A home for new and unusual music from all corners of the classical genre, brought to you by the power of public media. Second Inversion is a service of Classical KING FM 98.1.
Back by popular demand! To those who missed our24-hour marathon of women composerson International Women’s Day: you’re in luck. Today we’re bringing back another 24-hours of music by women composers from around the globe.Tune inall day to hear works by 220 women who have helped shape, inspire, and expand the world of classical music.
Maggie Molloy, photo by Nicole Schlaeppi.
Plus, in Seattle tonight our Women in (New) Music Founder and Director Maggie Molloy presents a lecture on the history of women composers at the Seattle Opera SOWING Circle’s signature Wine Music Chocolate event.
The SOWING Circle (Seattle Opera Women’s Initiative Group) is a group of women dedicated to embracing and expanding the opera and classical music community in Seattle. As curator and host of this year’s Wine Music Chocolate event, Maggie will share five musical selections by women composers from across history, each paired with a wine by a woman vintner.
To learn more about the SOWING Circle and Wine Music Chocolate,click here.
An entire chorus of women’s voices has risen up this year in unparalleled numbers—and not just through protests and political marches, but also through the beautiful subtleties of music, performance, and poetry.
Women in (New) Music is proud to premiere pianist Lara Downes’ Just Like A Woman: a brand new video series which weaves together the work of today’s top women composers and poets. Each episode features Downes performing a solo piano work by a woman composer, paired with a poetry reading by a woman writer.
“As an artist who works in both music and words, I want to create a space for women’s voices to come together in the expression of shared desires, dreams, and destinies,” Downes said. “These videos are meant to be glimpses into the creative lives of women.”
The first episode, which just launched on International Women’s Day, features Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rita Dove’s achingly nostalgic “Singsong” paired with composer Rachel Grimes’ introspective “Every Morning.”
We’re thrilled to premiere Episode Two right here on Second Inversion. In this second installment, Downes lends her fingers to Sarah Kirkland Snider’s liquidly lyrical “The Currents,” the music woven together with Safiya Sinclair’s vividly emotive poem “Hands.”
Over the course of their decade-long career, the Jasper String Quartet has become pretty familiar with the famous quartets of historic masters like Haydn, Beethoven, and even Bartók—so when it came time to record a new album, they decided to look for new musical inspiration a little closer to home.
Unbound is a collection of 21st century works that burst through the boundaries of traditional Western musical styles and forms. The Jaspers—comprised of violinists J Freivogel and Sae Chonabayashi, violist Sam Quintal, and cellist Rachel Henderson Freivogel—explore the furthest reaches of the string quartet repertoire with new works by seven of today’s most dynamic composers.
Featuring compositions by Caroline Shaw, Missy Mazzoli, Annie Gosfield, Judd Greenstein, David Lang, Donnacha Dennehy, and Ted Hearne, the album unfolds as a survey of today’s spectacularly diverse and dynamic string music landscape, each piece stretching the string quartet tradition in new and inventive ways.
The album begins with Caroline Shaw’s tangy and succulent “Valencia,” the video for which we premiered just last week on Second Inversion. The Jaspers bring precision and playfulness to Shaw’s billowing harmonics and bold bow strokes, evoking the brilliant colors and juicy texture of the fresh, flavorful fruit.
Missy Mazzoli’s contribution to the album, by contrast, is a bit more narrative-driven. “Death Valley Junction” is inspired by a small American town of the same name, where a woman named Marta Becket resurrected a crumbling opera house in the late 1960s and went on to perform weekly one-woman shows there for over 40 years. An airy, sparse, desert-inspired soundscape gradually gives way to a wild and exuberant dance, evoking Becket’s colorful imagination and unshakable optimism.
It’s followed by Annie Gosfield’s “The Blue Horse Walks on the Horizon,” a piece she wrote specifically for the Jaspers. Inspired by the surreal radio broadcasts and codes used by European resistance groups during World War II, the piece unfolds through shifting, repetitive figures that evoke the abstract coded messages.
Group dynamics are the key theme behind Judd Greenstein’s contribution to the album. “Four on the Floor” is an energetic, fast-paced work which explores different instrument pairings working with and against one another in constantly changing teams.
