Chamber Music | Fall 2023

ChamberMusic VOL. 40, NO. 4 FALL 2023 $5.95

T H E 2 024 M E M B E R S H I P D I R E C TO RY

The Urge to C

OMPETE

IDtEDoSWe? STRIVE For? C E D O H W Wha PERSONAL Standards WHAT’S HANGED ?

WHAT HASNC ’T? Communal ACHIEVE The CRITIC’S Gaze

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MENT

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Sphinx Virtuosi’s Debut Album Out Digitally on Deutsche Grammophon This debut album represents the rich history of the Sphinx Organization and the vibrant future of classical music by centering the artistry of extraordinary composers and artistic visionaries of color.

Visit Deutsche Grammophon at dgt.link/Sphinx to download or stream.

For more information on Sphinx Virtuosi, visit www.SphinxVirtuosi.org

“Powerful, celebratory debut” — I Care If You Listen

“Joyous and uplifting” — The Financial Times

Photos: Scott Jackson

January 25 - 27, 2024 | Detroit MI The Sphinx Organization brings you the largest and longeststanding convening dedicated to diversity and inclusion in classical music January 25-27, 2024! With over 30 sessions designed to inspire and ignite action and spark collaboration, the participation of more than 90 speakers, keynote addresses by luminaries and trailblazers, and much more: you won’t want to miss this transformative experience!

To reduce barriers to participation, Sphinx offers a “choose what you pay” ticket model, with options ranging from $0 $200. Fellowships that include lodging and a modest travel stipend are also available.

Visit www.SphinxConnect.org to learn more.

Aaron P. Dworkin

Photos: Craig Gorkiewicz

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Founder

www.SphinxMusic.org

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2024-2025 SEASON YCA on Tour is a unique touring program that brings a chamber music ensemble made up of some of the most extraordinary YCA artists, in programs of fabulous repertoire, to cities all over North America!

The 24-25 season of YCA on Tour will feature two special programs of chamber music for flute, violin, viola, and piano! Participating artists include current YCA artists flutist Anthony Trionfo, violinist Risa Hokamura, and pianist Chaeyoung Park, alongside YCA alums cellist Alex Cox, and renowned violist Hsin-Yun Huang.

PROGRAM OPTION 1

PROGRAM OPTION 2

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ARVO PART Mozart Adagio for Piano Trio (flute, cello, piano)

MOZART Flute Quartet in D major, K. 285 (flute, violin, viola, cello)

AKSHAYA AVRIL TUCKER In Whose Mouth, The Stars (violin, viola, cello)

WEBER Trio in G minor, Op. 63 (flute, cello, piano)

WEBER Trio in G minor, Op. 63 (flute, cello, piano)

-Intermission-

-Intermission-

BLOCH Concertino (flute, viola, piano)

MOZART Flute Quartet in D major, K. 285 (flute, violin, viola, cello)

RAVEL Piano Trio (violin, cello, piano)

KATHERINE BALCH Musica Spolia (flute, viola, piano) BLOCH: Concertino (flute, viola, piano)

CONTACT CHRISTINA BAKER Senior Director of Artist Management Christina@yca.org 917-841-1308

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MIC HERRING Director of Booking and Operations Mic@yca.org 917-716-4528

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" Yo u n g Con ce rt A r t i st s i s Bac k "

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YCA’s artists are the leaders of the future – stars who combine world-class talent with creative vision to bring new reach and relevance to the art form. For more than 60 years YCA has invested in extraordinary young musicians, providing them with the support, clarity, and confidence to tell their stories, as well as with the tools, opportunities, and infrastructure to take their careers to the highest level.

PIANO

Albert Cano Smit Do-Hyun Kim Maxim Lando Nathan Lee Ying Li Chaeyoung Park Aristo Sham Zhu Wang Harmony Zhu

VIOLIN

Benjamin Baker Bella Hristova Risa Hokamura SooBeen Lee Lun Li

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Narek Arutyunian Chelsea Guo

Xavier Foley

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FLUTE

TENOR

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CLARINET

Joseph Parrish Hanzhi Wang

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STRING QUARTETS Ariel Quartet Arod Quartet Quatuor Danel Hagen Quartet Miró Quartet Pacifica Quartet Parker Quartet Shanghai Quartet Ying Quartet PIANO TRIO Gryphon Trio VOCAL ENSEMBLE Cantus WOODWIND QUINTET WindSync CHAMBER ORCHESTRA Sphinx Virtuosi

COMPOSER-PERFORMERS Gabriel Kahane Jessie Montgomery CONDUCTOR Jacomo Bairos STRINGS William Hagen Andrei Ioniță Rachel Barton Pine PIANO Rodolfo Leone Jeffrey Kahane Jon Kimura Parker Orion Weiss VOCALISTS Gabriel Kahane Karen Slack WINDS Amy Dickson Anthony McGill

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ChamberMusic A Publication of Chamber Music America FALL 2023, VOLUME 40, NUMBER 4

48 25 68

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Four writers—Alex Ross, Marcus J. Moore, Vivien Schweitzer, and Brent Hayes Edwards—discuss how notions of excellence figure into writing and thinking about music.

BY Larry Blumenfeld

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Photos: Ellen Qbertplaya (Iyer), Ogata (Akinmusire), Deb Fong (ARKAI), Ebru Yildiz (Moor Mother)

CMA Grants & Awards, 2022-2023

Ensemble music professionals across the country receive CMA support to compose, perform, tour, record, teach, and present their music.

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EXCELLENCE

In It to Win It

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What do chamber music competitions tell us?

BY Brian Wise

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Briefly Glimpsing Excellence, Along The Way

A trumpeter and composer considers what it means to find “integrity in sound.”

BY Ambrose Akinmusire

Whose Excellence?

A pianist, composer, and Harvard University professor interrogates notions of musical excellence— and praises musicality.

BY Vijay Iyer

SPECIAL SECTION:

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Who Defines Excellence, and What Is It Code For?

Alejandra Valarino Boyer, Caitlin Edwards, Blake-Anthony Johnson, and Jennie Oh Brown expand upon their provocative panel discussion at CMA’s Chicago ChamberFest.

BY Emery Kerekes

F E AT U R E S 15

Gold Standards and Ineffable Qualities

What Do We Strive For?

Chamber music educators consider the art of nurturing excellence in a changing world.

BY Rebecca Schmid

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CMA MEMBERSHIP DIRECTORY D E PA R T M E N TS

7 CMA LETTER: Our Journey Together Toward Excellence

BY Kevin Kwan Loucks

10 CMA NEWS: CMA Board Welcomes New Voices

12 AWARDS, IN MEMORIAM, AND SEGUES 32 BOOKS: Consider the Source Four new books explore how and why race matters in the making, playing, and documenting of our shared musical lives.

BY Willard Jenkins

88 CMA SCORES: Edward Simon’s Mujer Remolino

148 THE LAST WORD:

Blind Spots and Bright Futures

BY Jennifer Grim

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Excellence: The Playlist

A songwriter, composer, vocalist, and poet finds the seeds and sound of brilliance in six essential tracks.

BY Moor Mother

10/15/23 9:39 PM

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CMA Letter

ChamberMusic Official publication of Chamber Music America

12 W. 32nd Street New York, NY 10001 (212) 242-2022 www.chambermusic america.org Larry Blumenfeld

editorial director

Andrew Frank

managing editor

Steve Futterman research

Red Herring Design design

Brenden O’Hanlon

advertising

CHAMBER MUSIC AMERICA

Kevin Kwan Loucks

chief executive officer

Geysa Castro

director of membership services

Susan Dadian

associate director of grant programs

José R. Feliciano

director of grant programs

Jenny Ouellette

chief operating officer

Orchid McRae

marketing and communications manager

Erica Murase

associate director of development

Fabian Robinson conference and events manager

CJ Salvani

membership services/ accounting associate

Ben Schonhorn

social media assistant

Elva Tang

grant programs administrative assistant

Ofir Tomer

development associate

Adriana Vergara

grant programs associate Chamber Music (ISSN 1071-1791), the official publication of Chamber Music America, is published quarterly, in Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall by Chamber Music America, 12 West 32nd St., New York, NY 10001. 𝖢2022 Chamber Music America. Chamber Music magazine subscription price for one year ($35.00) is included in membership dues.

Periodical postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to Chamber Music, 12 West 32nd St., New York, NY 10001. Articles, reviews, and letters reflect the viewpoint of their individual authors; publication by Chamber Music does not imply official endorsement by CMA. Partial support for Chamber Music magazine is provided by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Our Journey Together Toward Excellence

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n our field, the term “excellence” carries profound philosophical significance.

For me, excellence, in its truest sense, is an aspiration. It is not merely a measure of technical mastery, but rather an embodiment of the human spirit’s quest for the sublime. As we explore this theme in our current edition of Chamber Music, we contemplate how excellence weaves itself into the creative process and how it can elevate our musical experiences beyond the auditory realm.

These reflections guide us as we journey towards a truly one-of-a-kind CMA National Conference experience in January. Day one will highlight a partnership with our colleagues at American Composers Forum to bring to life ACF’s invaluable digital resource guide, “Anatomy of a Commission,” shedding light on the intricate commissioning process. This collaboration showcases our commitment to nurturing new compositions and pushing creative boundaries, and marks an exciting expansion of the Conference in both content and duration. The day also features a celebratory concert with three remarkable ensembles breathing life into CMA-commissioned works, followed by our annual opening-night reception, generously sponsored by BMI. Throughout the conference, excellence takes various forms through daily performances by world-class artists spanning various genres; informative and thought-provoking panels; affinity gatherings; and a “listening lounge” that offers a serene haven for those seeking uninterrupted musical immersion. Saturday evening marks a remarkable reunion of the renowned Cleveland Quartet, followed by star-studded performances paying tribute to this iconic ensemble.

The conference’s culmination, the Awards Brunch, offers a chance to honor those who exemplify excellence through their service to chamber music and the broader field. Here, we proudly present the Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award, the Michael Jaffee Visionary Award, and the coveted Cleveland Quartet Award. Additionally, we will introduce new awards, a testament to the creativity and innovation fostered within our membership.

As we prepare for the conference, let us remember that excellence is not a destination but an ongoing journey. It represents a lifelong commitment to exploration, refinement, and the unwavering pursuit of beauty and emotional depth through music. We eagerly anticipate sharing this transformative experience with you as we celebrate the shared values that define our vibrant community, January 18-21, 2024 in New York City. Register today!

