As the Fellows Quartet prepares for this weekend’s performances, violinist David Rubin reflects on a piece by Leoš Janáček.

Several months ago, I wrote for this blog about Aaron Copland’s violin sonata. My affection for that piece was uncomplicated. Every layer of meaning – biography, reception history, extramusical associations – made it richer, easier to love. Now, preparing for this weekend’s concerts at Everett Stage & Bell Street Chapel, I find myself in the opposite position. The deeper we delve into Leoš Janáček’s Intimate Letters, the more ambivalent I feel. What do you do when the circumstances surrounding a piece of music push you away, rather than draw you in?

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When I put bow to string and try to come to terms with the physical demands of this music, I quickly fall under its spell. Everything about it is unique.

The melodies. Little cells, packed with emotional energy and ready to combine, break apart, metamorphose. They have density of meaning, like Wagnerian leitmotif, but also a plainspoken quality – they burrow into your memory and haunt for days on end. Janáček spent the better part of his career trying to enshrine the Czech language in musical prose, and you can hear that effort. It’s easy to imagine words standing behind every note.

The rhythm. For most of Intimate Letters, one or more of the four players is busy shredding some frenzied, repeating pattern (in musical lingo, we call such repetition “ostinato”). Every so often, those ostinatos will converge – or clash – to dizzying effect. It’s a cliche to say that a work of small-scale chamber music is “symphonic in scope,” but in this case it rings true. The force of this combined rhythmic energy can be overwhelming. A cataclysm for four players – as written on the page, it’s almost too much to realize. Too much for a little box of wood, strung with steel or gut.

The texture. People often talk about “color” in concert music, whether in reference to the harmonic language of Ravel or Debussy, full of sensory appeal,  or the orchestration of Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakov, rife with surprise. Janáček is one of the few composers who makes me feel texture just as strongly as color. A melody blurred by a rasping “ponticello” – the bow pulled against surface of the bridge – is it a memory of something precious past, or a portent of some idyllic future? A note so unexpected and poignant that you want to delay the vibrato or press the bow – things our teachers tell us not to do – because that’s what it sounds like when a singer’s voice aches, when music is spoken rather than sung. Sweetness tempered with grit. Beautiful and ugly sounds rendered in the same instant. That’s what I mean by texture.

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But when I think about this piece, my relationship to it sours. Lately, I keep having the same experience, or variations of it. I’ll be humming one of its tunes, setting up the office for teaching… in the pause before the melody’s repeat, my brain will offer the same nagging reminder: remember what this music meant to the composer. Remember the ugliness behind those notes…

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“Oh, it’s a work as if carved out of living flesh. I think I won’t write a more profound and truer one.”

Leoš Janáček intended this piece as a musical portrait of his decade-long, one-sided, imagined love affair with a distant woman, Kamila Stösslová. Kamila was nearly forty years younger than Janáček himself, and a complete stranger. The two met briefly in 1917, while Janáček was on vacation. She was married, and did not return his interest in the slightest… but over the next ten years he penned hundreds – hundreds! – of letters, in which he poured out his soul, proclaimed his ardor, and declared her to be his muse.

When Janáček created this second string quartet – in a frenzy of creative energy, exactly ninety years ago – he was enshrining this private history in music, immortalizing it.  At first, he considered treating the piece as a public declaration, by giving it an explicit title: Love Letters. A friend talked him down from the ledge – that’s how we ended up with the more elusive Intimate Letters. In contemporaneous writing to Kamila, Janáček pointed to particular scenes in the quartet as pictures of their imagined life together – one movement a depiction of the son they would have had; another a portrayal of the composer conquering all obstacles to their union (“the ground shook”). You can’t make this stuff up! Well, I guess Janáček could, but… the saying still holds!

We’ve all had unrequited loves. We’ve all preferred the contours of fantasy to the disappointments of everyday life. But to invest so much of your life’s meaning in another, indifferent person – that seems like such a sadness! I cringe when this piece is discussed as some sort of hyper-romantic gesture. This isn’t love. That requires two real, flawed people. Kamila isn’t present in these pages – only Janáček’s picture of her. His fetishized, idealized woman.

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And for me, that’s the catch, the entry point to this bizarre artwork, only briefly visible. When I think about enigmatic Kamila… then I think about men chasing women who don’t want them. And I don’t want to hear any more. But if I acknowledge that only one personality is truly enshrined in this music – Leoš Janáček himself, and all of his desires – then I can begin to accept it as sympathetic, flawed, and deeply moving.

