Program:
Trevor Weston - Fudo Myoo
Thomas Adès - Four Quarters
i - Nightfalls
ii - Morning Dew
iii - Days
iv - The Twenty-fifth Hour
intermission
Vivian Fung - String Quartet no. 4 “Insects and Machines”
Tigran Hamasyan arr. Kevin Rogers -
Song for Melan and Rafik
Friction Quartet:
Otis Harriel, violin
Kevin Rogers, violin
Mitso Floor, viola
Doug Machiz, cello
Program Notes
Fudo Myoo
During college, I became fascinated with a statue of a 12th century Japanese statue of the Buddhist deity, Fudo Myoo at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I encountered the statue while fulfilling a requirement for a course in the history of Japanese art. I made frequent subsequent trips to the museum while living in the Boston area to stand in front of this statue. What impressed me about the deity and his depiction was the wrathful, menacing expression on his face, his body surrounded by fire and a sword in his right hand to cut through ignorance with wisdom. “The Immoveable One,” as he is also called, stands on a rock, poised and ready to act. In his left hand hand, Fudo Myoo holds a rope to bind demons, devils, and evildoers. The deity highlights the necessity to attack and subdue evil by slicing through ignorance that created the mendacious acts or thoughts. Although the symbolic violence represented by this figure does not encourage physical violence, it does liken the work needed to rid the world of evil to an epic battle that starts with severing ignorance with knowledge or wisdom. Indifference is not an option for Fudo Myoo. My string quartet attempts to embody the energy, fire, and wrathful positive energy of Fudo Myoo. “The Immovable One” changes anger into salvation and frightens people to get them to this higher level of existence. My string quartet mollifies the initial energy of the work over time to arrive at a more peaceful place imbued by the opening wrathful music.
-Trevor Weston
The Four Quarters (2011) has an Arcadian model of brilliant evocation by means of tight construction, the central metaphor being the diurnal cycle. ‘Nightfalls’, the first movement, opens on two planes, the violins playing harmonics in a regular pattern of short-short-long while the viola and cello are in harmony, far below and slower. These planes are utterly distinct, and yet they seem not only to complement but also to resemble one another, in that the intervals on which the violins keep hesitating are also those with and towards which the lower instruments grope. More than that, the scintillant anapaest that the violins go on turning (Adès suggests it may also be heard as a dactyl, long-short-short) seems to be a basic motif for the whole quartet, one that will be refracted and reflected through different rotating prisms as the work unfolds. Here it makes a slow journey downwards, into the second violin and viola parts, leaving the first violin to join the cello in harmony. A more turbulent energy carries the music up again, and the violins reprise their chain of lights, which so quickly turns into nocturnal harmony in up to seven parts. This also rises, in register and agitation, to precipitate another short reprise, and the lights, perhaps now identifiable as stars, are still there at the darkening close.
All the remaining movements are shorter, ‘Morning Dew’ being emphatically the scherzo, mostly pizzicato. Though Adès in this work maintains the same time signatures in all parts, the four instruments are on their own tracks through stretches of this movement, now and then arriving at the same spot with some surprise, but then happily joining in a bit of ostinato. The second time this happens, the first violin goes off into bowed playing, followed by the others, still otherwise independent, but they cannot get the old music out of their fingers.
‘Days’ is a study in monotony, but within a context, of course, of constant change. The second violin begins by repeating middle C sharp to a repeating rhythm of short-short-long, short-long, short-long, short-long (thirteen beats, therefore), placed against a shifting frame of time signatures, the other instruments playing in harmony mostly below, until they are drawn into the second violin’s rhythm and disturb its equanimity. After this it is scalewise motion that comes forward as an alternative, until, startlingly, everyone arrives at fortissimo chords on the nagging thirteen-beat rhythm. Then quiet again, the music unwinds.