With musical reverence,

Kevin Kwan Loucks Chief Executive Officer

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OF DUK E UNIVERSIT Y

Duke University Full-time String Quartet in Residence since 1965 Eric Pritchard and Hsiao-Mei Ku, violins, Jonathan Bagg, viola, and Caroline Stinson, cello

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9/29/23

8:18 AM

Fry Street Quartet

A creative force in the chamber music world, the FSQ premieres a new string quartet by Gabriela Lena Frank in the 2023-2024 season, alongside two other commissions by Aida Shirazi and Akshaya Tucker. After more than 65 performances in three different countries, their multi-disciplinary exploration of global sustainability, Rising Tide, enters its second decade with performances on both coasts, as well as the Midwest.

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frystreetquartet.com www.jwentworth.com martha@jwentworth.com 301-277-8205 (direct)

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News

CMA Board Welcomes New Voices Three new appointed members—Sophia Contreras-Schwartz, Juliana Han, and Edward Kim—were confirmed by the Board of Directors in late summer.

CMA welcomes the new members, whose profiles follow.

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love for music and a zeal for the law have been the personal signposts for Sophia Contreras-Schwartz, deputy general counsel for Nextdoor, Inc. Not that juggling the two has always been easy.

“I went to U.C. Berkeley for undergrad and completed a major in political science and a minor in music,” says ContrerasSchwartz, a pianist and oboist by training.

“Attending law school after college was a natural path given what I had studied.”

Contreras-Schwartz started her career in law working on litigation matters, but after having her first child,

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made the transition into corporate work.

Her practice focused on mergers and acquisitions and general corporate matters. “I love deal work,” she says.

“Even though there are opposite sides, everyone is working toward the same goal, and at the end both parties are typically happy.” She left private practice in 2018 to move in-house at Nextdoor, the neighborhood-based social network, as the second attorney the company ever hired. The following five years found her building out the team and taking the company public, all while working on a wide variety of legal issues.

Yet music remained an essential part of her life.

“My passion for music has never waned, and I’ve been looking for ways to integrate it back into my life. Becoming a member of the CMA Board provides a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between my professional life and my love for music. I have a strong background in corporate governance, and my role as a Board member will allow me to contribute my expertise to the art

form that played such a big role in shaping who I am. There are so many different ways to enjoy music, whether as a listener or a performer, regardless of the musical genre. It has an unparalleled ability to connect us, and I’m thrilled to be a part of an organization that is helping musicians hone their craft and get it out into the world.”

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celebrated pianist, educator, writer, and podcaster, Juliana Han also holds degrees from Harvard University in biochemistry and

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law. There’s also her experience as a biotech consultant, corporate attorney, legal advisor to the New York City Council, and as founder and co-director of the Piedmont Chamber Music Festival. On top of all that, she’s now a member of Chamber Music America’s Board of Directors. The term “polymath” springs to mind.

“I consider myself an efficient person, but at the end of the day, there’s just not enough time. At every point, something I really care about has to go on the back burner in favor of something a little more important,” Han says. “Luckily, I can be at peace putting things on hold because I’ve done it a number of times. I took a decade off from music, then law, and each time felt like I was able to come back stronger. Life is long enough for second chances, and too short to lose sight of what’s important.”

It was at Harvard that Han became enamored with chamber music. “Some of my happiest memories are of playing chamber music. One of the first things I did when I got to campus was join the orchestra [as a violinist], and all anyone could talk about was what chamber groups they wanted to form,” Han recalls.

“Pretty soon I was staying up late sightreading quartets and taking a chamber music performance course every semester. The first piece I studied was the Brahms B major trio [as a pianist] and I couldn’t believe there was this entire body of astonishing repertoire that I had never heard.”

“Later, when I was a corporate lawyer in New York struggling to make sense of my life, I decided to move toward something that had always made me feel alive and human,” she says. She chose to audition for the collaborative piano program at Juilliard, “so that I would always be working on musical projects with others. I knew I had made

the right decision because every summer I spent at a chamber music festival, practicing and rehearsing dawn to dusk, felt like some version of heaven.”

The future of chamber music remains a priority for her. “Creating new fans of an art form is not always easy, but I think two words can help: inclusivity and connection. To be more inclusive, we need to remove the barriers that might make someone feel that this chamber music experience is not meant for them—maybe they don’t know much about Beethoven, or have never been in a concert hall, or are afraid they won’t know what to do at a concert.

We also need to increase access to early music education, reduce economic barriers to instrumental study, and create opportunities for musicians of all abilities to play together—and have fun doing it.”

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dward Kim was in his early twenties and partway through an undergraduate degree in anthropology and medicine when he asked himself a difficult question: “Is this the beginning of the end of my musical growth?”

For Kim, a lifelong pianist, “the answer seemed to be ‘yes.’” So he changed course: after graduation, he enrolled in the University of Maryland

for his M.M. and then went on to Juilliard for a certificate in collaborative piano.

In the following years, he travelled to Austria, where he served as assistant conductor and pianist-coach at the Salzburger Landestheater, a celebrated opera hall with a storied history.

“Austria gave me that opportunity that I really needed as an opera upstart,” he says. “From being a repetiteur, to assistant conducting, to individual vocal coaching, I got to experience firsthand the holistic creation of a show, and it opened my eyes to that world in a profound way.” After a few years, Kim made the difficult decision to return to school once more—this time for an M.B.A. “After working in Austria, I realized I wanted music to play a more personal role in my life, something I could share if and when I wanted to, without obligation,” he says.

Kim now works in management consulting for the Boston Consulting Group. As he explains, “The work actually has more in common with music than you might expect— collaborating in teams, problem solving, etcetera. Maybe that’s why I feel fulfilled professionally, even though it means less music making than before,” he muses. He relishes the more unstructured relationship to music his new career allows. “Now that I don’t have performance deadlines, I can take my time learning new pieces, which has honestly been the most wonderful thing.”

Joining CMA’s Board was another way to ensure that music remained a steady presence in his life: “I’d been looking for ways to marry my professional life now with the professional life I had as a musician, to be part of the kind of work that helps classical music adapt to the multi-faceted demands, intricacies, and realities of the twenty-first century.”

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Awards

Segues

In October, the MacArthur Foundation announced its 2023 “Genius” Fellows.

They include composer and pianist Courtney Bryan and composer and visual artist Raven Chacon.

The New Thread Quartet has a new member: alto saxophonist Noa Even, who succeeds founding member Kristen McKeon.

In Memoriam Leny Andrade, vocalist Gloria Coates, composer Joan Kaplan Davidson, arts philanthropist Richard Davis, bassist Curtis Fowlkes, trombonist Charles Gayle, saxophonist Miles Hoffman, violist and founder, American Chamber Players; radio broadcaster Dom Minasi, guitarist Russell Sherman, pianist Nancy Van de Vate, composer

The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival has appointed David J. Kitto as its new executive director. He succeeds Steve Ovitsky in the position.

Yuna Lee has been named second violinist of The Alexander String Quartet.

Lee, a founding member of the Phaedrus Quartet, succeeds Fred Lifsitz.

Frank J. Oteri has stepped down as editor of NewMusicBox, the online magazine of New Music USA. Oteri, who has led NewMusicBox since its launch in 1999, joined the full-time faculty of The New School this fall.

This January, cellist Merry Peckham will assume the role of assistant dean and director of chamber music at the Juilliard School. Peckham, a founding member of the Cavani Quartet, currently serves as chair of chamber music at New England Conservatory..

The Music Academy of the West has named Shauna Quill as its new president and C.E.O., effective November 1. Quill, who last served as executive director of the New York Youth Symphony, succeeds Scott Reed in the position.

Friends of Chamber Music Kansas City has appointed Brett Robison as the organization’s new executive director

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Quinteto Latino has a new member and a new director: Bassoonist Jamael Smith has joined the ensemble, succeeding Shawn Jones; and Hugo J. Seda has been appointed to the newly formed role of managing director.

The Aizuri Quartet, recipient of CMA’s 2022 Cleveland Quartet Award, has appointed two new members: cellist Caleb van der Swaagh and violist Brian Hong. They succeed departing members Karen Ouzounian and Ayane Kozasa, respectively.

The Carpe Diem String Quartet has named Sam Weiser, formerly of the Del Sol Quartet, as its newest violinist.

Spoleto Festival USA has named Paul Wiancko, cellist of the Kronos Quartet, as the new director of its Bank of America Chamber Music Series.

Wiancko first joined Spoleto in 2019 as a composer-in-residence and, last season, shared hosting and curatorial duties.

Saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón has joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as assistant professor of jazz.

Errata In the Summer 2023 issue of Chamber Music, we mistakenly credited the funder of Trevor Weston’s Stars, a 2020 CMA commission. Stars was made possible by CMA’s Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Mellon Foundation. We sincerely regret the error.

FALL 2023

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“Mastery of the scores and absolute unity of interpretive purpose…” The Spokesman Review, Spokane, WA

ARIANNA STRING QUARTET

Photo: Karen Palmer.

University of Missouri - St. Louis | ariannaquartet.com

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2023-24 SEASON Forward in all directions

Carpe Diem String Quartet welcomes first violinist Sam Weiser as we launch our 18th season, featuring world-class

collaborations and selections from our “15 for 15” Commissioning Project. Concerts will be livestreamed for free. Visit cdsq.org for details & full schedule.

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COMING SOON! Carpe Diem’s recording

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Ariana Nelson cello

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of Piano Quintets by Luigi Perrachio and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco with pianist David Korevaar on the Da Vinci label.

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2022

CMA Grants & Awards

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During the most recent fiscal

year, CMA awarded $1,370,287 to ensembles and concert

presenters across the United States. On the following pages, we proudly present the recipients and their projects and achievements.

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Classical Commissioning Program

Grants to ensembles for commissions of new chamber works Commissions funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional program support is provided by The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, the Amphion Foundation, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and the Chamber Music America Commissioning Endowment Fund.