–David Rubin, CMW Fellow 2017-2019

Join us for one (or both!) of these performances:

Saturday, March 3 at 7pm
Everett Stage
9 Duncan Street, Providence
$20 suggested donation

Sunday, March 4 at 3pm
Bell Street Chapel
5 Bell Street in the West End of Providence
$20 suggested donation
Join us for a post-concert community dinner!

Since graduating from the CMW Fellowship Program, Ariana Falk (Cello Fellow, 2010-2012) has served as Education Director for the Worcester Chamber Music Society and runs Neighborhood Strings, a program that provides free music lessons and programming to youth from Worcester’s neediest neighborhoods. Here, Ariana updates us on the program.

Neighborhood Strings is now in its sixth year with two program sites and over 50 kids in the program. The new “Green Group” spent the fall learning basic theory and solfege and joyfully received instruments at the annual presentation ceremony, now held in Clark University’s beautiful Tilton Hall. Also at Clark, 14 students enrolled in Community Music and Social Action, a course co-taught  by Neighborhood Strings instructors Ariana, Peter, and Dean Matt Malsky, are serving as mentors this semester for our youth while learning about the philosophical ideas behind social justice and music.

One of the most moving things to witness as a teacher is when students take off with the material we give them and widen their own worlds.

One longtime Neighborhood Strings student, Peter K., has been doing that this fall in an inspiring way. Peter has been playing the viola since the very beginning of Neighborhood Strings, as a fourth-grader. As a student of “big Peter” Sulski, he has really taken off, reaching a level of comfort and joy on his instrument that has allowed him to move onto harder and more satisfying music.

Now a high school sophomore, Peter has come to ChamberFest (our music camp) three times and played works by Corelli, Handel, Mozart alongside advanced players his age and older. Most exciting – last fall, he took on the challenge of playing in Clark Sinfonia, a college-level ensemble, where he played the entire program last month as a member of the viola section. I loved watching him sit with the college students, studying his scores and standing proudly on the stage of Razzo Hall. Any younger Neighborhood Strings student can simply look at Peter to see how music can send them on an amazing journey.

Coming up, all students in our program will get on stage in Worcester’s gorgeous Mechanics Hall to play at our group’s annual family concert  in front of a sold-out crowd of 800 people (the opening act to Peter and the Wolf). The NS Club, our team leadership group, received a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for a number of youth-led concerts around the community, a recording, and a TV appearance. And for the first time, all Neighborhood Strings students will be invited to attend our two-week summer Chamber Fest camp and mingle with advanced chamber music players from around the region. By the way, we welcome students from other programs looking for a similar experience and will do our best to provide scholarships. A lot to look forward to!

–Ariana Falk
Director, Neighborhood Strings

Learn more about Neighborhood Strings here.

Cellist Lauren Latessa has spent her post-CMW Fellowship time creating The Music Project (and getting married: congratulations, Lauren and Ryan!). Recently, Lauren updated us on the project’s developments.

“This project saved my life. Suddenly I realized the arch of my life could go up again. I found something I loved and could give back to.” — a participating senior.

Hello CMW friends!

As many of you know, I have spent the last three years creating and developing a music program for a large retirement community in Rockville, MD. I am a full-time employee and feel very lucky to work with talented, thoughtful colleagues across the artistic spectrum. Each day I learn more about how to harness music’s power to provide joy, meaning, and texture to a time of life that is often filled with loneliness and isolation.

In this video, senior resident Marjorie talks about the impact that the Music Project has had in her life: “I think the only thing that keeps you alive is learning new things.”

In February of 2017, this project took a huge step forward as I welcomed Sara Matayoshi and Jessica McKee and formed the Iris Piano Trio. Three days a week we collaborate with elders from four retirement communities, working in independent living, assisted living and memory care contexts. Each year we curate an annual rotation of concerts, open rehearsals, participatory group programs and one-on-one sessions designed specifically for these communities.

This past year has been an incredible journey, full of peaks and valleys as we’ve navigated our way through the different environments and found our voice as a trio. We are thrilled to now be embarking on our second year working at the intersection of creative placemaking and creative aging!

The trio is just putting together our website (www.irispianotrio.com) and newsletters. Send an email to contact@irispianotrio.com if you’d like to be added to our monthly newsletter!

Wishing you all the best in 2018,
Lauren Latessa
CMW Cello Fellow 2012-2014

Learn more about The Music Project’s day-to-day activities in this blog post.

“The Last Supper” painting by Jessica Van Daam, on loan to the Trinity Brewhouse.

CMW Fellow and violinist Luke Fatora muses upon Beethoven as a pop culture icon.