Finally, ‘The Twenty-Fifth Hour’, in a time outside time, restores high-treble lustre and dance, the time signature of 25/16 being divided into groups of 8+3+8+6. Now one may feel not only that the violin-harmonic image from the first movement is back but that it has grown into a bright melody, spinning in changing harmonic currents, resolving at times into scales, speeding up, reaching into a passage of magnificent triadic harmony, slowing down again and coming to stillness on a D major chord so beautiful it just has to be repeated.
notes by Paul Griffiths © 2015
String Quartet No. 4: “Insects and Machines
Buzzing……whirring……glitching……ringing……thumping……. We are constantly saturated with noises that permeate our daily lives. On a recent trip to Cambodia, I was especially attuned to the persistent noises of buzzing insects that accompanied my walk through the thick jungle, and this cacophony gelled with my emotional reaction to the terrible genocide of the Khmer people.
I give voice to this background babbling in this quartet, organizing the various moments as episodes that freely morph from one event into another. One can hear buzzing at the beginning that turns into a waltz, which in turn transforms into a motoric adventure of machine-like chuggings-along.
Much like the sound of thumping bass in a neighboring car, the episodes come in as waves and then disappear into the distance to be replaced by other soundscapes. The end result is an unrelenting fast and virtuosic 12-minute tour-de-force quartet.
-Vivian Fung
Song for Melan and Rafik
I wrote this in 2012, a couple of days before New Year’s Eve. It’s dedicated to my grandmother Melan and my grandfather Rafik. Both are very inspirational figures. I was only four when my grandfather died, but he has remained an incredible presence throughout my life. My grandmother still tells me stories about this fascinating man, a joker, an actor, a great chess player, someone who was into music and the arts. And, in tribute to him, the song is overflowing with rhythmic concepts. The working title for this song was "Forty-Two,” because it’s actually in the unusual time signature of 42/16, which makes it an intense piece to learn! The entire song has only three chords, but the idea is to really explore one idea and take it to a lot of different places. And it’s the only track that’s not arranged for a trio, but very heavily arranged for a full quintet, featuring saxophonist Ben Wendell and vocalist Areni Agbabian.
-Tigran Hamasyan
Bios
Friction Quartet, lauded for performances described as "terribly beautiful" (San Francisco Classical Voice), "stunningly passionate" (Calgary Herald), and "exquisitely skilled" (ZealNYC), is dedicated to modernizing the chamber music experience and expanding the string quartet repertoire. The quartet achieves its mission by commissioning cutting-edge composers, curating imaginative concert programs, collaborating with diverse artists, and engaging in interactive educational outreach.
Friction made their debut at Carnegie Hall in 2016 as participants in the Kronos Quartet Fifty for the Future Workshop. They returned in March of 2018 to perform George Crumb’s Black Angels as part of “The 60’s” festival and their performance was described as, “one of the truest and most moving things I’ve ever heard or seen.” (Zeal NYC)
Since forming in 2011, Friction has commissioned 43 works for string quartet and given world premiere performances of more than 80 works. They developed the Friction Commissioning Initiative in 2017 as a way to work together with their audience to fund specific commissions. The $14,000 raised to date has helped Friction commission a total of 12 new works, including six by young composers between the ages 16 and 21. They were awarded a 2019 Intermusic SF Musical Grant to develop a participatory educational program with composer Danny Clay that is designed to be accessible and sensory-friendly. The project is slated to premiere in the Fall of 2020 at the Pomeroy Recreation and Rehabilitation Center in San Francisco. Friction’s past grants include a grant from Chamber Music America that was used to commission a piano quintet from Andy Akiho, which debuted in November 2016, as well as project grants from Intermusic SF and Zellerbach Family Foundation supporting special projects involving the performance of commissioned works.
While Friction has garnered international attention as commissioners and interpreters of new music, they are also devoted to performing masterworks of the string quartet repertoire at the highest level. They won Second Prize in the 2016 Schoenfeld Competition, they were quarter-finalists in the 2015 Fischoff Competition and placed second at the 2015 Frances Walton Competition
Friction has held residencies at the New Music for Strings Festival in Denmark, Interlochen Arts Camp, Lunenburg Academy of Music in Nova Scotia, Napa Valley Performing Arts Center, Old First Concerts, San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, and was the first ensemble in residence at the Center for New Music.
