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Program for Wooden Fish Ensemble – March 10, 2024

Sunday, March 10, 2024 at 4 pm

download a copy of this program here.

Wooden Fish Ensemble plays Women Composers!
Centuries of Innovation in Celebration of International Women’s Day

Terrie Baune, violin
Thalia Moore, cello
Thomas Schultz, piano

Program

Clara Wieck Schumann (1819–1896)
Romance, Op. 21, No. 1
                        Thomas Schultz, piano

Ruth Crawford (1901–1953)
Piano Study in Mixed Accents (1930)
Thomas Schultz, piano

Galina Ustvolskaya (1919–2006)
Duet for violin and piano (1964)
Terrie Baune, violin; Thomas Schultz, piano

Intermission

Clara Wieck-Schumann
Romance, Op. 11, No. 1
Romance, Op. 11, No. 2
                        Thomas Schultz, piano

Ruth Crawford
Piano Study in Mixed Accents (1930)
                        Thomas Schultz, piano

Hyo-shin Na (b. 1959)
Many Paradises (2023) (world premiere)
                        Terrie Baune, violin; Thalia Moore, cello; Thomas Schultz, piano

About the music

Ruth Crawford’s Piano Study in Mixed Accents was written in December, 1930. In this compact piece, the composer offers three possibilities for the music’s dynamics, asking the pianist to choose one – a rather surprising extension of the player’s role, some 25 years before composers like Cage, Boulez and Stockhausen attempted something similar. The absence of repetition/pattern in the music is also rare for that time (actually rare for any time).

Crawford wrote many of her best-known, most radical pieces between 1928 and 1932. These include the Piano Preludes 6 – 9, her songs to texts by Carl Sandburg, the two striking Ricercare (Sacco, Vanzetti and Chinaman, Laundryman, texts by H. T. Tsiang) from 1932, and the String Quartet. She wrote no more of her own compositions until 1939 (Rissolty, Rossolty for orchestra) and the Suite for Wind Quintet, 1952. Instead, she was deeply involved in collecting and arranging anthologies of folk songs (American Folk Songs for Children, Animal Folk Songs for Children, American Folk Songs for Christmas, Let’s Build a Railroad) and raising her children, Michael, Barbara, Peggy, and Penny, and those from her husband’s first marriage, Charles, John and Peter (the folk musician Pete Seeger). Yet another challenge she faced was the teaching of 20 to 30 private piano students each week.

It was also necessary for Crawford to deal with the prejudices of her husband (initially her composition teacher), the musicologist Charles Seeger. He believed that “women can’t compose symphonies” and wrote about “the curse of the woman composer, always to follow, never to lead.”. Although, it should be mentioned, he was quite open about his critical feelings – about Varese, he wrote: “very poor composer”, Gershwin: “a flop…a fake”, Ruggles: “very disappointing”. When Seeger began meetings of the New York Musicological Society, he banned her from attending the meetings but allowed her to sit outside the door, which would be left open a bit so that she could listen…

Crawford died of cancer in 1953.

(note by Thomas Schultz)

After a long struggle with her father, Clara Wieck and Robert Schumann married in September of 1840. Slightly more than a year earlier, in 1839, Clara had written the Three Romances, Op. 11 (she had actually begun writing the second Romance in 1838), dedicating them to her future husband. Later that same year, Robert fashioned a sort of musical reply to her set with his Three Romances, Op. 28, matching, in his second Romance, the intimate musical dialogue/duet she’d written in her second piece. The first of the Three Romances, Op. 21 was written in 1855 and was the last of her compositions, although she lived until 1896.

As a listener, one can enjoy, along with these meaningful duets, the harsh dissonances and unexpected moments of drama in Op. 11, No. 2 and the subtle, almost hidden rhythmic complexities of the middle section of Op. 21, No. 1.