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grantee Balance Campaign (Washington, DC) composer Jeffrey Mumford instrumentation Flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion

grantee Byrne:Kozar:Duo (Melrose, MA) composer Marti Epstein instrumentation Trumpet, soprano

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grantee Decoda (New York, NY) composer Nina C. Young instrumentation Flute, clarinet, bassoon, piano, violin, viola, cello, bass grantee Ensemble For These Times (E4TT) (San Francisco, CA) composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh instrumentation Violin, cello, piano grantee InfraSound (Brooklyn, NY) composer Susan Botti instrumentation Three voices, two flutes, bass clarinet, violin, cello, double bass, percussion

grantee Khemia Ensemble (Spanish Fork, UT) composer Anuj Bhutani instrumentation Soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, two percussionists, plus electronics

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grantee newEar (Kansas City, MO) composer Susan Kander instrumentation Flute, clarinet, two violins, viola, cello, percussion, piano

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grantee NEXUS Chamber Music (Chicago, IL) composer Paul Wiancko instrumentation Violin, cello

grantee Roomful of Teeth (Williamstown, MA) composer Christopher Cerrone instrumentation Four voices (tenor, baritone, bass-baritone, bass), plus live processed and pre-recorded electronics

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grantee Shepherdess Duo (Brooklyn, NY) composer Mary Kouyoumdjian instrumentation Soprano, violin

grantee The New Consort (Brooklyn, NY) composer Jonathan Woody instrumentation Six voices (soprano, alto, two tenors, baritone, bass)

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New Jazz Works

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Support for the creation of new works by jazz artists Funded by the Doris Duke Foundation

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grantee Aimée Allen Trio (New York, NY) composer Aimée Allen instrumentation Voice, bass, guitar

grantee Emilio Solla y La Inestable de Brooklyn (Brooklyn, NY) composer Emilio Solla instrumentation Piano, bandoneon, flute/tenor saxophone/bass clarinet, alto flute/tenor/soprano saxophones, violin, trumpet/flugelhorn, trombone, bass, drums/percussion

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grantee Gabriel Vicéns Sextet (New York, NY) composer Gabriel Vicéns instrumentation Guitar, alto saxophone, piano, bass, drums, percussion

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grantee Manuel Valera (New York, NY) composer Manuel Valera instrumentation Piano, saxophone, trumpet, bass, drums

grantee Miguel Zenón & Golden City (New York, NY) composer Miguel Zenón instrumentation Alto saxophone, piano, guitar, bass, percussion, trumpet/trombone, trombone/tuba, trombone, drums

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grantee Patrick Cornelius Group (Brooklyn, NY) composer Patrick Cornelius instrumentation Alto/soprano saxophones/flute, guitar, piano, bass, drums/percussion, trumpet/flugelhorn, tenor saxophone/bass clarinet/clarinet, trombone

grantee Grant Richards Sextet (Brooklyn, NY) composer Grant Richards instrumentation Piano, acoustic bass, drums, alto/soprano saxophones, tenor saxophone, trumpet

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grantee Jimmy Greene Quintet (Newtown, CT) composer Jimmy Greene instrumentation Saxophones, guitar, piano, bass, drums

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grantee Jonathan Powell and Mambo Jazz Party (Colorado Springs, CO) composer Jonathan Powell instrumentation Trumpet/flugelhorn, tenor/soprano saxophones/flute, flute, alto saxophone, two trombones, piano/ Fender Rhodes/synthesizer, bass, drum set/batá/bongo/percussion, conga/ percussion grantee Le Boeuf Brothers (Santa Cruz, CA) composer Remy Le Boeuf instrumentation Alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, piano, bass, drums

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grantee Ryan Cohan Ensemble (Chicago, IL) composer Ryan Cohan instrumentation Piano, saxophones/ flutes, bass, drums, two violins, viola, cello grantee Silvano Monasterios (Clifton, NJ) composer Silvano Monasterios instrumentation Piano, percussion, drums, bass, saxophone, flute, trumpet, bass clarinet, vibraphone

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grantee Somi Kakoma (New York, NY) composer Somi Kakoma instrumentation Voice/percussion, drums, piano, bass, guitar, saxophones, voice, voice/bass

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grantee The Vanity Nonet (Los Angeles, CA) composer Sara Gazarek instrumentation Voice, trombone, piano, drums, guitar, trumpet, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, bass

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Performance Plus

Supports female-led jazz ensembles by connecting them with an experienced artist-educator Funded by the Doris Duke Foundation

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grantee Astrid Kuljanic and Mat Muntz (Berkeley, CA) leader Astrid Kuljanic artist-educator Laurie Antonioli

grantee Aubrey Johnson Group (Brooklyn, NY) leader Aubrey Johnson artist-educator Billy Childs

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grantee Cocomama (Nyack, NY) leader Mayra Casales artist-educator Michele Rosewoman

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grantee Gabriela Martina (Lincoln, MA) leader Gabriela Martina artist-educator Frank Carlberg grantee JAZZphoria (Pinole, CA) leader Jean Fineberg artist-educator Frank Martin

grantee Jenny Hill and Liquid Horn (Croton-on-Hudson, NY) leader Jenny Hill artist-educator Jerome Harris grantee Le Banda Ramirez (New York, NY) leader Carolyn Steinberg artist-educator Hector Martignon grantee Monica Shriver Quartet (Nashville, TN) leader Monica Shriver artist-educator Rahsaan Barber

grantee Monika Herzig’s Sheroes (Bloomington, IN) leader Monika Herzig artist-educator Lenny White

grantee Sounds of A&R (S.O.A.R.) (Edison, NJ) leader April Webb artist-educator Thelonius Sphere Monk III grantee Star n the Knight (Seattle, WA) leader Andrea Redmond artist-educator D’Vonne Lewis

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grantee The Sofia Goodman Group (Spring Hill, TN) leader Sophia Goodman artist-educator Pascal Le Boeuf

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Ensemble Forward

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Expert coaching for New York City-based ensembles that perform Western European Classical and Contemporary chamber music Funded by The New York Community Trust

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grantee Bergamot Quartet (Astoria, NY) coach Dan Trueman instrumentation Two violins, viola, cello grantee InfraSound (Brooklyn, NY) coach Darian Donovan Thomas instrumentation Countertenor, voice, flute, harp, clarinet, violin, viola, double bass, percussion, piano

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grantee Luminae Trio (New York, NY) coach Andrew Yee instrumentation Violin, cello, piano

grantee Ocelot (New York, NY) coach Wadada Leo Smith instrumentation Tenor saxophone, clarinet, bass/contrabass clarinets, piano/ keyboard, drums/percussion

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grantee Quartet Salonnières (New York, NY) coach David Salness instrumentation Violin/viola, violin/viola, violin/viola, cello grantee Trio Fadolín (New York, NY) coach Kinan Azmeh instrumentation Fadolín, violin, cello

grantee Tropos (Brooklyn, NY) coach Darius Jones instrumentation Violin, clarinets, piano, drums/percussion grantee Uptown Winds (New York, NY) coach Mark Dover instrumentation Flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn

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Artistic Projects Supporting New York City-based projects, including performances, recordings, compositions, and residencies.

Funded by The Howard Gilman Foundation

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grantee Afro-Andean Funk (Long Island City, NY) project New Recording instrumentation Voices, guitar, piano, bass, drums

grantee Ali Bello & The Latin Jazz Liaisons (Middle Village, NY) project New Recording instrumentation Flute, trombone, voice, violin, bass, piano, percussion

grantee Annette A. Aguilar (New York, NY) project New Composition, Recording, and Performance instrumentation Flute, trombone, voices, violin, cello, piano, electric/ acoustic bass, marimba, drums, congas/percussion grantee ARKAI (New York, NY) project EP Recording, Launch, and Tour instrumentation Violin/electric violin, cello/electric cello

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grantee The Folklorkestra (New York, NY) project New Recording instrumentation Voices, alto flute/ Hungarian kaval/tin whistle, trumpet, alto/baritone saxophones, clarinet/ bass clarinets, harmonica, mandolin/ mandocello, sitar/banjo/Portuguese guitar/lap steel guitar, keyboards/ accordion, theremin, bass, percussion

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grantee Jennifer Wharton’s Bonegasm (Astoria, NY) project New Recording instrumentation Trombones, bass trombone, piano, bass, drums grantee KOE (New York, NY) project Performance Series of New Works/Arrangements instrumentation Flute, cello

grantee Muthaflower (New York, NY) project New Recording instrumentation Saxophones, flutes, bass clarinet, piano, drums

grantee RighteousGIRLS (New York, NY) project New Recording instrumentation Flute, piano grantee Stephanie Chou Project (New York, NY) project New Recording with Accompanying Materials and Premiere Performance instrumentation Two voices, alto saxophone, erhu, violin, viola, piano, bass, drums, percussion

grantee TAK Ensemble (Brooklyn, NY) project Two-Day Festival with Guests instrumentation Flutes, clarinets, voice, violin, percussion

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grantee Thistle (Brooklyn, NY) project Six Free Performances in NYC Area instrumentation Voice, harp, cello, percussion

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grantee Unheard-of Ensemble (Brooklyn, NY) project Multimedia Performance Series instrumentation Clarinet, electronics, violin, cello, piano

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grantee Volker Goetze Quartet (Staten Island, NY) project Recording and Community Concert instrumentation Trumpet/flugelhorn, clarinet/bass clarinets, double bass, drums, percussion

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grantee consortium members Arts for Art (New York, NY) Ars Nova Workshop (Philadelphia, PA) CapitalBop (Washington, D.C.) presenting Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble: Don Cherry Tribute

grantee consortium members Trans Art (New York, NY) EastSide Arts Alliance (Oakland, CA) Arts & Education Continuum (New York, NY) presenting Craig Harris and Harlem Nightsongs

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grantee consortium members Stanford Jazz (Stanford, CA) Outpost Productions, Inc. (Albuquerque, NM) The Jazz Salon (Long Beach, CA) presenting Dafnis Prieto Ensemble featuring Luciana Souza

grantee consortium members Nameless Sound (Houston, TX) Epistrophy Arts (Austin, TX) The New Quorum (New Orleans, LA) presenting Myra Melford’s Fire & Water Quintet

grantee consortium members Elastic Arts (Chicago, IL) Hallwalls, Inc. (Buffalo, NY) Trinosophes Projects (Detroit, MI) presenting Trio Imagination (Andrew Cyrille, David Virelles, and Reggie Workman)

Presenter Consortium for Jazz Support for presenters partnering to engage jazz ensembles in concert Funded by the Doris Duke Foundation

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4 photo credits CLASSICAL COMMISSIONING PROGRAM: Balance Campaign by Emory Hensley; Jeffrey Mumford by Frank Oteri; Byrne Kozar Duo by Dominique Holliday; Marti Epstein by Andrew Sherman; Decoda by Fadi Kheir; Nina Young by Laura Bianchi; Ensemble for These Times by Michael Halberstadt; Niloufar Nourbakhsh by Michael Yu; InfraSound by Sean Salamon; Susan Botti by John Rizzo; Khemia Ensemble by Angie Petty; Anuj Bhutani by Carlos J. Matos; newEAR courtesy of the artist; Susan Kander by Russ Rowland; NEXUS Chamber Music by Grittani Creative; Paul Wiancko by Dario Acosta; Roomful of Teeth by Anja Schütz; Christopher Cerrone by Jacob Blickenstaff; Shepherdess by Flaminia Fanale; Mary Kouyoumdjian by Alik Barsoumian; The New Consort by Elizabeth van Os; Jonathan Woody by Keith Race Design and Photo.

