Program
Only Ever Us
Paul Wiancko
Sagrada
Adolphus Hailstork
Against/Sharp
Brittany J. Green
Stay On It
Julius Eastman
Only Ever Us
Paul Wiancko
Paul Wiancko is a cellist and composer. Currently a member of the Kronos Quartet, Paul also frequently performs chamber music as a member of the viola and cello duo Ayane & Paul, as well as Owls, a quartet-collective dubbed a “dream group” by The New York Times. In addition, he was recently named Director of Chamber Music at Spoleto Festival USA early this year. I’ve been dazzled by Paul’s string writing since 2018, when he was the undeniable winner of Austin’s String Quartet Smackdown IV (hosted by Golden Hornet) with his quartet Lift.
About Only Ever Us, Paul writes:
This piece is an excuse to gather.
It is a reason to know someone better
and a chance to share a moment with them.
It is an opportunity to listen, chat, and perhaps
consider that in this us-versus-them world,
we are free to redraw the boundary of us
at any time to include more them.
Only Ever Us has a requisite minimum number of four players (two violins, viola, and cello) but Paul also wrote three additional “auxiliary” parts for an additional violin, viola, or cello. Below are some notes and potential interesting interactions between the requisite quartet and any additional players. Here at Austin Unconducted, we’re going to be slightly expanding the definition of what a septet is and unfortunately, Paul has not written a pithy note about our configuration…(if anyone has any descriptions, let us know after the show)
Requisite quartet ("At least we have each other")
Requisite quartet + Vln 3 ("That's a lot of E string")
Requisite quartet + Vla 2 ("Viola power!")
Requisite quartet + Vc 2 ("May as well read some Schubert after this")
Requisite quartet + Vln 3 + Vla 2 ("Why is our cellist wearing earplugs?")
Requisite quartet + Vln 3 + Vc 2 ("Me Against the World: A Violist's Story")
Requisite quartet + Vla 2 + Vc 2 ("Couples therapy a la Schoenberg")
Requisite quartet + Vln 3 + Vla 2 + Vc 2 ("I'll go get more chairs")
Requisite quartet + 4 Vln + 3 Vla + 2 Vc + 2 Db (“???????????????????????”)
Program note by Zach Matteson
This piece was commissioned for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, a project of the Kronos Performing Arts Association. The score and parts are available for free online. 50ftf.kronosquartet.org
Sagrada
Adolphus Hailstork
Conductors and the administrators have to care about opening their doors and lifting their ceilings. The conductors of the world can have entire careers playing just dead Europeans... And then if you say you want to add some African Americans, that’s a fringe of a fringe...I used to have an attitude of “Don’t tell anybody my race before you played the piece.” Because... I want[ed] to shock them a little bit when I walk[ed] onstage. But I can’t shock anybody anymore, because everybody knows my name a little bit.
These are the words New York native Adolphus Hailstork says about BIPOC representation in classical music, and performances of his work. The field, notorious for reverence of antiquity and tradition, is in need of skilled composers like himself. Prolific in multiple mediums, he is one of the most active living American composers, having written more than 300 works in nearly every imaginable classical style. His works have been commissioned and performed by nearly all major American orchestras.
Hailstork’s chamber sonata, Sagrada, certainly bears an element of the aforementioned “shock”, but this shock comes from the immediate and sustained intimacy of its atmosphere. Inspired by a trip to Barcelona where he visited the famous church La Familia Sagrada, Hailstork describes the piece as a juxtaposition of intention: “depict[ion] of the mysterious, beautiful grandeur of the building and...the pious meaning and spiritual uplift of the holy space.” Part of the musical material is borrowed from a Catalonian chant “Cuncti simus Concanentes”, which translates to “Let us sing together.” Tender moments of suspension smoothly move into vivid moments of sharp, angular catharsis; the voice of the oboe becomes a voice of piety. By taking the sacred call of action within the chant, and ascribing it to secular elements of the work, Hailstork shows us piety in the power of space to bring together.
Program note by Rohan Joshi
Brittany J. Green
Against/Sharp
Brittany J. Green (she/her(s)) is a North Carolina-based composer, performer, and educator who has been aptly described as “a creative force of attention-seizing versatility” (The Washington Post). As you will find in “Against/Sharp,” her work often creates collaborative and intimate musical spaces that evoke visceral responses from the listener. You’ll hear how she uses sound, silence, and text to explore and challenge our ideas around what it can mean to be human.
About “Against/Sharp,” Brittany writes:
The temporal space of the work grounds it in the bodies of those who enact these praxes. Dedicated to Black women and queer people of color who have lost their lives violently as a result of their intersecting identities, the piece is 4 minutes and 8 seconds long, representing the 48 Black women who have been murdered by police from 2015-2020. 32 seconds of silence are dispersed throughout the piece in honor of the 32 trans and gender non-conforming lives that were violently taken in 2020, many of which were the lives of people of color.
Text
This piece is about taking up space.
A reclaiming.
A centering.
A refusal to be unseen.
A refusal to be comfortable.
A discomfort.
An against.
A fundamental disidentification.
Scrambling.
And reconstructing.
A technology of the self.
Sharp!
A daring to look.
A declaration.
I am!
I am!
A refusal to be.
Counter-memory.
No longer that strange fruit in
the breeze.
But children of the sun,
Cackling with the stars.
No longer unseen.
No longer silenced.
Puncture
Against.
Sharp!
Taking up space.
Reclaiming space.
Cool connection: Brittany’s creative work has included a lot of exploration of Julius Eastman, the composer of the last piece on the program! You may notice similarities in their pieces’ energies and use of repetitive rhythms layered together.
Program Note by Andrea Beyer
Stay On It
Julius Eastman
Julius Eastman was a composer, singer, and violinist who upended the contemporary music discourse in the 60s and 70s. He was black and gay, and his work asked questions about what it meant to be those things. He took minimalism and made it his own, embracing improvisation, integrating pop music structures, and eschewing abstract mathematical patterns in favor of aggressively joyous celebration. His work is mirthful and brash, full of a pointed, ecstatic energy that maintains its timelessness because of its timeliness; We grapple with questions of race, class, sexuality, and identity not unlike Eastman was doing 50 years ago.
Stay On It is a call for perseverance. It has an infectious motion, and requires intense communication between performers to maintain that motion. Small fragments of music layer and melt together, colliding and expanding over the course of the piece. Each performance is different, there is an openness that leaves some choices up to the performers in the moment. This kind of openness comes with a risk, the risk of failure, that gives the work its edge, its thrill. It could fall apart at any moment.
The score includes a poem from Eastman on the title page:
Com’ on now baby, stay on it.
Change this thread on which we move
from invisible to hardly tangible.
With you movin and groovin on it,
making me feel fine as wine,
I don’t have to find the MEANING,
because you will have filled in his most invisible and intangible Majesty’s place;
But only if you stay on it. You Dig
Although his majesty does stay with it,
he can’t stay on it. (Does that move you?)
Ties that move and break,
disappear, and return agin, are not ties that stay on it.
They are sometimy bonds. These bonds cause
screens like the Edge of Night, with
Ivory snow liquid to appear.
This is why baby cakes, I’m ringing you up
in order to relay this song message
so that you can get the feelin
O sweet boy
Because without the movin and the groovin,
the carin and the sharin,
the reelin and the feelin,
I mean really
–Julius Eastman
Program note by James Parker
Special thanks to our supporters!
This project has been financed in part by the City of Austin’s Elevate Grant Program.