Friction Quartet is dedicated to building new audiences for contemporary music through interactive musical enrichment programs. They are participating for the third consecutive year in the San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music program, visiting over 60 public schools annually. They are Ensemble Partners with Young Composers & Improvisors Workshop, workshopping and premiering new works written by young composers in the Bay Area. They have also given presentations at Oakland public schools through KDFC’s Playground Pop Up program. In collaboration with Meridian Hill Pictures, they created a short documentary, titled Friction, that profiles their early educational outreach in Washington DC’s Mundo Verde Public Charter School. Their presentations regularly utilize Doug’s adventurous arrangements of Pop songs alongside excerpts from standard string quartet repertoire to help young audiences build connections to musical concepts.
Friction appears on recordings with National Sawdust Tracks, Innova Records, Albany Records, Pinna Records, and many independent releases. They released their full-length debut album, resolve, in 2018 through Bandcamp. Friction has appeared on radio stations such as NPR, KALW, KING-FM, and KUT, among others.
Friction’s video of the second movement of First Quartet by John Adams was named the #2 video of the year in 2015 by Second Inversion. John Adams shared this video on his own homepage and called it “spectacular.” Their video for Andy Akiho’s In/ Exchange, featuring Friction and Akiho, was also chosen by Second Inversion for their Top 5 videos of 2016. The video was also featured on American Public Media’s Performance Today.
Friction Quartet takes risks to enlarge the audience’s understanding of what a string quartet can be using arrangements of pop music, digital processing, percussion, amplification, movement, and additional media. Their multimedia and interdisciplinary projects have received critical acclaim. In 2017 they produced Spaced Out, an evening-length suite of music about the cosmos that utilizes surround sound electronics and includes a Friction Commission written by Jon Kulpa. The San Francisco Classical Voice called it “accessible, yet surreal.” No matter where their musical exploration takes them, they never lose sight of the string quartet’s essence– the timeless and endlessly nuanced interaction of four analog voices.
Thomas Adès was born in London in 1971. Renowned as both composer and performer, he works regularly with the world’s leading orchestras, opera companies and festivals.
His compositions include three operas : the most recent of which The Exterminating Angel premiered at the 2016 Salzburg Festival and subsequently has been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, New York and the Royal Opera House, London all conducted by the composer; The Tempest (Royal Opera House and Metropolitan Opera); and Powder Her Face. His orchestral works include Asyla (CBSO, 1997), Tevot (Berlin Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall, 2007), Polaris (New World Symphony, Miami 2011), Violin Concerto Concentric Paths (Berliner Festspiele and the BBC Proms, 2005), In Seven Days (Piano concerto with moving image - LA Philharmonic and RFH London 2008), Totentanz for mezzo-soprano, baritone, and orchestra (BBC Proms, 2013), and Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (Boston Symphony Orchestra, 2019). His compositions also include numerous celebrated chamber and solo works.
Thomas Adès has been an Artistic Partner of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 2016 and will conduct the orchestra in Boston and at Tanglewood, perform chamber music with the orchestra players, and lead the summer Festival of Contemporary Music. He coaches Piano and Chamber Music annually at the International Musicians Seminar, Prussia Cove.
As a conductor, Thomas appears regularly with the Los Angeles, San Francisco and London Philharmonic orchestras, the Boston, London, BBC and City of Birmingham, Symphony orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouworkest, Leipzig Gewandhaus and the Czech Philharmonic. In opera, in addition to The Exterminating Angel, he has conducted The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Opera House and the Zürich Opera, The Tempest at the Metropolitan Opera and Vienna State Opera, and Gerald Barry’s latest opera Alice’s Adventures Under Ground in Los Angeles (world premiere) and in London (European premiere). In the 2019-20 season Thomas has a residency with the Royal Concertgebouworkest and also conducts the London and Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestras and makes his debut with Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. In the USA, he returns to the Los Angeles and Boston Symphony Orchestras. Thomas also returns to the Royal Opera House twice this season, to conduct Barry’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and the premiere of his new ballet The Dante Project.