NEW JAZZ WORKS: Aimee Allen by Erika Kapin; Emilio Solla by Gustavo Pereyra; Gabriel Vicéns by Elana Hedrych; Grant Richards by Luke Marantz; Jimmy Greene by Anna Webber;

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Jonathan Powell and Mambo Jazz Party by Chris Sulit; Le Boeuf Brothers by Shervin Lainez; Manuel Valera courtesy of the artist; Miguel Zenon by Luis Perdomo; Patrick Cornelius by Vincent Soyez; Ryan Cohan by Ryan Bennett; Silvano Monasterios courtesy of the artist; Somi Kakoma courtesy of the artist; The Vanity Nonet

by Lauren Desberg.

PERFORMANCE PLUS: Astrid Kuljanic by Francesco Moretti; Aubrey Johnson by Lauren Desberg; Cocomama by Tom DeLorenzo; Michele Rosewoman by Chris Drukker; Gabriela Martina courtesy of the artist; Jean Fineberg by Sandy Morris; Jenny Hill courtesy of the artist; La Banda Ramirez by Suess Moments; Monica Shriver by Elisabeth Donaldson; Monika Herzog by Glen Frieson; SOAR by Julianne Karr; Star n the Knight courtesy of the artist; Sofia Goodman by Elisabeth Donaldson.

ENSEMBLE FORWARD: Bergamot Quartet by Corey Hayes; InfraSound by Sean Salamon; Luminae Trio courtesy of the artist; Ocelot by Luke Marantz; Quartet Salonnières courtesy of the artist;

Trio Fadolín by Tatiana Dubek; Kinan Azmeh by Martina Novak; Uptown Winds by Toby Winarto.

ARTISTIC PROJECTS: Afro-Andean Funk by Bill Wadman; Ali Bello and The Latin Liaisons by Jhoel Delgado; Annette A. Aguilar by Argenis Apolinario courtesy of Casita Maria; ARKAI by Thomas Brunot; Folklorestra courtesy of the artist; Jennifer Wharton’s Bonegasm by John Abbott; KOE by Ayaka Kato; Muthaflower courtesy of the artist; RighteousGIRLS by Shervin Lainez; Stephanie Chou by John Abbott; TAK Ensemble by Kaveh Kowsari; Thistle

by Michael Campbell; Unheard-of Ensemble by Michael Yu; Volker Goetze by Sam Samore.

PRESENTER CONSORTIUM FOR JAZZ: Kahil El’Zabar courtesy of the artist; Craig Harris courtesy of the artist; Dafnis Prieto by Ebru Yildiz; Luciana Souza courtesy of the artist; Myra Melford’s Fire & Water Quartert courtesy of the artist; David Virelles courtesy of the artist; Andrew Cyrille by Laurel Golio; Reggie Workman courtesy of the artist.

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extraordinary music all year!

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Anna Polonsky & Peter Wiley november 9 • the old church

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Chien-Kim-Watkins Trio march 9, 14 & 16 • the old church Our Artistic Directors & Emerson cellist Paul Watkins play ALL NINE of Beethoven’s Piano Trios in a 3-concert, week-long mini festival!

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Imanis & BodyVox are back Your soon-to-be favorite German imports Two of the world’s for our latest music & dance creation: in Portland for the first time most exciting & innovative Beautiful Everything Haydn, Borodin & Beethoven composer-performers join forces for: In the Garden of the Gift

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Photo: US Army Signal Corps / Library of Congress

First Lieutenant James Reese Europe and the 369th Infantry Regiment Band playing for patients in the American Red Cross Hospital No. 9, Paris, France, September 4, 1918.

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Books

Consider the Source

Four new books explore how and why race matters in the making, playing, and documenting of our shared musical lives.

Photo: US Army Signal Corps / Library of Congress

B Y Willard Jenkins

C

onsider these facts: Jazz, a distinctly American art form, was birthed and nurtured largely

by African American communities; and yet most of the journalism, criticism, and scholarship surrounding jazz has come from White writers hailing from outside the music’s communities of origin. Even so, Black writers have long documented jazz. With those truths in mind, I embarked on more than a decade of in-depth interviews with notable writers— including trailblazer A.B. Spellman, Thelonious Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley, and other notable authors such as Farah Jasmine Griffin and Tammy L. Kernodle—that led to the volume I edited, Ain’t But a Few of Us. In the book, I paired these conversations with seminal writings from critics through six decades—Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Stanley Crouch, and Greg Tate, among others—and from musicians including Wayne Shorter, Billy Taylor, and Archie Shepp. My title refers to the minority standing, in terms of race, of these writers within their field.

My goal was to express the power, focus, and shared perspectives these voices demonstrate when gathered together.

Ain’t But a Few of Us is more a matter of Black writers telling their stories of earning bylines and space for their writing than about the music itself. This

is not a book based on gripes and grievances. Still, along their respective writerly journeys, matters of race arose—sometimes as bumps in the road, and others as significant obstacles to achieving goals. In a chapter devoted to “Magazine Freelancers,” Janine Coveney recalls her tenure at Billboard magazine.

“Even though I was the ‘Black Music’ columnist,” she writes, “if an African American artist ‘crossed over’ to the pop side enough to warrant front-page coverage I was deemed unqualified to write the story.” In another chapter, Kelley describes how a piece of his about a burgeoning Black jazz scene in Brooklyn was killed at The New York Times. The editor, he recalls, “said something like, ‘Who is going to believe Black people are so into jazz?’” (That essay, originally published in the newsletter of the Institute for Studies in American Music, is included in my book.)

In the year since my book’s publication, four fascinating volumes have arrived that enlighten us about the contributions of Black musicians and composers to a wide range of musical spheres. These books correct misperceptions, fill gaps in existing histories, and argue for new ways of thinking about Black music and new perpsectives about music in general suggested, or demanded, by the legacies of Black composers, musicians, and 33

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writers. The twenty-three essays compiled

by Laurie Matheson for the two-volume Music in Black American Life examine the wide range of the stylistic expressions present in Black music-making over the course of nearly 400 years—including folk, Spirituals, classical, blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm & blues, and hip-hop. These anthologies, part of the Music in American Life series, include pieces that originally appeared in Black Music Research Journal, published by the Center for Black Music Research that Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. established in 1983 at Columbia College Chicago. Floyd’s own essay, “Toward a Philosophy of Black Musical Scholarship” (first published in 1982) lays out a succinct goal: “Our purpose is not to pursue an ‘us too; or ‘we were first’, or ‘ours is better’ approach to documentation, but to place Black music events in their proper musical and historical perspective.” Or, as Sandra Jean Graham puts it in her introduction to the first volume, to recognize “the centrality of Black American music to (American) music history.”

Floyd offers two definitions of Black music: “1) Afro-American music is characterized by cadences, patterns, timbres, nuances, reflections, and devices peculiar to music originated by Black people in the United States;” and “2) Black American music is that which expresses essentials of the Afro-American experience in the United States.” Arguing against, say, the scholarship and criticism that has trivialized the significance of Black communities of origin for jazz—that see the style as free of any essential association to race—he writes: “The primary threats to the Black American musical heritage are those of exclusion, redefinition, and miseducation,” he writes. “These result in serious misperceptions.”

This first volume moves from 1600 to 1945, addressing a progression of 34

“The primary threats to the Black American musical heritage are those of exclusion, redefinition, and miseducation.

These result in serious misperceptions.” musical development and a wide range of expression. Katrina Dyonne Thompson’s essay “Backstage” discusses many facets and functions of Black music and dance throughout the period of bondage. She describes, for instance, how corn-shucking songs of enslaved Africans in South Carolina could “be heard for miles,” and “may have served as a public announcement to invite Blacks from neighboring plantations to the festival, and also provided a rhythmic cadence to increase productivity in the fields.” Sandra Jean Graham’s riveting account of the evolution of “jubilee singers” contrasts innovators—primarily the standardbearing Fisk Jubilee Singers and The Hampton Singers, both of which arose from what are now known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (H.B.C.U.s)— with their various imitators. Harriet Ottenheimer’s “The Blues Tradition in St. Louis” details untold, undervalued, or overlooked elements and individuals, providing context to that city’s importance on the Black music map. R. Reid Badger’s “James Reese Europe and the Prehistory of Jazz,” published in 1989, is a prescient piece of writing about a figure later championed by pianists Randy Weston and, more recently, Jason Moran.

The second volume of Music in Black American Life, on the period from 19452020, delivers two potent essays on gender politics at the intersection of race, including Sherrie Tucker’s valuable contrasting of two all-Black, all-female jazz ensembles of the late 1930s and ‘40s—

the renowned International Sweethearts of Rhythm (who were “elegantly comported”) and, lesser-known, The Darlings of Rhythm (more “ragged” in stage presence, but hailed as the more solidly swinging unit). In one chapter, “Black Women Working Together,” scholar Tammy L. Kernodle recounts the relationship between two essential jazz figures: the pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams and the trombonist and arranger Melba Liston. Kernodle’s portrait of Liston’s impact is especially valuable.

She details the cynicism and downright hostility Liston encountered while in the trombone section of Dizzy Gillespie’s band during an Eisenhower-era State Department tour. Some band members saw a woman stealing a job from a more “qualified” male counterpart, but Gillespie “understood that her innovative musical voice as an arranger would be the factor that would legitimize her presence,” according to Kernodle. “Rather than suppress her femininity, apologize for her presence, or try to prove her musical prowess as a soloist,” she writes, “Liston allowed her skills as an arranger to argue her position.”

A

nother essay collection, Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today (Wolke Verlag)— published in English and German, on alternating pages—considers the Black presence in contemporary classical music.

The volume was edited by saxophonist and scholar Harald Kisiedu and his

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Columbia University colleague George E. Lewis, a trombonist, composer, and scholar whose book, A Power Stronger Than Itself, tells a definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (A.A.C.M.). Here, the focus is the past half-century or so.

“While recognizing the progress of scholarly work on both Black popular music and jazz,” the editors write, “this book is about slowly closing the gap in similar treatments and examinations of Afrodiasporic classical and experimental composers active since 1950.”

These essays consider Black composers from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the U.S. “to present a new identity for contemporary music,” Lewis writes, “not as a globalized, pan-European, White sonic diaspora, but as a creolized, cosmopolitan, mosaic cultural practice that embraces a panoply of historical, geographical and cultural cross-connections whose ultimate

Ain’t But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story Willard Jenkins, editor DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

outcome is not just diversity but also a new complexity that promises far greater depth.” The long list of Black composers considered here include some who are the objects of current fascination, such as Tania León, Anthony Davis, and Julius Eastman, as well as others who deserve more attention, including Talib Rasul Hakim, Andile Khumalo, Charles Uzor, Elaine Mitchener, and Julia Elizabeth Neal.