Earlier this year, an unexpected downpour of cold rain unleashed itself as I was out for a walk. Passing by the Trinity Brewhouse on Fountain Street, I took refuge inside and found myself seated near a musician-themed mural riffing on The Last Supper. I was enjoying a nearby table’s particularly slurred conversation – its contents better left unexplored here – when it took a hard turn. One of the speakers interrupted a waitress, gesturing towards the mural hanging on the wall where Ludwig van Beethoven (not to confused with Beethoven the dog but more on that later) was stoically seated next to Billie Holiday in the company of other musicians like Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. He asked “Who’s the guy with the curly hair??”

I found myself thinking back to this experience recently at CMW’s Phase II students’ weekly dinner and discussion. The students were exploring the interdependent relationship between a piece of art and the settings that a culture places it in. Later that night I grappled with unanswerable questions as I tossed and turned. How would Beethoven have responded to someone telling him that two centuries into the future, Americans would scarf down nachos and beer under his quasi-religious image in a brewpub in Providence, RI? How about being told that Andy Warhol, an iconic 20^th century American artist, would designate Beethoven as the figure from western classical music to join the likes of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Chairman Mao, as portrait subjects? Finally, what would he have had to say about the movie Beethoven released in the 1990’s?? My guess is as good as anyone’s as to how Beethoven would have reacted to being told that his name would become synonymous with a Hollywood movie about the adventures of a goofy, slobbering, St. Bernard.

The composer’s canine namesake.

After entertaining these hypothetical reactions, we’re left with some serious questions. Why did Andy Warhol choose Beethoven over someone like Schubert or Tchaikovsky as an iconic portrait subject? Why is the comedic reboot of Lassie centered around a St. Bernard named Beethoven (the surface explanation is here) and not Schoenberg or Bach?

Warhol’s Beethoven

Beethoven was an incredibly forward thinking composer – so much so that nearly a century after he wrote his wild Grosse Fugue, composers such as Arnold Schoenberg would look back to it as a premonition of their own radical breaks with tradition. Are we to believe that Beethoven’s seat at the table of musical disciples in the Trinity Brewhouse is a result of his technical wizardry as a composer?

Another explanation lies in his easily accessible humanity. As many people know, Beethoven lost his hearing over the course of time and had a generally tough life. His struggles led him to rail against fate in his Fifth Symphony. There is hardly a more universal human experience than struggling with circumstances that are beyond our control. Beethoven’s loss of hearing is tragic and his response to continue living for the sake of creating art is certainly heroic (you can read about it in his own words in his famed Heiligenstadt Testament). This said, other composers, being human (for now…), have certainly also struggled with circumstances beyond their control.

Popular culture’s obsession with Beethoven (the composer) risks encapsulating his image in the opening bars of his 5^th Symphony and “that epic part of the 9^th symphony where people are singing about something in German.” Only a sliver of Beethoven’s humanity is seen when it is through this lens. Recently, I have been working through his Third op. 12 Piano and Violin sonata and have been enjoying how starkly it contrasts popular notions of what Beethoven should sound like (“bark bark bark baaaark!”). Beethoven began working on his op. 12 Piano and Violin sonatas in 1797; he was 27 years old and had been living in Vienna for 5 years. At that point, he was 5 years away from writing the Heiligenstadt Testament and presumably contemplating suicide in the face of his worsening deafness. The Heiligenstadt Testament details the agony of Beethoven’s depression but it also mentions his lifelong heightened sensitivity to “tender feelings of affection” and his general “love for man and feelings of benevolence.”

Ludwig Van Beethoven, composer and guy with the curly hair.

Beethoven’s Third Piano and Violin Sonata can be seen as stemming from these general underlying dispositions; it is brimming with a particularly sparkling and playful energy, never taking itself too seriously. The beginning and ending movements are strikingly joyful romps through E flat major. The second movement is an Adagio in C major that begins with a simple melody containing an emotional pureness that becomes transformed throughout the movement. The theme passes briefly through distant and more complicated emotional landscapes, emerging to playfully evade a committed return to its original character – one gets the sense that Beethoven is exploring what it feels like to make peace with an unattainable ideal’s imaginary nature. This is the side of Beethoven that, two centuries later, keeps me warm on a slushy February day. Beethoven’s ability to probe such an extreme range of emotion leaves me in awe of his (very human) ability to reach across time and space to connect with us and – most importantly – inspires me to stop reaching for my phone to check the latest news and reach for my violin instead.

–Luke Fatora

Please join us Thursday, February 15 at 7pm for the Sonata Series Event at RISD Museum’s Grand Gallery as Luke Fatora performs Beethoven (the composer) along with pianist Jeff Louie. The event also features violinist Jesse Holstein performing a composition by Amy Beach.