His piano engagements include solo recitals at Carnegie Hall (Stern Auditorium), New York and the Wigmore Hall in London, and concerto appearances with the New York Philharmonic. This season will see the release of his album of solo piano music by Janacek and he will also join Simon Keenlyside in a recital of Schubert’s Winterreise at the Vienna State Opera.
His many awards include the Grawemeyer Award for Asyla (1999); Royal Philharmonic Society large-scale composition awards for Asyla, The Tempest and Tevot; and Ernst von Siemens Composers' prize for Arcadiana; British Composer Award for The Four Quarters. His CD recording of The Tempest from the Royal Opera House (EMI) won the Contemporary category of the 2010 Gramophone Awards; his DVD of the production from the Metropolitan Opera was awarded the Diapason d'Or de l'année (2013), Best Opera recording (2014 Grammy Awards) and Music DVD Recording of the Year (2014 ECHO Klassik Awards); and The Exterminating Angel won the World Premiere of the Year at the International Opera Awards (2017). In 2015 he was awarded the prestigious Léonie Sonning Music Prize and in Spring 2020 he will receive the Toru Takemitsu composition award at Tokyo Opera City where he will conduct a concert of his own music.
Trevor Weston’s music has been called a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling.” (Detroit Free Press) Weston’s honors include the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, Berkeley, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and the Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the MacDowell Colony and a residency with Castle of our Skins at the Longy School of Music. Weston co-authored with Olly Wilson, chapter 5 in the Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, “Duke Ellington as a Cultural Icon” published by Cambridge University Press. Weston’s work, Juba for Strings won the Sonori/New Orleans Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition.
Weston won the first Emerging Black Composers Project award sponsored by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Symphony. The resulting work, Push, premiered by the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen in Davies Symphony Hall. Push was noted for, “Working in terse, delicate strokes, Weston covers a range of references from the African American musical tradition,” by the San Francisco Chronicle. “…an energetic and colorfully orchestrated mini-symphony, is the kind of work that makes you want to hear more of Weston’s music,” according to San Francisco Classical Voice. Weston’s Flying Fish, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall for its 125 Commission Project and the American Composers Orchestra, was described as having, “…episodes of hurtling energy, the music certainly suggested wondrous aquatic feats. I was especially affected, though, by an extended slower, quizzical episode with pensive strings and plaintive chords.” (New York Times). Subwaves, a musical tribute to the NYC Subway, premiered at David Geffen Hall by the Music Advancement Program orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.
Trevor Weston’s music has been called a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling.” (Detroit Free Press) Weston’s honors include the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, Berkeley, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and the Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the MacDowell Colony and a residency with Castle of our Skins at the Longy School of Music. Weston co-authored with Olly Wilson, chapter 5 in the Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, “Duke Ellington as a Cultural Icon” published by Cambridge University Press. Weston’s work, Juba for Strings won the Sonori/New Orleans Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition.
Trevor Weston’s musical education began at St. Thomas Choir school in NYC at the age of ten. He received his BA from Tufts University and continued his studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he earned his MA and PhD in music composition. His primary composition teachers were T. J. Anderson, Olly Wilson and Andrew Imbrie and Richard Felciano. Dr. Weston is currently a Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Drew University in Madison, NJ and an instructor for the Music Advancement Program and Pre-College at The Juilliard School, NYC.
JUNO Award-winning composer Vivian Fung has a unique talent for combining idiosyncratic textures and styles into large-scale works, reflecting her multicultural background. NPR calls her “one of today’s most eclectic composers” and The Philadelphia Inquirer praises her “stunningly original compositional voice.” Her newest compositions run the gamut from the orchestral piece Parade, a ROCO commission reflecting on San Francisco’s Lunar New Year festivities; to the daring Ominous Machine II, a powerhouse work for two pianos and two percussion; to her Flute Concerto: Storm Within, a challenging work commissioned and premiered by Vancouver Symphony Principal Flutist Christie Reside.