Jonathan Leal’s book Dreams in Double Time is animated by a central and specific question: “How is it that the dreams encoded in bebop, specific to African American experiences, came to transform the lives of differently racialized listeners as they dealt daily with the violences of state and national power?” Leal, a native of the South Texas borderlands who selfidentifies as Chicano, focuses on three seemingly disparate figures: James Araki, an alto saxophonist and trumpeter born to Japanese parents in Hawaii, who

Music in Black American Life, 1600-1945 Music in Black American Life, 1945-2020 COMPILED BY Laurie Matheson UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

experienced the atrocity of an internment camp during W.W.II; Raúl R. Salinas, a Mexican American and Chicano poet and jazz critic best known for his poetry while incarcerated and his role in the prisoner-rights movement; and Harold Wing, an Afro-Chinese drummer who played with, among other jazz musicians, pianist Erroll Garner. For Leal, the common thread uniting these diverse lives is how the course of each was altered by the influence of bebop, a music that originated in Harlem, as played by Black musicians.

Through these stories, the author expands our narrative of bebop, documenting how “the Black-centered musical revolution of bebop proposed new ways of being in the world.”

Willard Jenkins—recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts 2024 A.B. Spellman Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy—has been a writer, broadcaster, educator, historian, artistic director, and arts consultant since the 1970s.

He blogs at www.openskyjazz.com.

Composing While Black: Afrodiasporic New Music Today EDITED BY Harald Kisiedu and George E. Lewis

Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop

BY Jonathan Leal DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

WOLKE VERLAG

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Photo: TK

these and related questions.

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E XC E L L E N C E

IN IT TO

WIN IT

What do chamber music competitions tell us?

B Y Brian Wise

Pianist Van Cliburn in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory during the Tchaikovsky International Music Competition in 1958.

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“A career is generally not made by one event. A career is a series of many, many successes, hopefully in short succession.”

Photos: Courtesy of the Cliburn (Van Cliburn); courtesy of Glen Kwok (medals); courtesy of the Queen Elisabeth Competition (Laredo)

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t the final round of Concert Artists Guild’s 2023 Elmaleh Competition in May, a harmonica and guitar duo followed their performance by telling an onstage interviewer about their lives as parents of a rambunctious toddler. A harpist gave a shout-out to his dog. A string quartet discussed horoscope signs and favorite take-out meals.

As an eleven-member jury looked on from the balcony at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, competition organizers sought to humanize a practice in music that has often been criticized for its aura of blood-sport entertainment. Bartók famously said that competitions are for horses, not artists, and he may have been on to something: Can a string quartet performance be evaluated like a track and field event? And what is the goal when we try?

At a time when there are fewer plum quotes from newspaper reviews to spice up ensemble biographies, competition wins remain dependable résumé credits. The numbers point to the increasing popularity of such events. The World Federation of International Music Competitions lists 120 members on its website, up from 83 in 1990 and 54 in 1980. Twenty of the current members are dedicated to string quartets, piano trios, or general chamber music.

This proliferation of competitions has been driven in part by a sense that they can give emerging ensembles the powerful boost up the career ladder they need. Yet other motives can be ascribed as well, whether to honor a famous namesake or to help elevate a host country’s profile on the global stage. One of the first international contests, the Anton Rubinstein Competition, held in 1890, started partly as an effort to tout Russia’s musical prowess in European circles. In the last decade, China has similarly sought recognition with events such as the Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violin Competition and the China International Music Competition.

Despite perennial debate—there have been criticisms of both the idea of music competitions and their execution— recent history shows that a succession of wins can generate significant career momentum. In 2015, Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen went from relative obscurity to Europe’s top opera houses after clinching a series of notable singing prizes, including Operalia and the Queen Sonja Singing Competition.

Similarly, South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim built on a threeyear stretch of competition medals, culminating in a gold at the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, to attain a touring schedule studded with major-orchestra debuts.

Yet gone are the single career-making events of the Cold War era. After Van Cliburn won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, he returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York City and a cover of Time magazine proclaiming him “The Texan Who Conquered Russia.”

When, in 1959, Jamie Laredo was awarded first prize in the Queen Elisabeth Competition (founded in honor of Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth) it put the Bolivian teenager on a fast track that included an RCA contract and a Carnegie Hall recital debut months later. “Although it opened up everything for me, my feeling is that nowadays there are just too many competitions,” Laredo says. “One is absolutely overwhelmed. So, I think they’ve lost a little bit of their meaning.”

Violinist Jamie Laredo, first prize winner of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, in 1959

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Chamber music contests occupy a smaller, and younger, subset of this busy landscape. Most were established in the last half-century, including the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, which marked its 50th anniversary in May; the Banff International String Quartet Competition, first held in 1983; Italy’s Premio Paolo Borciani string quartet competition, founded in 1987; and London’s Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, whose roots date to 1979.

Does Consensus Measure Excellence?

Amid this growth have come complaints that competitions favor clinically precise virtuosity at the expense of individuality and risk-taking. “The group that wins, in a way, plays it safe because they appeal to the middle line of the jury. They don’t offend anyone,” says Marya Martin, the flutist and artistic director of the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival. “If you feel you want to be extremely creative and on the edge, the time of a competition may not be the exact time to do it.

I do think you have to be at least cognizant of the fact that there are eight or ten jury members.”

But Norman Fischer, the director of chamber music at Rice University, believes that individuality can still flourish in these conditions. “When you’re in a competition the idea is: ‘I need to make sure that if I have a 104 degree fever and I haven’t slept at all for a couple days, it’s going to sound just as good as if I’m fully rested,’” he says. And with chamber music ensembles, each member has to be operating at that precisionist level. “But there’s no way that you can’t see the individuality of the constituent players as well. So, for example, there may be a string quartet that has a very showman-like first violinist. Or there may be a refreshing, energetic interchange between all four of the members.

I’m going to be looking for groups that I really respond to and that I really want to love.”

At times, jurors will settle disagreements by focusing on objective criteria such as intonation or rhythmic accuracy, says David Geber, director of chamber music at the Manhattan School of Music. “Sometimes it’s a matter of, ‘This group may have been more imaginative, but this note was out of tune, so we’ll go with those who took the safer route,’” he notes. “And often, a jury will really disagree with itself. I love being on a panel when there’s unanimity, or close to it, because then you really know that, in everyone’s heart, that you’ve made the right decision.”

Nicholas Cords, the violist of the string quartet Brooklyn 42

Bartók famously said that competitions are for horses, not artists, and he may have been on to something: Can a string quartet performance be evaluated like a track and field event? And what is the goal when we try?

Rider, recalls judging the A.R.D. International Music Competition in Munich and hearing a violist play in an opulent, 19thcentury manner. “All of us on the jury were really fascinated by her playing,” he said. “In the end, it didn’t hold up, but I was heartened to see that a really individualistic interpretation could do so well. To me, it comes down to authenticity in the approach. If a group is trying to be provocative in an interpretation, but it’s not coming from that authentic place, that’s pretty easy to sniff out.”

Formed in 2003, Brooklyn Rider is a rare example of a quartet career built entirely outside the competition circuit.

“I don’t think it was an idea that was under really serious consideration,” Cords says about competing. The members were slightly older at the time and committed to a do-ityourself aesthetic centered on electro-acoustic jam sessions, Armenian folk song arrangements, and collaborations with players of the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, and kamancheh, a bowed string instrument of Persian origin. Even when playing standard repertoire, he says, the interpretive aim was to strip away layers of interpretive tradition—the very traditions that typically orient a group before a jury.

Still, riskier ensembles can establish pathways to success through competitions. Eighth Blackbird claimed victories at the Fischoff, Concert Artists Guild, and Naumburg chamber music competitions in the late 1990s with a stage presence that suggested an arty rock band. “We were trying to coexist in a world with string quartets and piano trios, so it meant a lot to us,” says Matt Albert, a former violinist in the sextet who now chairs the chamber music department at the University of Michigan. “When we placed first at Fischoff in ’96, that was the thing that spurred us to say, ‘Okay, let’s make this a priority for the next two years. We can actually stay together and do this.’ Without that, we would have all graduated from Oberlin and never played together again.”

Similarly offbeat was Russian Renaissance, a young balalaika quartet from Moscow, which in 2018 won the short-lived M-Prize

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ArcoStrum performs at Concert Artists Guild’s 2023 Elmaleh Competition, held at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, NY.

Chamber Music Competition at the University of Michigan, edging out several string quartets and taking home $100,000.

The group’s bracing takes on jazz, classical, and tango pieces rose above the pack. “There was something about Russian Renaissance that just delighted you out of your mind,” said Fischer, who sat on the jury. “We said, ‘That has to be our grand prize winner.’” (After signing to American management and appearing on many university series, the group reformed during the pandemic as SirinCry, and has yet to return to the U.S.) Sometimes the audience prizes at competitions are the most compelling gauges of excellence, unburdened as they are by jury consensus-building. “It’s really interesting to see the kinds of things the average public picks up in a performance,” notes Fischer. At the Concert Artists Guild competition in May, the audience prize went not to a string quartet or violin soloist (despite worthy examples of each) but to the ArcoStrum, a violin-guitar duo whose members doubled on traditional Chinese instruments.

The competition field has been dogged over the years by ethics concerns and the lack of transparent voting standards.

Prominent competitions such as Banff have taken various steps to forbid jury members from voting for their own students— typically the most glaring concern when it comes to fairness and transparency. But doubts linger: there can be murky balloting procedures, jurors who tactically vote for each other’s students, and questions about the definition of a teacher-student relationship. (Does a single master class count? A few lessons at a summer festival?) The emergence of video streaming and even the publishing of jury results has supplied some measure of openness, though the field lacks a single industry watchdog.

And perhaps no system can produce a pure, unaffected result.

“Most of these competitions that have been going on for a while have a track record,” says Rice University’s Fischer.

“But the choosing of a jury is a big deal. You are choosing people not just because they happen to be first violinist of a famous quartet, but because you know the person, their standards, and their tastes.”

Can competitions produce stars?

Violinist Arnold Steinhardt is among those who built their careers in competitions; he won a bronze medal at the 1963 Queen Elisabeth Competition. While he hoped it would be the “second-stage rocket” that would thrust him into a solo career, instead it led him in a more unexpected direction, toward co-founding the Guarneri String Quartet. In recent years he has seemed to sour on the hype machinery around contest winners.

