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MusicWorks Collective: Winter Meditation
January 13 @ 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Join us for an afternoon of meditative music, including a world premiere piece by composer and former CMW Resident Musician Laura Cetilia and works by Swiss composer and clarinetist Jürg Frey and German composer Ludwig van Beethoven.
MusicWorks Collective presents a performance of three works for string quartet that in different ways bring us toward the devotional and aspirational qualities of being human. In the premiere of the newly commissioned work counterglow, composer (and former CMW resident musician) Laura Cetilia takes the audience on a 10-minute journey from the cosmos to the earth and back again, illuminating the journey through her compositional technique of hearing every point on the length of a violin, viola, or cello string. Laura quotes from artist Yayoi Kusama, who describes polka dots as invitations to the otherworldly: “Our earth is only one polka dot among a million stars in the cosmos.”
Laura has long been inspired by the Wandelweiser Collective musicians, including Swiss composer Jürg Frey, whose Third Quartet is a quiet durational meditation slowly progressing through several iconic chords. In his article about the Wandelweiser Collective New Yorker, music writer Alex Ross says that “in much of Frey’s music achingly Romantic harmonies drift to and fro, as if a Mahler Adagio were suspended in zero gravity.”
The program ends with the slow movement from the late Beethoven a minor quartet, Op. 132 “Heiliger Dankesang“ which the composer wrote during his recovery from what could have been a life-threatening illness. This “Holy Song of Thanksgiving from a Convalescent to the Divinity” has been a lodestar for many musicians and music lovers, alternating between reverent stillness and spectrally celebratory music.
We look forward to sharing this wonderous music of contemplation and hope in the darkness of these winter days and amidst the backdrop of the struggling world.
MusicWorks Collective in Concert
Saturday, January 13 at 4 pm
United Congregational Church of Little Compton
1 Commons, Little Compton, RI
Admission is free, and no reservations are necessary