Series Concert I
Sunday, September 7
Bob Dylan/Colin Jacobsen | The Times They are A-Changin’
“Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things pass and nothing stays, and comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river.” -Plato
As we approach the country’s 250th birthday, we find ourselves indeed in a time of great change, socially, politically, economically, culturally. The interesting thing about Dylan’s song, also from a time (the 60’s) of great societal upheaval, is how it instantly became a timeless classic. Perhaps part of its success (other than the clearly hewn lyrics, the anthemic chords and Dylan’s unique singing style) is that it enunciates a timeless principle, attributed to Heraclitus, “the only constant is change” and encourages us to have courage in the face of this change. The river analogy does indeed feel apt to describe lived experience: currents, eddies going every direction, progress on some aspect of society while another is flowing backwards.
My arrangement/fantasy based on this song attempts to capture some of that layered experience, as we continue to swim (forward?).
~ Colin Jacobsen
“Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things pass and nothing stays, and comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river.” -Plato
As we approach the country’s 250th birthday, we find ourselves indeed in a time of great change, socially, politically, economically, culturally. The interesting thing about Dylan’s song, also from a time (the 60’s) of great societal upheaval, is how it instantly became a timeless classic. Perhaps part of its success (other than the clearly hewn lyrics, the anthemic chords and Dylan’s unique singing style) is that it enunciates a timeless principle, attributed to Heraclitus, “the only constant is change” and encourages us to have courage in the face of this change. The river analogy does indeed feel apt to describe lived experience: currents, eddies going every direction, progress on some aspect of society while another is flowing backwards.
My arrangement/fantasy based on this song attempts to capture some of that layered experience, as we continue to swim (forward?).
~ Colin Jacobsen
Giovanni Sollima | Four Quartets
Since I was a teenager, I’ve been thinking about T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” without ever managing to write something...
Now I did it! I don’t follow the narrative structure, just as I haven’t sought other musical references. It’s more of an emotional approach in a four-movement – or miniatures - form.
~ Giovanni Sollima
Description from the Ricercare editions website about the piece:
Composed in 2024, “Four Quartets” is inspired by the eponymous book by the poet T.S. Eliot, following its narrative structure loosely and at times. The four movements reprise the titles of the poems collected by the author in a single book in 1943.
1. Burnt Norton
2. East Coker
3. The Dry Salvages
4. Little Gidding
The piece is dedicated to Brooklyn Rider and co-commissioned for them by Köln Musik Service u. Betriebsges. GmbH (Kölner Philharmonie), Meany Center for the Performing Arts, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Patricia Reser Center for the Performing Arts, Vail Dance Festival, 2023 - Damian Woetzel, Artistic Director, and Washington Performing Arts
Since I was a teenager, I’ve been thinking about T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” without ever managing to write something...
Now I did it! I don’t follow the narrative structure, just as I haven’t sought other musical references. It’s more of an emotional approach in a four-movement – or miniatures - form.
~ Giovanni Sollima
Description from the Ricercare editions website about the piece:
Composed in 2024, “Four Quartets” is inspired by the eponymous book by the poet T.S. Eliot, following its narrative structure loosely and at times. The four movements reprise the titles of the poems collected by the author in a single book in 1943.