“A prize means recognition and publicity,” he wrote in his 2006 memoir, Violin Dreams. “Yet competition winners are seldom assured a glittering concert career as a victory trophy. Indeed, some have accepted their prize and disappeared into oblivion.

For most, competitions serve as one in a series of vaguely defined steps that might lead to concerts, a manager, and a name.”

Steinhardt’s varied career in chamber music and academia resonates with Chris Williams, the former executive vice president of Concert Artists Guild (C.A.G.) and now president and C.E.O. of the American Pianists Association. “This is show business,” he says, “and not everyone gets to be a star. Not everybody has a major solo touring career, but they are quite successful in the background in ways that people may not totally understand.

Maybe they have a fabulous teaching job and they’re getting to do all sorts of performing around that institution. Unfortunately, the standard optic is: ‘I don’t see you playing with every major orchestra. You didn’t really make it.’ I hope that changes over time.”

In part because C.A.G. effectively doubles as a management and publicity agency for its winners, it has adjusted its guidelines with an eye towards the presenting landscape. Instead of a blind audio pre-selection round, applicants must submit a video, a written statement about their programming philosophy, and if possible, a piece unique to their culture or heritage. “The kind of artist that we are looking for at C.A.G. is someone who is curious about how to make a difference in the world with their music,” says Williams, “and who we think we’ll grow over time on the roster.”

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The Rolston String Quartet at the Banff International String Quartet Competition, where they took home first prize in 2016.

Chris Williams

The C.A.G. roster reveals a greater racial and ethnic diversity than even five years ago, a product of some of these efforts. Other competitions have taken some (often modest) steps to promote inclusivity through their application process. The Fischoff competition requires “at least one complete work” by a female, Black, or Latinx composer, and has added a Lift Every Voice Prize to highlight the best performance of a work by a historically 44

under-represented composer. Elsewhere, requirements appear less specific. The Annual Competition for Emerging Professional Ensembles in Yellow Springs calls for a 30-minute audition video “demonstrating the breadth of your ensemble’s repertoire.”

A similar audition requirement, albeit via audio, holds for the Chesapeake International Chamber Music Competition. The application repertoire for the Banff competition is squarely focused on standard literature from the 18th through 20th centuries, though director Barry Shiffman says that later rounds allow for diverse choices by the contestants. “Of their own volition, many of those choices were more representative than we’ve seen in the past,” he says, “and a lot more new music and music of all different ethnicities and races appeared, which was wonderful.” Shiffman adds that he sees more diversity among the competitors themselves, which he credits to efforts by groups such as the Sphinx Organization.

As career builders, competitions have limits. Shiffman says that Banff structures its prize packages to provide a long-term push, extending beyond the usual cash awards, engagements, and recordings to include a long-term management deal and a two-year paid residency at Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts. The latter component can prepare quartets for teaching and academic residencies. Still, Shiffman

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urges caution. “Yes, if you win Banff, you win a three-year, halfmillion-dollar investment in your career,” he says. “That’s really significant. But a career is generally not made by one event. A career is a series of many, many successes, hopefully in short succession.” He points to his own term as second violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet: In 1992, the quartet won both first prize in the Banff competition and was a winner of the Young Concert Artists auditions.

Sometimes, competitions don’t provide the key to lasting success. Consider the Rolston String Quartet, which won first prize at the 2016 Banff competition. Despite this and other accolades — including the grand prize at the Chamber Music Yellow Springs competition and the Cleveland Quartet Award from Chamber Music America—the group disbanded last year amid a variety of career pressures, worsened by the pandemic. “The quartet is super rewarding, but as the time goes on, the priorities change and money is the thing you can’t live without,” said Luri Lee, who played first violin in the Rolston. “That’s one of the biggest reasons why people go in and out of chamber music.” Lee, now a member of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, adds that the Banff win yielded many initial concerts, but the quartet was unable to parlay those into enough re-engagements and a long-term business model. “In the end, audiences and presenters should like you, and that’s how you build a career.”

Photos: Donald Lee (Rolston String Quartet); Pete Checchia (Laredo)

Do presenters pay attention to competitions?

necessarily have a lot to compare a group to, they put their trust in some of the bigger competition names,” she says.

Some Banff winners are initially booked in North America through what Shiffman calls “agreements in principle,” meaning that a presenter may decline to engage the winner if they choose (an option that has not been exercised). In other cases, winners are guaranteed a spot on a series; some North American and European presenters pre-commit solely based on the Banff brand.

Occasionally, a series might take a second- or third-prize winner instead. “We kind of look at the touring as a partnership with all of those presenting organizations,” Shiffman says. “This needs to work for them and this needs to work for us.”

Whether competition winners align with the expectations of presenters is another matter. While some young ensembles are keen to offer programs featuring under-represented composers or theatrical elements, they must also consider the tastes of more conservative communities. “When we’re approaching presenters with our programming, we do so in a way that isn’t going to slap people in the face with something they’re not prepared to hear,” says Devin Moore, the violist of the Isidore String Quartet.

Fischer encourages his own students to compete, if only to see how they stack up. “Groups really want to find out if they

Jamie Laredo conducting the New York String Orchestra Seminar in 2016

The extent to which presenters book their series based on competition wins varies. Some, including Martin of the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, wait to see how a prize-winning ensemble develops before engaging them for a concert. “If you want to be the Jerusalem [Quartet] or the Danish String Quartet, you have to be working together for years and years to develop that really cohesive sound,” she said. “I certainly follow all the young string quartets after they win, but I also like to give them a little bit more time. They need that to become more cohesive as one player rather than four.”

Cellist Sharon Robinson, who together with her husband Jamie Laredo, is co-artistic director of the Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle and Cincinnati’s Linton Chamber Music Series, takes a more strike-while-the-iron-is-hot philosophy. The couple recently hired the Isidore String Quartet after the ensemble took first prize at Banff in 2022. The ensemble’s competition credits were touted in the Hudson Valley organization’s website and marketing copy.

“If an audience member is new to chamber music and they don’t 45

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are international quality,” he says. “One of the only ways they can do that is to put themselves into the competition to see where they are and what they’re made of.” Sometimes an ensemble runs its course on the competition circuit and disbands soon after. Other times, prizes offer the necessary motivation to soldier on. “The performance opportunities that one gets from a competition are enough of a launching pad that the ensembles could begin to try to make an artistic life. They engage with audiences, presenters, and their market to see what can happen in the beginning of a lifelong career.”

At the Concert Artists Guild competition in May, the Toronto-based Dior Quartet was one group seeking to prove its mettle before a jury that included prominent administrators (representing Carnegie Hall, Washington Performing Arts, and other organizations) and a notably diverse cadre of musicians, including conductor Kazem Abdullah, pianist Conrad Tao, and violinist Anne Akiko Meyers. The quartet’s members, sporting smart, color-coordinated chinos, spent much of their set gesturing, bounding, and leaping across the National Sawdust stage as demanded by Dinuk Wijeratne’s Disappearance of Lisa Gherardini, a semi-theatrical work about a theft of the Mona Lisa.

“When we placed first at Fischoff in ’96, that was the thing that spurred us to say, ‘Okay, let’s make this a priority for the next two years. We can actually stay together and do this.’ Without that, we would have all graduated from Oberlin and never played together again.”

“We wanted to be outrageous,” said violinist Noa Sarid in an onstage interview. Whether or not their self-proclaimed outrageousness (or at least, theatricality) will speak to every presenter, the group’s imaginative presentation showed that there is, these days, room to experiment in the finals of an international competition.

Brian Wise is the radio producer for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and is editor of the Curtis Institute of Music’s Overtones magazine.

Photo: Margarita Corporan

The Dior Quartet perform at the 2023 Elmaleh Competition.

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BRIEFLY GLIMPSING EXCELLENCE, ALONG THE WAY Photo: Ogata

B Y Ambrose Akinmusire

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An integrity of sound. You’re somehow projecting what you stand for in the sounds you make.

y grandmother went to church a lot. I got into music through her church. During services at First Truth Missionary Baptist Church, in Oakland, Ca., I would run up and bang on the piano because I wanted to be a part of it all.

I can remember that feeling of being moved, of wanting to contribute. So my earliest association with music was something spiritual, something beyond this realm. In a way, that was also my first experience with a variety of excellence. There was something about having this choir of untrained singers who individually didn’t sound very great, but when you put them together a magical thing happened.

I always wanted to figure out why that was. At three or four years old, I recognized that.

I continued to be taken aback by how music moved people, by its ability to bypass everything. To bypass who we think we are or what we’re willing to do or how we think we’re doing.

I recognized that not only in church but also when I saw my first jazz concert and, even before that, in hip-hop.

The music I heard in the eighties and the nineties sounded like my community. Too Short. Digital Underground. They sounded like every step I took in Oakland. It was almost as if this shouldn’t even have been called music. It was all the characters in Oakland—the smell, the taste, the joy, the heartbreak, the darkness of Oakland. The weather. A strangely excellent version of home. And then when I heard Art Blakey’s Moanin’, I was back in the church I grew up in. But instead of just piano, organ, drums, and voice, all in service to a text, here it was being played on more instruments. And the horns were the text. By then, I was already playing trumpet, but I wasn’t yet playing jazz.

By my teens, when I was playing jazz, I got to play with drummer Billy Higgins quite a bit. Billy had mastered his instrument on both a spiritual and technical level. In that context, my experience of excellence related to integrity. An integrity of sound. You’re somehow projecting what you stand for in the sounds you make.

In the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, I started playing with alto saxophonist Steve Coleman. We went on the road for six weeks.

That was the first time I was onstage with somebody who had something they were really after. It was: I have set goals for every aspect of this, and I’m trying to reach that day and night.

That inspired me then, and still inspires me. We were on a long train ride to Germany once. It was quiet for about an hour. All of a sudden, Steve picks his head up, looks at me, and asks, “What’s your concept?” I’m 19 years old. I say, “I don’t know. I got time, man. I’m just playing. I haven’t really thought about it.” And he said, “You know what’s interesting? I asked someone that exact same question at the exact same age you are, 20 years ago, and that’s what they said, too. Today, they sound exactly the same as they did then.” And that changed my life. I realized that I don’t need to arrive at something, but I definitely need to be thinking about this. Excellence is a search.

I was lucky enough to have been brought into this music by old-school musicians from the Bay Area who weren’t famous at all, who were playing music because it kept them alive. It was all about expression and being part of this lineage. Even when I met trumpeters like Roy Hargrove and Nicholas Payton and Wynton Marsalis, I was attracted to the soulfulness, the truth, in their playing more than their technique. When I went to college, that was the first time there was talk about technical excellence, these things that you can measure and you can sort of quantize.

