NOVA Chamber Music Series
Fry Street Quartet, music directors
Libby Gardner Concert Hall
concert program
with notes by Jeff Counts
Songs From Letters
Libby Larsen
(b. 1950)
Jin-Xiang Yu soprano | Kimi Kawashima piano
I. So like your father’s
II. He never misses
III. A man can love two women
IV. A working woman
V. All I have
CONTENT WARNING: This piece contains references and physical gestures intended to evoke gunfights in the “Old West”.
With no fewer than 500 works in her highly varied catalog, American icon Libby Larsen has had many years to put her belief that a composer’s job is to “communicate something about being alive through music” into practice. Larsen also feels that music comes from the “languages people use to communicate with each other” and speaks about a “third voice” that can emerge from a meaningful collaboration between text and sound. One of her many proofs of this concept was a vocal work from 1998 based on the writings of the famed wild west sharpshooter Calamity Jane. “The diary of Martha Jane Canary Hickock,” writes Larsen about Songs From Letters for soprano and piano, “reveals the struggle of an individual soul, a tender soul, a woman and pioneer on many frontiers. Calamity Jane was a working woman, good at her profession, working at what she loved, and making choices because of her will to work.” Jane sent her daughter by Wild Bill Hickock to live with a trusted friend, and her letters to young Janey used “rough-tough words” to describe her itinerant life. For Larsen, Calamity Jane’s is a genuine and irresistible American story. She was, like so many of us, “odd and lonely” in her time.
(Bury Me) Where the Lightning [Will] Never Find Me
Raven Chacon
(b. 1977)
Katie Porter bass clarinet | Keith Carrick percussion
Laura Ha violin | Noriko Kishi cello
Diné-American composer Raven Chacon was born in Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. His music explores the intersection of acoustic, electronic and constructed instruments, and frequently gives musical voice to the heritage of Indigenous peoples. (Bury me) Where the Lightning [Will] Never Find Me was composed on a commission from Arraymusic in 2019. It is the second of three works Chacon has composed on the conjoined subjects of lightning and thunder. In a recent conversation with Utah-based arts writer Les Roka, Chacon spoke about his inspiration for the set of pieces — a 2003 book by Richard C. Rath entitled How Early American Sounded. Among the varied descriptions of 17th- and 18th-century soundscapes in the text are interesting African and Native-American mythologies related to the functions of thunder and lightning. Specifically, the title of (Bury Me) comes from a quote in the book by an enslaved woman called Phyllis who wishes to be safely interred under a tree when she dies, so no lightning bolts can get to her body. But generally, the piece aims to sonically depict the zig-zag effect of lightning’s visual course from cloud to ground, through the targeted manipulation of melody, rhythm, volume and speed.
Many thanks to Les Roka for sharing details of his interview with Raven Chacon.
Lek
Nicolás Benavides
(b. 1987)
The Fry Street Quartet
Robert Waters, Rebecca McFaul violin
Bradley Ottesen viola | Anne Francis Bayless cello
Mike Cottle electronics
This piece was commissioned by the NOVA Chamber Music Series.
Lek means “play” in Swedish, and it refers to both the physical location and collection of male birds who gather to dance in the mating season. When males are lekking, they are exhausting themselves by dancing for months. The Greater Sage Grouse uses two inflated sacs as resonators to make swooshing and popping noises with his wings. The Sharp-Tailed Grouse has an equally impressive display: the males bend over with heads facing down, extend their wings like an airplane, puff up their necks, and stomp as fast as they can. They are the flamenco dancers of the wild, vibrating across frigid hilltops in choruses of thumping and clucking. The grouse dances until a female chooses him, and the females are incredibly picky. It’s half TikTok, half marathon. This piece uses recordings of their incredible dances as an accompaniment and inspiration, asking the string quartet to play the roles of battling males and a picky female. I’ll let you decide who won her over in the end… Fracking, development, mining, and other human activities ruin pristine leks, and we risk losing this beautiful animal if we cannot learn to coexist. If only we’d learn to value their dancing as much as we value ours. My thanks to Fry Street Quartet, NOVA, and GLFCAM for giving me the opportunity to learn about this beautiful creature.
- Nicolás Benavides
Piano Quintet
Roy Harris
(1898-1979)
Laura Ha, Alex Martin violin
Yuan Qi viola | Noriko Kishi cello
Jason Hardink piano
I. Passacaglia
II. Cadenza
III. Fugue
Roy Harris is one of those tip-of-the-tongue names from mid-century American music history who deserves a better place in our collective memory. Most of us have only heard of him. But, if not for his once quite popular Symphony No. 3, many of us couldn’t even say that much. Harris grew up in California, where he began his formal music studies at UC Berkeley before heading to Paris to take part in Nadia Boulanger’s compositional hothouse. He returned home to the U.S. in the 1930s and continued a restless life that included numerous university postings and four marriages. Harris’ music, like so much of what American composers were producing in the middle decades of the 20th century, is tonal and broadly lyrical, employing folk influences and often managing, even now, to sound patriotic in the most open-hearted way. Harris composed his meditative Piano Quintet in 1936, the same year he married Beulah Duffy (Johana Harris from then on), and Johana’s skill and instincts as a pianist would influence Roy’s chamber music writing until the end of his career. As with his most successful work, the Third Symphony, the movements of the Piano Quintet proceed without pause, lending the listening experience an air of impressive intellectual cohesiveness.
Please join us in the lobby following the concert for light refreshments as we celebrate NOVA’s 45th Anniversary.
artists
Featured
our sponsors
Today’s concert has been made possible by
UTAH DIVISION OF ARTS AND MUSEUMS
The World Premiere of Nicolas Benavides’ Lek is supported by
iZOTOPE
The Fry Street Quartet is sponsored by|
ONSTAGE UTAH
Kimi Kawashima is sponsored by
JOUNG-JA KAWASHIMA
The musicians featured on Roy Harris’ Piano Quintet are made possible by
GORDON IRVING
Our tribute to Jason Hardink, NOVA Music Director from 2009-2018, is sponsored by
MICHAEL AND DIANE HARDINK
NOVA would like to recognize the following government, corporate, and foundation partners for their generous support of our mission:
Aaron Copland Fund for Music
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Utah Legislature | Utah Division of Arts & Museums
Utah State University Caine College of the Arts Production Services
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