1. Burnt Norton
2. East Coker
3. The Dry Salvages
4. Little Gidding
The piece is dedicated to Brooklyn Rider and co-commissioned for them by Köln Musik Service u. Betriebsges. GmbH (Kölner Philharmonie), Meany Center for the Performing Arts, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Patricia Reser Center for the Performing Arts, Vail Dance Festival, 2023 - Damian Woetzel, Artistic Director, and Washington Performing Arts
Colin Jacobsen | Morgantina Studies
I was touched when my friend, the cellist Raphael Bell, (“Rafe”) asked me to write a piece for the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival in honor of his dad, Malcolm Bell III. I mostly knew “Mac” in the context of the festival, where his quietly inquisitive and piercing eyes pointed to a vast amount of knowledge of music, to say nothing of his life’s work as an archaeologist, working mostly at the dig at ancient Morgantina in Sicily. Rafe suggested that perhaps the piece could relate to some aspect of the place, the history, Mac’s work, and I was excited by the possibilities. In my own research, I stumbled upon a folk song from southern Italy, entitled Tarantella del Gargano. It’s an intoxicating love song, with a repetitive bass line much like a passacaglia. The tarantella and tarantism have all sorts of lore and legends surrounding them, most popularly that tarantism is a spiritual malady brought on by a spider bite, causing a hysterical condition that can only be cured through a frenzied dance (the tarantella). I was intrigued to learn that scholars believe that tarantism may have its roots in ancient Bacchanalian/Dionysian rites, which were suppressed by the Roman Senate in 186 BC, and perhaps went underground to become the tarantella. This made me feel I had found a possible link back to the life of the citizens of Morgantina, which had a massive auditorium dedicated to Dionysus, capable of seating 5000 people. When I first heard this Tarantella del Gargano, it immediately grabbed me with its ancient sound, that seemed to speak to an older world than many tarantelle I had heard. In fact, very few of the hundreds of versions of this tarantella that are out there even have the
stereotypical compound meter. Instead, the ecstasy of this song lies more in its wistful repetition.
I decided to structure the piece loosely around my imagination of Mac’s archaeological work. There are four sections, and in my mind, the introduction represents an initial excavation, the 2nd section is the thrill of discovery, the 3rd a further, closer examination of the exhumed object, and the final section the full reveal and the spreading of that knowledge with the world. Most of the material is derived from the intervals inherent in the bass line of the Tarantella del Gargano and the melody that floats on top, but we only get disembodied versions until the final section, allowing for an archaeological-like reveal of the music. In the original song, there is imagery around how far one would go to earn the beloved’s love, including building a garden with a fountain and turning oneself into a bird to sing for the beloved. Some of that imagery inspired some of the music in my piece as well.
Of course, knowing this would be a cello quintet for Brooklyn Rider and Rafe made me think of Schubert’s great cello quintet in C, which also seems to dig up ancient music and make it new. While writing this piece, Brooklyn Rider has been playing Schubert’s transcendent work, and I couldn’t help but draw upon one of his motifs as well, which you hear in the 2nd section as part of that “thrill of discovery”. The title of the piece, Morgantina Studies, comes from the title of the scholarly series that commenced with the publication of Mac’s dissertation as volume I, and which now is up to volume VII.
~ Colin Jacobsen
Antonín Dvořák | String Sextet in A Major, Op. 48
In 1878, when Antonin Dvořák composed his String Sextet, the thirty-something composer was entering his prime and just starting to be recognized internationally; this is the Dvořák of the Wind Serenade, the Stabat Mater, and the first set of Slavonic Dances. In the Sextet one can hear a mastery of long form, a sureness of voice, and yet there is also a sense of a still-young composer who is eager to experiment, to reach beyond traditional structure and try out new flavors and ideas.
The genre of the string sextet, birthed by Johannes Brahms just a few years earlier, extends the sound of the standard string quartet to a deeper, richer tint by the addition of a second viola and a second cello. Dvořák uses this sound to lovely effect in the opening of the first movement, weaving a texture of patient, reminiscent melancholy that evokes an old pipe organ in a country church. Already experimenting, he tries an approach in this movement where, instead of giving each of his two themes a separate lengthy section, as would be standard procedure, he alternates them more tightly, so that they recur around each other in a kind of negotiation, the sighing, singing first melody against the nimble, dancing second one. Across its rather ambitious length, this movement continually trends towards the brighter, more energetic side of things, but it is the opening material, with its deeply nostalgic character, that stays with us when all is said and done.