Before that, music and art was just about how well something was expressed but also how close to the source—this thing that’s higher than us—you could be, and how down in the flow of the music you could be.

At Manhattan School of Music, I began studying with trumpeter Laurie Frink. At my first lesson, I began improvising.

A couple of minutes in, she said, “OK, stop. You really don’t know how to play the instrument, do you?” My other teachers had told me, “I can’t teach you anything.” But Laurie gave me seeds 49

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for what is now a jungle. She started me on specifically focused rituals: long tones (sound); how long can you play the long tones? (endurance); movement from one passage to another (flexibility); manipulation and articulation of the notes within each passage (dexterity). Laurie set me on the path of doing these things, pursuing excellence in these terms, for at least an hour each day, for twenty-two years now.

When I think about the 2007 Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Trumpet Competition, where I was awarded first prize, I remember that one of my main goals wasn’t about me. It was about having an experience with the musicians I was playing with—creating something bigger than that moment, which is the way I approach music in general. There was this one section in “Ruby,” a piece I had written for my grandmother. At the end, there’s a vamp I wrote for drummer Carl Allen; I told him, “In this section, you and I will have a conversation about what grandmothers mean to us.” I wasn’t thinking about winning in that moment. I was thinking about creating this space to honor my grandmother, Lillian Ruby Campbell, who had recently passed away, and giving Carl a similar space. We didn’t talk about his grandmother, his relationship. It was just me, expressing my belief in the integrity of this music and in his integrity. It was me, knowing that everybody else might be thinking about technical things, but I’m thinking: I’m just going to make beautiful music because I believe in this so much. Several people came up to me and talked to me about that particular moment afterward, not even knowing what it was about.

Right after that, I entered the Monk Institute’s graduate program, then at U.S.C. in Los Angeles, led by Terence Blanchard.

I knew Terence had his own ideas about excellence, and that some of them came from New Orleans teachers that I know well, like Roger Dickerson, and from Blakey, whose Jazz Messengers band Terence was once in. We also had visiting artists. One of them would think I was the most amazing player ever, and then the next week another would think I couldn’t play a single note right. Each had their own take on how to become excellent. Trombonist Hal Crook was all about pushing harder. You’ve got to really hit it, you’re not giving enough.

Excellence for him was how hard you were reaching, every moment being the most critical one. Then Ron Carter came in and, man, if I missed one note he would look at me. His thing was to find and hold excellence in every note.

For most of my career, I felt like I was witnessing and facilitating excellence as a bandleader more than being part of it myself. Only in the last several years has that feeling changed.

I think that change began when my quartet played the Village Vanguard in 2017, which led to a double album. Listening back 50

There was something about having this choir of untrained singers who individually didn’t sound very great, but when you put them together a magical thing happened.

to those twelve sets we played at the Vanguard, where there’s not much reverb, where the sound’s not coming back at you, where you have to really play, I heard excellence beginning to take shape, and I was right there in the middle of it.

Taking on my new role as artistic director at the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, the present incarnation of the former Monk Institute, I started thinking about what my definition of excellence would be in this context, and this has lent some clarity: Excellence is defining your own terms of success and living by those while simultaneously allowing them to grow and change. I would love to challenge each musician to define their terms of success, beyond having an amazing recording contract and beyond playing with whoever it is they want play with.

When I first met Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter through the institute, I asked them for advice about how to become a great composer. And they each told me the same thing: Figure out how to be a great human being. I know how corny that can sound, but I think that’s really it. You have to be at a certain level and pursue deep knowledge to get there. You have to, like Steve Coleman said, have a concept. Keep your bar high, yes; that’s where shedding comes in. That’s where sounding as good as you can comes in. But do it as a way to give something to the art form, and to the communities around that art form.

The people that worked with me as I developed challenged me to think about my goals as a human being, beyond music, and they forced me to figure out how I could use music to achieve those things and how those things could help the communities that I’ve chosen to participate in. And once you’ve reached that point, if you reach that point, I think you can pursue an even higher level of excellence—the pursuit of freedom, in which freedom means the inclusion of all things.

Trumpeter and composer Ambrose Akinmusire is artistic director of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz. His latest release, a solo trumpet performance, is Beauty is Enough.

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Friday, November 3 at 8 PM

Kronos Quartet: Five Decades A 50th Anniversary Celebration

with Laurie Anderson Jake Blount | Brian Carpenter Tanya Tagaq | Wu Man Aizuri Quartet | Attacca Quartet Bang on a Can All-Stars Sō Percussion Additional artists to be announced

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This special concert includes a short film by documentarian Sam Green; the New York premieres of Carnegie Hall co-commissioned works by Michael Gordon and Gabriella Smith; and an extraordinary new “Sunrise Jam” version of Terry Riley’s Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector for 50 musicians.

Tickets start at $32.

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Artists, programs, dates, and ticket prices subject to change.

Each ticket is subject to a $9 convenience fee. Tickets $25 and under are subject to a $3 convenience fee. © 2023 Carnegie Hall.

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STANDARDS AND

INEFFABLE QUALITIES How do notions of excellence figure into writing and thinking about music?

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Photos: Josh Goldstine (Ross); Moyo Oyelola (Moore); Chevas Rolfe (Schweitzer); Nora Nicolini (Edwards)

There’s almost a curse of E XC E L L E N C E , as conventionally understood.

We gathered, via Zoom, bridging two coasts—as well as the styles and subgenres that make up chamber, classical, jazz, and creative music—for a wide-ranging conversation sparked by a single word. —Larry Blumenfeld PA RT I CI PA N T S:

Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker since 1996, is the author of the books The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Listen to This, and Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. In 2008, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.

Marcus J. Moore is a Brooklyn-based music journalist covering jazz, soul, and hip-hop at The New York Times and Tidal, among other outlets. He is author of The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America.

Vivien Schweitzer is a pianist and culture journalist who contributes to publications including The Economist, The New York Times, and The American Scholar. Her book, A Mad Love: An Introduction to Opera, was named one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books We Read in 2021.”

Brent Hayes Edwards teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. His most recent book is Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music, the co-written autobiography of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and musician Henry Threadgill.

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Black music

Blumenfeld: When you each started down the path of your work, what were your notions of “excellence” as related to your fields, and how did they figure into what you were trying to do?

Moore: I started covering music about fifteen years ago. I always tried not to approach criticism just from the perspective of things that I like—this album is great because I said so. I never want to be that person, that critic. You’re not going to fall in love with every album that comes across your desk. But I do my best to try to understand where these artists are coming from, from a musical perspective, and try not to imprint my own ideas of excellence on what somebody is doing. And I try not to compare this person to that person. I also understand that a certain point, you have to evaluate: This is what this music is saying, and here’s what I take from it.

Schweitzer: I think of excellence in two ways. There’s the idea: What is the group actually performing? What is their repertoire? And then there is the performance itself. When I was doing a lot of reviewing for The New York Times, sometimes the paper would send me out to three, four, five concerts a week.

Sometimes I was exhausted, or it was a rainy day and I didn’t necessarily want to leave the house. Am I really glad that I’m here, at this concert? Am I feeling awake and invigorated? Has this performance moved me? In terms of reviewing, that’s one measure of excellence. The idea of the concert is a whole other consideration. What are these performers trying to say? What is their mission with this concert? Is it an excellent young chamber group playing Beethoven, and simply doing it very well? Or is this a new commission trying to do something unusual?

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Edwards: What I say comes from the perspective of a scholar and a university professor, where I think the parameters and the politics of excellence get played out in a somewhat different way than for a critic or journalist. When I started to move in the direction of jazz studies, I began to think of the question of excellence as intimately connected to the question of the interdisciplinary. I got my Ph.D. in comparative literature. I’m primarily a professor of literature, but there was a Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University that was founded by Robert O’Meally, my dissertation director, when I was in graduate school.

As a graduate student, I got involved in an interdisciplinary conversation involving journalists, scholars, musicians, creative writers, dancers, and others at Columbia. That propelled me into a conversation where the question of excellence was not defined just in relation to one discipline, but in relation to the ways disciplines cross or talk to each other.

From the beginning, I felt an interesting, productive tension between standards of excellence in my primary discipline—what one does as a literary scholar—and what one does in an interdisciplinary realm: thinking about history, thinking about music, thinking about politics, and confronting the fact that for practitioners in artistic fields, excellence might mean something somewhat different than it would mean for me as a literary scholar. I can’t uncouple the question of excellence from that question of interdisciplinarity, and thinking about excellence as it resonates differently across different fields.

Ross: I started out as a critic with my primary purpose, my first order of business, being contemporary music. In many ways, so it remains. From that standpoint,

the idea of excellence was unfamiliar in the sense that my first reaction to a new work was not along the lines of: Is this excellently done? Thinking back to the music that excited me when I started out—figures as various as György Ligeti and Alfred Schnittke and Cecil Taylor, among others—there was an element in all that music that was pushing against conventional ideas of excellence and any sort of orderly, polished musical discourse.

There was an element of chaos and uproar, which appealed to me very much, and still appeals to me.

Also, honestly, thinking back to my early reviews, when it came to writing about the older repertory, the classical music repertory, I was probably too hung up on certain ideas of excellence, of perfect execution. I think this was a result of having grown up listening to music on recordings as much as in performance.

The whole process of my education as a critic has been about being more sympathetic to the complexities of performance, and accommodating different approaches, sometimes looser approaches, to the execution of the score.

I think this has been a trend in classical music in recent decades—to look beyond a strict interpretation of the score.

So, I think I have a certain kind of tense relationship with the idea of excellence in musical performance, and it has been evolving.

Schweitzer: From the classical viewpoint— and, happily, this is changing a little bit—excellence has always had to do with being note-perfect. You couldn’t really be an excellent musician or give an excellent performance unless it was absolutely flawless. Especially given the level of virtuosity now, that’s become almost ubiquitous. Any young musician making a debut is probably going be

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has been not just denigrated and dismissed, but actively separated from certain standards of E XC E L L E N C E .

absolutely note-perfect in a way that their predecessors weren’t. I think this fact set a kind of unfortunate precedent for excellence—for it just to mean this notion of perfection, though that same performance might not be excellent at all in terms of phrasing something in order to communicate something, or having qualities that distinguish it from every other performance. I’ve gone to many concerts that on some level were excellent, as in they were note perfect and very professional. There was nothing I could particularly complain about, but I was bored and unmoved. Is that still an excellent concert? Is it an excellent concert that happened not to move me?

Or maybe it’s not an excellent concert because it was perfect, but I was not remotely involved in it.

Ross: I absolutely agree. These are the issues that classical music has been confronting for a couple of generations.

