Courage and integrity overcome prejudice and discrimination in the story of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress. Acclaimed mezzo-soprano Heather Johnson stars in this dramatic song cycle.
John Halle: Amen Choruses
Christian Asplund: One Eternal Round
Fierce Grace: Jeannette Rankin, a Song Cycle
libretto: Kimberly Reed
music: Kitty Brazelton, Laura Kaminsky, Laura Karpman, Ellen Reid
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Join us before each concert at 2:30pm to participate in a discussion about the music. This is a great opportunity to learn more about the program and increase your enjoyment of the music you'll hear.
Program Notes
by Jeff Counts
When Jeannette Rankin entered the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916, only a handful of western states and territories allowed women to vote. Her own state of Montana was among them, having granted unrestricted rights in 1914, but Wyoming and Utah acted quite a bit earlier, in 1869 and 1870, respectively. (Utah, sadly, repealed their law in 1887.) Rankin was instrumental in the Montana effort and later introduced legislation at the federal level that would lead to the 19th Amendment in 1920. Looking back on her important work 100 years later, it is important to remember Rankin’s life as both distinctly American and powerfully human. She was a staunch suffragist and the first woman elected to Congress, but also a lifelong pacifist who, at great personal and professional cost, refused to support our involvement in either World War.
In the liner notes for the recording of Fierce Grace, librettist Kimberly Reed remarked on how the twin pillars of Rankin’s citizenship, suffragism and pacifism, informed the process of building the work. It’s designed as an “exquisite corpse, referring to the Surrealist technique for collaborative creation in which each artist continues another artist’s work, having seen only the final stage of what the previous artist created.” Reed said that “the idea of one composer handing a final phase of music to the next one in line somehow triggered my memory of a grade-school trip to the Montana Capitol to see the statue of Jeannette Rankin.” Thinking back on that visit and the “glass-ceiling-shattering pioneer” who inspired it, Reed “remembered how [Rankin] passed her work in the suffragist movement on to the pacifist movement” and felt that Rankin’s clear “gratitude for the work of those who came before her, and her dedication to leave a better world than the one she found” was perfect for the Fierce Grace project. The composers who collectively recreate Rankin’s voice are Kitty Brazelton, Laura Kaminsky, Laura Karpman and Ellen Reid. Fierce Grace premiered on April 7, 2017 at the Library of Congress.
Reviewers have appreciatively commented on the “gauzy jazz temperament” and “dapper swagger” of John Halle’s Amen Choruses, and the composer’s own thoughts on the piece offer a deeper look at the music itself. According to Halle, “The title Amen Choruses is a corruption of Amen Cadence, the latter referring to the harmonic progression [IV-I] frequently encountered in the last measures of so-called gospel or soul jazz classics of the late 1950s. From the first measures, it should be clear that the piece directly references and celebrates its jazz lineage, wearing its substantive content and rhetorical form on its sleeve through a boisterous middle section that attempts to transport it somewhere else – to outer space maybe. But it all comes crashing down, returning to its roots by concluding with an Amen Cadence.” Amen Choruses was written in 2016 for Julie Rosenfeld and features prominently on her Grammy-nominated CD “New Music for Violin and Piano.”
Utah-based composer Christian Asplund wrote the violin duet One Eternal Round in 2015 for Alex and Aubrey Woods. The title refers to a familiar scriptural phrase that Asplund says “describes a more cyclical temporality as one transcends the linear experience of time.” Regarding the framework of the piece, he writes that he “imagined the two players playing nearly identical parts offset by various short durations, and even imagined them being separated in space so the listener hears the sound move discretely from left to right.” He gives credit for how quickly the music came together to the “gutsy and expressive playing” of the Woods and his own history as a string instrument performer. One Eternal Round unfolds as a single movement that “starts with long values exchanged from violin to violin” and proceeds through a series of subtle variations in pitch and duration, until it peaks and diminishes back into a controlled simplicity.
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