The second movement is a “Dumka”, a concept that came out of Ukraine. The word dumka in Ukrainian literally means “thought” or “idea”, and in its musical form was a lamenting kind of ballad. In Dvořák’s hands, the form took on a very particular flavor: an expression of gentle melancholy that alternates with brighter, more hopeful passages, smiling through its tears, dancing in the midst of sorrow. To the composer, there was something ineffably Slavic about holding the bright and the dark in balance with each other, and he returned to his own version of Dumka over and over, most famously in his “Dumky” Trio, which consists of six Dumka movements in a row. In the sextet, Dvořák utters his Dumka phrases in 5-bar lengths, rather than the more symmetrical and traditional 4 bars, which gives an easy, rambling comfort to the narrative, a grandmother unfolding her tale in her own good time.
The third movement is another Slavic form: a Furiant, an exuberant and uplifting triple-meter dance. In this case, Dvořák keeps both the material and the spacing comically simple, good-humored, repetitious just for the sheer fun of it. Despite the slightly gentler middle section, there are no shadows here, just flirtation, the dance, and a few oafish grunts from the low instruments at the very end.
In the final movement, Dvořák pays a kind of homage to Beethoven. The older composer was fond, when it came to last movements, of choosing a theme and variations, often with a calm, measured opening — in his “Harp” Quartet, his “Eroica” Symphony, his late piano sonatas. Here Dvořák offers a variations movement with a viola solo as its theme, graceful but sultry. In a nod, perhaps, to Beethoven’s Heilige Dankgesang, Dvořák uses a “modal” approach to harmony here: that is, he straddles the knife-edge between two keys, clinging to B minor while seeming to long for A major. Each section then finally relents and comes to
rest in the latter key. The movement winds through many variations in different characters — meandering, sparkling, gloomy, menacing. Always there is the feeling of ambivalence, of mulling the problem of the two key centers. This dilemma finally loosens in the final section, a Stretta, or “squeezing” passage, where the B minor material starts to sparkle, effervesce, and finally explode in an A major version of itself. The original problem is now tossed playfully around the group, a game of hot potato, escalating yet further to a frantic Presto — can the second violin really play that fast? — before reaching an emphatic, stamping conclusion.
~ Misha Amory
I was touched when my friend, the cellist Raphael Bell, (“Rafe”) asked me to write a piece for the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival in honor of his dad, Malcolm Bell III. I mostly knew “Mac” in the context of the festival, where his quietly inquisitive and piercing eyes pointed to a vast amount of knowledge of music, to say nothing of his life’s work as an archaeologist, working mostly at the dig at ancient Morgantina in Sicily. Rafe suggested that perhaps the piece could relate to some aspect of the place, the history, Mac’s work, and I was excited by the possibilities. In my own research, I stumbled upon a folk song from southern Italy, entitled Tarantella del Gargano. It’s an intoxicating love song, with a repetitive bass line much like a passacaglia. The tarantella and tarantism have all sorts of lore and legends surrounding them, most popularly that tarantism is a spiritual malady brought on by a spider bite, causing a hysterical condition that can only be cured through a frenzied dance (the tarantella). I was intrigued to learn that scholars believe that tarantism may have its roots in ancient Bacchanalian/Dionysian rites, which were suppressed by the Roman Senate in 186 BC, and perhaps went underground to become the tarantella. This made me feel I had found a possible link back to the life of the citizens of Morgantina, which had a massive auditorium dedicated to Dionysus, capable of seating 5000 people. When I first heard this Tarantella del Gargano, it immediately grabbed me with its ancient sound, that seemed to speak to an older world than many tarantelle I had heard. In fact, very few of the hundreds of versions of this tarantella that are out there even have the
stereotypical compound meter. Instead, the ecstasy of this song lies more in its wistful repetition.
I decided to structure the piece loosely around my imagination of Mac’s archaeological work. There are four sections, and in my mind, the introduction represents an initial excavation, the 2nd section is the thrill of discovery, the 3rd a further, closer examination of the exhumed object, and the final section the full reveal and the spreading of that knowledge with the world. Most of the material is derived from the intervals inherent in the bass line of the Tarantella del Gargano and the melody that floats on top, but we only get disembodied versions until the final section, allowing for an archaeological-like reveal of the music. In the original song, there is imagery around how far one would go to earn the beloved’s love, including building a garden with a fountain and turning oneself into a bird to sing for the beloved. Some of that imagery inspired some of the music in my piece as well.