In addition to her very active life as a touring concert pianist, she had eight children and had to persevere through the years of her husband’s mental illness, institutionalization and death. Her strengths were visible also in situations like the events of 1849, when, on May 5th, in the midst of a revolutionary uprising, she and Robert were forced to flee Dresden to the safety of a neighboring town, unfortunately leaving 3 of their children in the city with a maid. Desperate to reunite the family, and seven months pregnant, she set off on foot for Dresden on May 7th at 3AM. After witnessing many horrors and avoiding bands of heavily armed soldiers, she returned to Robert with the children at nearly noon. (note by Thomas Schultz)

Galina Ustvolskaya’s Duet, from 1964, is certainly among her most radical works, given its compact instrumental sound, extended length and extreme dynamics. She wrote only 27 pieces between 1946 and 1990 and, although she worked in a sort of cultural isolation, the character and quality of these pieces surely places her, along with Cage, Nancarrow, Stockhausen, and a very few others, among the late 20th century’s most unique voices.

She studied with Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatory. Shostakovich thought highly of his student: “I am convinced that the music of G. I. Ustvolskaya will achieve world fame, and be valued by all who hold truth to be the essential element of music.” Interest in her music began to appear in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and spread to the Netherlands and other parts of Europe in the late 1980s, into the 1990s. She taught composition at the Leningrad Conservatory until 1977.

She once said: “There is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead.” (note by Thomas Schultz)

About a year ago, I came across a very small book entitled 28 Paradises, consisting of 28 paintings by Dominique Zerfuss (b. 1951). Each painting is accompanied by a poem written by Patrick Modiano, her husband (b. 1945) (Nobel Prize in Literature, 2014). 5 sets from these 28, at times rather enigmatic, painting/poems became a beginning point of my work Many Paradises.

From 28 Paradises
by Patrick Modiano

1. And the roses growing without thorns

2. I had lived my life
I no longer cared about the past
Even less about the future

3. Meet me at the lakeshore
At sunrise
You will find once more what you’ve lost

4. A voice murmured in my ear
Look down there
The castle and the waterfall
If you cross the field
You will hear
The musics of silence

5. The large window looked out over the carousel of the king’s stables
And onto the clock always showing the same time
That of youth and eternal noon
During the day
The Lilliputian painted her paradises
And I
Next to her
Wrote a poem

“And the roses growing without thorns” – this one sentence, in particular, changed my attitude towards the world and made me hear new sounds that I’d never imagined before.

This work was composed with the generous support of the Elaine and Richard Fohr Foundation. (note by Hyo-shin Na)

About the musicians

In addition to being Co-Concertmaster of the Oakland Symphony, Terrie Baune is concertmaster of the North State Symphony and the Eureka Symphony, a member of the Earplay Ensemble, Music Director of the TBAM Festival in Trinidad, CA, and Associate Director of the Humboldt Chamber Music Workshop. Her professional credits include four years as a member of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC, two years as a member of the Auckland Philharmonia of New Zealand, concertmaster positions with the Fresno Philharmonic and the Rohnert Park Symphony, and over twenty years as concertmaster of the Women’s Philharmonic, with whom she participated in several recordings including as soloist in Maddalena Lombardini’s Violin Concerto No. 5. She has enjoyed working under the baton of Michael Morgan since they were both undergraduates at Oberlin Conservatory, from which she graduated in 1978 after winning the Oberlin Concerto Competition.

Thalia Moore is a native of Washington D.C. She began her cello studies with Robert Hofmekler, and after only five years of study appeared as a soloist with National Symphony Orchestra of Washington at John F. Kennedy Center’s  Concert Hall. After two years of study with Christopher Rex in Philadelphia, she enrolled at The Juilliard School of Music as a scholarship student of Lynn Harrell and received her Bachelor’s and Master of Music in 1979 and 1980. While at Juilliard, she was the recipient of the Walter and Elsie Naumberg Scholarship and won first prize in the National Arts and Letters String Competition.

Moore has been an associate principal cellist of San Francisco Opera Orchestra since 1982 and assistant principal cellist of San Francisco Ballet Orchestra since 1989. She has continued to concertize extensively, appearing as a soloist at Avery Fisher Hall, Carnegie Recital Hall, Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater, Herbst Theater, and San Francisco Legion of Honor, among others. She has performed as a guest artist at Olympic Music Festival, Grand Teton Music Festival, Festival Mozaic in San Luis Obispo, and Music in the Vineyards Chamber Music Festival.