Photo by Dario Acosta.
David Lang’s “almost all the time” explores a different type of evolution. The piece begins with a simple cell of a musical idea—what he calls “a little 10 note strand of musical DNA”—but across 18 minutes expands and evolves into a beautiful genetic mutation, each detail carefully crafted under the Jaspers’ fingers.
Donnacha Dennehy’s “Pushpulling” is more elastic in its movements. Frenetic bow strokes speed ever-forward, but are slowly and patiently pulled back to silence each time—pushing and pulling the listener along for the ride.
The album closes with Ted Hearne’s circular “Excerpts from the middle of something,” the first movement of his Law of Mosaics. Unusual in its form, the piece consists of a climactic build-up that, instead of resolving, is simply repeated and revised several times. And yet, each time it is convincing: the Jaspers play each rendition with the explosive energy and enthusiasm of a grand finale.
It’s an exclamation point at the end of the album but also a metaphor, perhaps, for the album’s overarching theme: the string quartet repertoire did not die with Haydn or Beethoven, but is still alive and still evolving to this day.
Second Inversion hosts share a favorite selection from their playlist.Tune inon Friday, March 17 to hear these pieces and lots of other great new and unusual music from all corners of the classical genre!
Sibling rivalry takes on a whole new meaning in Julia Wolfe’s Cruel Sister for string orchestra. Based on an old English ballad of the same name, the piece tells the tale of two sisters: one bright as the sun, and the other cold and dark. When a young man comes courting, the dark sister pushes the bright sister into the sea so that she can marry him. But when two minstrels find the dead sister washed up on the shore, they create a harp from her breastbone, strung with her yellow hair—and they play the ghostly instrument at the dark sister’s wedding.
Wolfe tells the tale with no words, instead following the dramatic arc of the original ballad through orchestra alone. Restless strings detail the gruesome murder, airy resonances evoke the lifeless body floating on the sea, and an obsessive, foreboding pizzicato waltz brings the music of the mad harp back to life. –Maggie Molloy
I couldn’t be happier that this amazing little piece cropped up in my playlist. I like a good Piazzolla tango once in a while, and Adiós Nonino is a very special one. It’s a somber, lyrical work, one that was intensely personal for Piazzolla, written after the death of his father. He said:
“And to close that very bad year of 1959, one day the phone exploded like an atom bomb. I was performing with (Juan Carlos) Copes in Puerto Rico…when I received a call from Dedé (his wife)…from New York. Nonino had died in Mar del Plata. It was too much.
“When I got back to New York a few days later, I asked to be alone in a room in the apartment, and in less than an hour I wrote Adiós Nonino. And then I cried as I had few times before in my life…In that piece I left all the memories I had of my dad.”
It’s some of his most soulful music, and it was arranged in something like 20 different ways during his life. In this version, the Boston Cello Quartet adds a beautifully dark, expressive sound, with an ending that is incredibly intimate. This new-era version of Adiós does not disappoint. –Geoffrey Larson
Musician Olga Bell was born in Russia, raised in Alaska, and now lives in New York as a member of the Dirty Projectors. On her solo album Krai (meaning “periphery”/”edge”), she explores the forgotten areas of her homeland in her native Russian, combining old folk fables with fresh, trance-y electronic sounds. In “Khabarovsk Krai,” crafty use of pitch-shifting software allows Bell’s vocals to sink, swoop, moan, and smear her voice inside your ears as she sobs “Russia, Mother Russia, Russian Motherland.” Much like the landscape that inspired the work, the song shifts constantly and is full of striking, unusual surprises. – Rachele Hales
On Friday, March 17 at 5pm PT / 8pm ET we continue our media partnership with Boston-based chamber orchestra A Far Cry with a live video stream of their next Jordan Hall performance at New England Conservatory! Join us here for West of the Pecos, a concert inspired by the vast open landscape of the American West. In this program, AFC delves into music from the last two centuries that explores these exciting, harsh, vibrant spaces. Legendary clarinetist David Shifrin joins AFC for Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto.
Click here to read the full program notes for the performance, featuring this repertoire:
Diamond:Rounds for String Orchestra Copland: Clarinet Concerto Still: Mother and Child Dvorak:American String Quartet