Of course, knowing this would be a cello quintet for Brooklyn Rider and Rafe made me think of Schubert’s great cello quintet in C, which also seems to dig up ancient music and make it new. While writing this piece, Brooklyn Rider has been playing Schubert’s transcendent work, and I couldn’t help but draw upon one of his motifs as well, which you hear in the 2nd section as part of that “thrill of discovery”. The title of the piece, Morgantina Studies, comes from the title of the scholarly series that commenced with the publication of Mac’s dissertation as volume I, and which now is up to volume VII.
~ Colin Jacobsen
Antonín Dvořák | String Sextet in A Major, Op. 48
In 1878, when Antonin Dvořák composed his String Sextet, the thirty-something composer was entering his prime and just starting to be recognized internationally; this is the Dvořák of the Wind Serenade, the Stabat Mater, and the first set of Slavonic Dances. In the Sextet one can hear a mastery of long form, a sureness of voice, and yet there is also a sense of a still-young composer who is eager to experiment, to reach beyond traditional structure and try out new flavors and ideas.
The genre of the string sextet, birthed by Johannes Brahms just a few years earlier, extends the sound of the standard string quartet to a deeper, richer tint by the addition of a second viola and a second cello. Dvořák uses this sound to lovely effect in the opening of the first movement, weaving a texture of patient, reminiscent melancholy that evokes an old pipe organ in a country church. Already experimenting, he tries an approach in this movement where, instead of giving each of his two themes a separate lengthy section, as would be standard procedure, he alternates them more tightly, so that they recur around each other in a kind of negotiation, the sighing, singing first melody against the nimble, dancing second one. Across its rather ambitious length, this movement continually trends towards the brighter, more energetic side of things, but it is the opening material, with its deeply nostalgic character, that stays with us when all is said and done.
The second movement is a “Dumka”, a concept that came out of Ukraine. The word dumka in Ukrainian literally means “thought” or “idea”, and in its musical form was a lamenting kind of ballad. In Dvořák’s hands, the form took on a very particular flavor: an expression of gentle melancholy that alternates with brighter, more hopeful passages, smiling through its tears, dancing in the midst of sorrow. To the composer, there was something ineffably Slavic about holding the bright and the dark in balance with each other, and he returned to his own version of Dumka over and over, most famously in his “Dumky” Trio, which consists of six Dumka movements in a row. In the sextet, Dvořák utters his Dumka phrases in 5-bar lengths, rather than the more symmetrical and traditional 4 bars, which gives an easy, rambling comfort to the narrative, a grandmother unfolding her tale in her own good time.
The third movement is another Slavic form: a Furiant, an exuberant and uplifting triple-meter dance. In this case, Dvořák keeps both the material and the spacing comically simple, good-humored, repetitious just for the sheer fun of it. Despite the slightly gentler middle section, there are no shadows here, just flirtation, the dance, and a few oafish grunts from the low instruments at the very end.
In the final movement, Dvořák pays a kind of homage to Beethoven. The older composer was fond, when it came to last movements, of choosing a theme and variations, often with a calm, measured opening — in his “Harp” Quartet, his “Eroica” Symphony, his late piano sonatas. Here Dvořák offers a variations movement with a viola solo as its theme, graceful but sultry. In a nod, perhaps, to Beethoven’s Heilige Dankgesang, Dvořák uses a “modal” approach to harmony here: that is, he straddles the knife-edge between two keys, clinging to B minor while seeming to long for A major. Each section then finally relents and comes to
rest in the latter key. The movement winds through many variations in different characters — meandering, sparkling, gloomy, menacing. Always there is the feeling of ambivalence, of mulling the problem of the two key centers. This dilemma finally loosens in the final section, a Stretta, or “squeezing” passage, where the B minor material starts to sparkle, effervesce, and finally explode in an A major version of itself. The original problem is now tossed playfully around the group, a game of hot potato, escalating yet further to a frantic Presto — can the second violin really play that fast? — before reaching an emphatic, stamping conclusion.
~ Misha Amory