Current and upcoming presentations of Fung’s work include the National Repertory Orchestra’s performance of Prayer, her critically acclaimed elegy for the pandemic. Fung’s composition Aqua, inspired by Chicago’s Aqua Tower, is on the program for the city’s annual Grant Park Music Festival.
Fung’s 2023/24 season officially begins with the world premiere of a work commissioned by the “Ligeti Etudes meets 18 Composers” project. A portrait album of her works featuring the Jasper String Quartet is due for release on Sono Luminus in October 2023. The world premiere of “Songs for the Next Generation” is set for May 2024 at the Kaufman Center in New York City.
Fung is currently at work on a new project about identity with soprano Andrea Nunez and Royce Vavrek, percussion works for Network for New Music and Ensemble for These Times, and a commission by Cape Cod Chamber Music Society.
Recent highlights include the digital world premiere of two operatic scenes based on Fung’s oral family history in Cambodia with librettist Royce Vavrek. In other works, Fung has taken inspiration from travels in China, Vietnam, Spain, Indonesia and beyond.
She has received numerous awards and grants from institutions including ASCAP, the Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her compositions have been performed by dozens of major ensembles worldwide. Recordings of her work have been released on the Naxos Canadian Classics, Telarc, Çedille, Innova, Signpost and Çedille Records labels.
Born in Edmonton, Canada, Fung began her composition studies with composer Violet Archer and received her doctorate from The Juilliard School in New York. She currently lives in California. Learn more at www.vivianfung.ca.
Tigran Hamasyan is considered one of the most remarkable and distinctive jazz-meets-rock pianists/composers of his generation. A piano virtuoso with groove power, Hamasyan seamlessly fuses potent jazz improvisation and progressive rock with the rich folkloric music of his native Armenia. Born in Gyumri, Armenia, in 1987, his musical journey began in his childhood home, where he was exposed to a diverse array of musical influences leading to him playing piano at the age of three, performing in festivals and competitions by the time he was eleven, and winning the Montreux Jazz Festival’s piano competition in 2003. He released his debut album, World Passion, in 2004 at the age of seventeen. The following year, he won the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition. Additional albums include New Era; Red Hail; A Fable, for which he was awarded a Victoires de la Musique (the equivalent of a Grammy Award in France); Shadow Theater; and Luys i Luso which featured the Yerevan State Chamber Choir focusing on Armenian sacred music stretching stylistically from the 5th century to the 20th century.
His Nonesuch debut, Mockroot (2015), won the Echo Jazz Award for International Piano Instrumentalist of the Year; subsequent records for the label include An Ancient Observer (2017) the companion EP, For Gymuri (2018), Revisiting the Film (2021) and most recently StandArt (2022). Hamasyan was awarded the Deutscher Jazzpreis international category in Piano/Keyboards in 2021. Hamasyan has released records on France’s Plus Loins, Universal France, Nonesuch and ECM.
Hamasyan’s new conceptual album “The Bird of a Thousand Voices” was released in August 2024 on Naïve/Believe – his debut with the label. Tigran composed, scored, and arranged the much-anticipated project blending its traditional folk footprints with rock influences. The first single from the album “The Kingdom” can also be experienced as an interactive game at www.bird1000.com. The recently released double album is inspired by an ancient Armenian tale in which a hero travels into unseen realms to find and bring back a mythical bird – whose thousand different songs will awaken people again and bring harmony to the world. The transmedia music theater piece ‘The Bird of a Thousand Voices’, an intriguing immersive light installation with shadow play, digitally programmed voices, live music, and an Armenian-English libretto, premiered at the Holland Festival in June 2024.
In addition to awards and critical acclaim, Hamasyan has built a dedicated following worldwide, as well as praise from Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau and the late Chick Corea. “With startling combinations of jazz, minimalist, electronic, folk and songwriterly elements…Hamasyan and his collaborators travel musical expanses marked with heavy grooves, ethereal voices, pristine piano playing and ancient melodies. You’ll hear nothing else like this” (NPR)