e feels a vocation for it, whilst it does you credit that you have always shown your self good and sensible in these matters...Remain true to these sentiments and to this line of conduct; they are feminine, and only what is truly feminine is an ornament to your sex.”
Until her mid-teens, Fanny and her younger brother Felix had shared the benefits of a first-rate education. Their cultured parents had hired the best tutors for music, as well as for general studies in history, languages and the sciences. Both children showed their prodigious musical talents early on, and they delighted in piano lessons, as well as advanced studies in counterpoint and composition.
Early exposure to Bach and Beethoven influenced them both for their lifetimes. At the age of 14, only weeks before she received the above letter, Fanny had pleased her father, as well as the other family members gathered for his birthday, by performing from memory all 24 Preludes from J. S. Bach’s volumes of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The children’s composition teacher, the highly regarded composer and conductor Carl Friedrich Zelter, in correspondence with his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, frequently wrote of his pleasure in their achievements, and on at least two occasions expressed his opinion that Fanny was the more gifted of the two.
So there we have it. Honoring her father’s opinions, deferring to her beloved brother’s right to a career in music, and bowing before the societal barriers to her own vocational desires, Fanny, as a woman of the finer circles in Berlin, married, bore a son and continued to nurture her own musicianship largely in secret. “Largely” is significant, as her husband, the painter Wilhelm Hensel, and her brother Felix were both aware of, and supported, her continuing practice of composition. While Felix depended upon her to help him in assessing his own works in progress, he did submit a few of her Lieder for publication under his own name in order for them to receive public notice.
Still, only in 1846 did she dare to publish a small handful of her compositions, a set of Lieder, under her own name, Fanny Hensel geb. [née] Mendelssohn Bartholdy. A few months later she unexpectedly died of a stroke at age 41. Nearly 450 other compositions remained unpublished and unheard until long after her passing. Very long after, at the end of the 20th century, Fanny Mendelssohn’s work finally began to be recognized for its exemplary quality. Her name, independent of Felix’s, finally entered the roster of important 19th century composers, and her compositions began to appear on concert programs.
Fanny’s only string quartet (the first in that genre ever composed by a woman) grew out of the themes she had used in an earlier piano sonata. She subsequently wrote that she was “not an eccentric or overly sentimental person,” and she proposed that she had composed the quartet under the influence of the “exceedingly moving and emotional” style of Beethoven, whose music she had loved since her childhood.
Fanny’s quartet has a decidedly minor cast to its first three movements. It opens soberly, an Adagio introduction that leads to an extended fugal passage. She casts the second movement as a lively Allegretto scherzo and trio. Her harmonic daring and impassioned lines of the Romanze express the heart of German romanticism. Finally the light of the E-flat major tonic begins to shine, and she completes the quartet with a playful Allegro movement that ends the work with great elan.
— Program notes by Sandra Hyslop