Tucked between the Connecticut and Merrimack rivers in south-eastern New England lies the little town of Henniker, New Hampshire. Aside from being the birthplace of Red Sox legend Ted Williams, Henniker also lays claim as the birthplace of one of the most important figures in American classical music, Amy Marcy Cheney Beach.

Composer Amy Beach

I recently discovered that the beloved game of skipping stones across water has a variety of other names in other countries – ducks and drakes (UK), dragonflies (Czech), throwing a sandwich (Finnish) and the Ukrainian name is zapuskaty zhabky which translates to “letting the frogs out”.

What has me thinking about skipping stones, you ask?

As musicians engaged in community residencies, we are constantly experimenting – tweaking traditional concert formats to engage new people, bringing a new game to a classroom of violin students – to build meaningful connections between people. And, that moment of trying something new in pursuit of connection, is a lot like the moment when you let go of the pebble to see how far it will bounce.

As anyone with stone-skipping prowess will tell you, much depends on finding the right pebbles. And we have been incredibly lucky with our plentiful supply! The Newport String Project is now in its fifth season – thanks to incredible community support, this year, myself and Emmy have been joined by violist Ashley Frith and cellist Jaime Feldman. Together we perform as the Newport String Quartet and curate educational programming that provides free violin, viola and cello lessons to almost forty students aging from Pre-K to fifth graders. There have been many, many “pebbles” along the way. And there have definitely been some “clunkers”– unruly frogs, you might say – but some of the more successful “pebbles” have led to signature events like the Paper Orchestra concerts (see highlights from our most recent one here) and the community barn dance series and many rich collaborations with local organizations.

Every so often, there’s the magical combination of pebble, technique and environmental conditions – and you realize that the pebbles are bouncing a lot further than you imagined, maybe in ways you hadn’t even noticed or realized. Like when our oldest students are recruiting their friends to come join the Newport String Project. Like when a younger sibling already knows a song because they’ve learnt it from an older brother or sister. Like when you notice a parent absorbed in watching their child’s lesson and marveling at the complexity of skills they’re learning. Like when an audience member finds you after a concert to ask what works by that composer they should listen to next. These moments are energizing, humbling and bring much needed detail to the sweeping Big Picture flow of this work.

-Ealain McMullin, Newport String Project Co-Director

Learn more about Newport String Project here!

We checked in with former CMW Fellow Annalisa Boerner (Viola Fellow 2012-2014), who has joined the staff of Music Haven in New Haven, CT as a full time Resident Musician and member of the Haven String Quartet. Here, Annalisa shares some news about the program’s new digs.

On Friday, January 19th, Music Haven celebrated its tenth year of teaching and our move into a beautiful new space with a ribbon cutting ceremony. Our new offices are in a former factory space called Erector Square. Our suite was too small for a school, too big for a yoga studio, and just right for our organization to fit into and grow with.

Music Haven’s new location, where we rehearse, teach, and perform, is helping our program grow in ways big and small. The sense of community is palpable when our eighty students gather for group classes on Fridays, and as they filter in and out throughout the week. We love to see them doing homework and playing Uno in the lounge area as they wait for lessons. On the teaching side, I can keep a shelf of music, a jar of clothespins, and both a violin and a viola close at hand, and my students can have lessons in a calm environment that’s dedicated to music-making. We’ve hosted studio recitals with potlucks in our large performance space, and we look forward to debuting next year’s Chamber Series concerts in this area as well.

The program for the afternoon of the 19th included words from Mandi Jackson, Executive Director; Yaira Matyakubova, violinist and Senior Resident Musician; and Mayor Toni Harp (!) who cut the ribbon. The Music Lanterns, an ensemble of nine to twelve-year-old students, kicked off the program, and the Harmony In Action chamber orchestra concluded it with a conductorless performance of Lean on Me.

It is thanks to our many supporters of all varieties that we are able to sustain and grow our program in this way.  Here’s to ten more years at Music Haven!

–Annalisa Boerner

Congratulations to Annalisa and the Music Haven staff and students!

“I find myself saying that it doesn’t matter what the music is, or at least that the content is a trivial concern compared to the importance of making a human connection between performer and listener.”

Heath Marlow, former CMW staffer and current faculty/staff at New England Conservatory, reflects on his work with CMW Fellows in creating and implementing a performance residency at Butler Hospital, a psychiatric facility on Providence’s East Side,  in 2017:

At our first session together in Fall 2016, I asked the Fellows to come up with a new community (not the communities already served by Community MusicWorks) that could potentially benefit from interacting with a string quartet.

Read Heath’s full account and reflection in his blog piece, here.