In 1979, she was a founding member of the Aurora Baroque Ensemble, based in New York, and has performed many baroque and classical operas under such conductors as Nicholas McGegan, Sir Charles Mackerras, and Roy Goodman.

As a member of the new music groups Earplay and Empyrean Ensemble, she has recorded works by Mario Davidovsky, Maria Niederberger, Ross Bauer, Cindy Cox, Jorge Liderman, Kurt Rohde, and David Rakowski. She has presented numerous premieres of works, including the 2005 world premiere of Laws of Motion, a concerto by Richard Festinger written especially for her.

Thomas Schultz has established an international reputation both as an interpreter of music from the classical tradition – particularly Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt – and as one of the leading exponents of the music of our time. Among his recent engagements are solo recitals in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, Ghent, Seoul, Taipei and Kyoto, and at the Schoenberg Festival in Vienna, the Piano Spheres series in Los Angeles, Korea’s Tongyoung Festival, the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento and the April in Santa Cruz Festival. From 2004 to 2011 he gave a series of six recitals at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, playing repertoire ranging from major works by Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Chopin to rarely heard music by Schoenberg, Rzewski, Cage, and Na. He has also given recitals in New York at Bargemusic and the Goethe Institute. He has appeared as a soloist at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, and in chamber music performances with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Da Camera Society of Houston, Robert Craft’s 20th Century Classics Ensemble and the St. Lawrence String Quartet. In 2005, 2010, 2014, 2017, and 2023 he gave masterclasses on the piano music of the Second Viennese School at the Schoenberg Center in Vienna and in 2016 gave performances of the complete solo works of Schoenberg in Vienna, San Francisco, Seoul and Taegu, Korea. From 2018 to 2023 he gave an annual series of masterclasses for young artists at Stanford University.

Schultz’s recording of solo works by Cage was released in 2018 on the Mode label and his recording of Christian Wolff’s Long Piano in 2009 by New World Records. Additional solo CDs, (a double CD of the Goldberg Variations of Bach and Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated, a CD of works written for him by Buckinx and Wolff, and recordings of music by Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Liszt, Satie and Busoni) are on the Wooden Fish label.

Schultz’s musical studies were with John Perry, Leonard Stein and Philip Lillestol. He was a member of the piano faculty at Stanford University for 29 years.

In Korea, Hyo-shin Na has twice been awarded the Korean National Composers Prize (for Western instrumental music & for Korean traditional instrumental music), and in the west she has been commissioned by the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, the Argosy Foundation, the W & F Hewlett Foundation, the Elaine and Richard Fohr Foundation, InterMusic SF, the Other Minds Festival, and the Los Angeles International New Music Festival among many others. Her music has been played worldwide by ensembles as varied as the Barton Workshop, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Kronos Quartet, the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, the National Gugak Center Orchestra of Korea, the Del Sol String Quartet, the Ives Quartet, the Earplay Ensemble, New Music Works, the Pacific Chamber Orchestra and the Korean Traditional Orchestra of the National Theatre among many others. Numerous groups and individual musicians, such as New Music Works in the US, the Barton Workshop in Europe, and the Jeong Ga Ak Hoe Ensemble in Asia have presented portrait concerts devoted solely to her music. Hyo-shin Na has written for western instruments, and for traditional Korean and Japanese instruments and has written music that combines western and Asian instruments and ways of playing. Her music for traditional Korean instruments is recognized by both composers and performers in Korea (particularly by the younger generation) as being uniquely innovative. Her writing for combinations of western and eastern instruments is unusual in its refusal to compromise the integrity of differing sounds and ideas; she prefers to let them interact, coexist and conflict in the music. She is the author of the bilingual book Conversations with Kayageum Master Byung-ki Hwang (Pulbit Press, 2001). Her music has been recorded on the Fontec (Japan), Top Arts (Korea), Seoul (Korea) and New World Records (US) labels and has been published in Korea and Australia. Since 2006 her music has been published exclusively by Lantro Music (Belgium).

Special Thanks to

The Elaine and Richard Fohr Foundation
2 anonymous donors
Ms. Kyung Burton
Balboa Green Garden Florist in San Francisco

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