There’s almost a curse of excellence, as conventionally understood. It’s just a given that musicians coming out the conservatories are going to be able to play extraordinarily well. The question becomes: How does one distinguish oneself? It no longer suffices to play all the notes. I think there are alternative understandings of excellence that may have to do with a greater emotional investment. It requires a bit of a suspension of that note-perfect mentality—to sort of readmit a little bit of the messiness of Romantic music, nevermind Early music, where actually a lot of the most creative activity is in terms of improvisation and embroidering the score and bringing the creative selfhood of the performer to the picture, as a model of where we need to go.

Moore: In jazz, I like to playfully refer to

the “jazz police”—those who feel like the music should have never evolved from what it was in the nineteen-forties or fifties or early sixties, and that represent one mainstream view of what jazz should sound like.

Personally, I like music that’s a little off-kilter, a little off the grid. Even from a hip-hop perspective, take somebody like the producer J Dilla: His music was sometimes about a sort of disconnectivity; it seemed a little woozy, for lack of a better term. Or today, a group like Irreversible Entanglements. I listen to that music, to the rage that’s within it, and I listen to the themes that Moor Mother’s spoken words address within that music. And to me, that’s a form of perfection. Vivien, like you were saying: Yeah, I’ve sat through shows at the Blue Note and thought, Oh, they can really play, but I don’t feel anything in this music.

Edwards: For those of us who are writing about African diasporic musics, we’re trying to come to terms with a set of traditions, or ensembles of traditions, that have been historically, actively, transitively denied any claim to conventionally defined standards of excellence.

Black music has been not just denigrated and dismissed, but actively separated from certain standards of excellence. At best, if it’s upheld as anything, it may be praised as popular, as natural, as a music filled with emotive content, with energy, with soul, with cool.

But the virtuosity of a Thelonious Monk is still actively unrecognized. The standards of excellence that are native to the music of this tradition are actively unrecognized. As a scholar of those traditions, part of what that reality drives me to do is to come to terms with the degree to which the musicians of these traditions have had to—and have

An individual musician redefines technique in a way that contemporaries might hear as chaos as, as ineptitude, even.

And from that emerges a new discipline.

reveled in the opportunity to—define their own standards of excellence. What does excellence mean for Monk? What does excellence mean for Cecil Taylor?

What does excellence mean for Muhal Richard Abrams? My job as a scholar is to suss that out. What I’m trying to get my students to do is to think about the musician as an arbiter of excellence— to think about what excellence means to this particular musician.

Ross: I think that’s a very important point. All of us, to one degree or another, seem to have a tension with excellence as conventionally defined. Yet I think we would all say, or I would certainly say, that some disciplined set of standards is necessary. These art forms grow within systems of excellence, definitions of technique. And then the art forms grow beyond those definitions or creatively contest existing sets of standards. Or an individual musician redefines technique in a way that contemporaries might hear as chaos as, as ineptitude, even. And from that emerges a new discipline.

I hate to drag the darksome figure of Richard Wagner into this discussion, but he did write an entire opera on this very topic. Die Meistersinger [Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The 55

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What does E XC E L L E N C E mean for Thelonious Monk? What does E XC E L L E N C E mean for Cecil Taylor?

Mastersingers of Nuremberg)] is all about the rules, and about a musician who comes in and does not obey the extant rules and nonetheless rises to the peak of the profession. It is very much an autobiographical story. There’s a wonderful line in which the rebellious young Walther asks the wise old Hans Sachs: What do I do with the rules? How do I navigate this territory? And Hans Sachs says, “You set the rule yourself, and then you follow it.” So here is this idea of creating your own discipline.

Blumenfeld: At a certain point in my work, I began using the word “musicality” rather than “excellence,” and to signify something different. Is that a better and more appropriate measure?

Schweitzer: I think so. It sounds silly to say someone plays music musically, but as we know—if a musician has a real sense of the music, it may sometimes even be very hard to know what they did differently to make us feel that way. Did they just hold that note a millisecond longer? Maybe they did something with a phrase that’s almost imperceptible. But that’s what makes you sit up and really listen to something that you may have heard a hundred times before. That player did something with it, something that may have been innate and spontaneous or possibly wasn’t even premeditated, and you felt it. I think that is, for lack of a better word, a sense of musicality.

Edwards: The first thing I’d say about a term like that is that it’s a guild rhetoric, with which practitioners are negotiating the criteria of accomplishment in their field. And there are all kinds of versions of that in all kinds of different artistic traditions, in music and beyond. In jazz, we might talk about swing, we might 56

talk about groove, or telling your story.

You know, these are terms of evaluation, but they’re vernacular in that they’re loose, and it’s an attempt to make language fit a particular set of qualities.

I feel like my job is to try to read into that—what those qualities are that the practitioners are identifying with that guild rhetoric. But it’s tricky because language can get dislodged, language can be appropriated, can be re-accentuated.

Ross: I think Brent brought up an important point about the ways in which these words can be used, and sometimes to create a kind of invisible fence to keep unwanted musicians at bay. I think of the kind of vocabulary that was directed at Asian classical musicians for a long time—that they learned all the notes, but they didn’t feel it. You still hear people saying this, unfortunately, from time to time, and in a completely racist way. There are so many powerfully communicative Asian musicians that it’s an utterly untenable statement and really always.

Yet musicality is a very important value. It does signify the difference between simply getting all the notes right and assembling them into phrases, into paragraphs, that convey an understanding of a language. It really is about comfortably inhabiting the worlds of the piece and not just kind of covering it on the superficial level. So I end up feeling ambivalent toward the use of the word musicality and yet, ultimately, for me, it is also kind of the highest compliment.

Edwards: If we were being optimistic, one salutary change we might identify on the horizon is that excellence, or a conversation around standards across musical disciplines, is being uncoupled from genre. If we’re talking about the

I end up feeling ambivalent toward the use of the word musicality and yet, ultimately, for me, it is also kind of the highest compliment.

mainstream, ever since Henry Threadgill won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, it’s been a really interesting list, right? Kendrick Lamar, Anthony Davis, Tania León, Raven Chacon, Rhiannon Giddens… What does that list signal? It signals accomplishment in a way that can’t be pigeonholed in relation to a marketing category or a protocol of reception that we put under the label “classical” anymore.

Ross: I’ve been on the Pulitzer Music jury twice, and my initial reaction to Kendrick Lamar winning, was: Well, how on earth are we ever going to be able to assemble a jury that has the literacy, the knowledge, in all of these different disciplines if indeed we are opening this prize up to absolutely everyone in every genre? That was an initial worry. But then serving in the jury the year that Raven Chacon won, that fear seemed to evaporate. And it was very much about the dynamic of this group of people, a jury with different viewpoints: How are we reacting to the group of works under examination?

I suppose we made our own rules in an ad hoc way, but also in a rigorous and earnest way. And there is something maybe liberating and hopeful about the idea that—not that we’re going to throw away any idea of what a competent

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What does E XC E L L E N C E mean for Muhal Richard Abrams?

performance sounds like, but that we will be less imprisoned by it. Not so much by genre itself, though, because genre for me means a history, an incredibly rich history, an entire body of experience that we learn from. Genre itself is not an evil word for me, but all of that internal policing and conventional wisdom and set rules that fall into place in every genre, that would be good to break free from.

Blumenfeld: Beyond simply genre considerations, must our notions of excellence change in yet more profound ways if we are to, as George E. Lewis put it, “decolonize the concert hall”?

Ross: I think it’s a commendable effort to open up, say, Lincoln Center. But then the question arises: Are we looking to Lincoln Center, to teach us about all these different genres and what we can value in each? Is Lincoln Center the best place for this to happen? My other strong feeling on this point is that, yes, classical music has profound problems with elitism and exclusion going back deep in its history. But the answer to that issue is not to phase out classical music, or reduce it to a sort of almost nominal presence. The answer is to confront it and to come up with new programs and new formats that bring those issues to the fore, and that foster new values.

Edwards: Yes, one wants to decolonize the concert hall. But I think the value of oppositionality is sometimes underestimated and that, too, is connected to excellence and musicality. I tend to think more ecologically about the scene. It’s not just about Lincoln Center or about Carnegie Hall, about the program of any particular institution. It’s about the relations among institutions. And those relations are inherently conditioned

by power networks. There’s no one institution that can speak for all practitioners to all audiences delivering all genres. So, of course, institutions take particular positions and carve out particular audiences and feature particular angles and not others. What I’m underlining is that’s it’s useful for an artist to say, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to build a different kind of space over here. That oppositionality is actually very productive, historically. And I wouldn’t want to disregard the historical function of that kind of oppositionality, in thinking about the emergence of music, especially the music that I care about most.

Moore: I’m noticing that within the context of the up-and-coming jazz musicians—say Immanuel Wilkins or Julius Rodriguez or Melanie Charles, who all create very dissimilar music on their own recordings—that their scene kind of reminds me of these old jazz records where, when you look within the liner notes, you notice that they’re all playing on each other’s albums, embodying a community. It’s the same deal with this new crop. And if they don’t get the same opportunities at these institutions that we’ve talked about, they have a rallying cry: Okay, well, we’re being denied over here, so we’re just going build our own thing over there, in a different part of town.

Ross: In classical music, we’re not addressing a deeper question, which has haunted the music for more than a hundred years, which is the shadow that the past casts in the present—the marginalization of living composers, especially those composers who are not imitating the styles of the past. There is this oppositional culture in classical music as well. Oppositional, not in a

political sense so much as a stylistic otherness, an outsider identity. The primary achievement won’t be somehow fixing what’s going on in the concert hall, but ultimately dethroning the big concert hall itself in terms of what we deem to be important and central, because those spaces have biases built into them in a purely architectural sense, as well as a cultural sense.

I think we ought to have an idea of excellence in classical music that is also about communicating with particular communities. We need to get away from a global model, where our most excellent musicians are constantly flying around from one continent to another, bestowing their greatness, and instead have a more community-minded sense of musical value. A career should really be defined in terms of, what have you done for people within your community? But we’re a very long way from that being central to the classical music discussion.

Moore: I think all areas of music will get decolonized, but—not to oversimplify—I think it just takes more people doing what they do and discovering their own excellence, or extending a tradition they admire. The advice I give to younger musicians is always the same: You just have to lean into those impulses to do whatever it is you think you should be doing. The stuff that challenges convention, if there’s enough of it coming out and enough of it is well done—that’s the music that becomes the vanguard for decolonizing these spaces.

Larry Blumenfeld is editorial director for Chamber Music America. He writes regularly about jazz, Afro-Latin, and creative music for The Wall Street Journal and other publications.

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You walk into audition after audition, and it’s, “Whose definition of E XC E L L E N C E

WHO DEFINES “EXCELLENCE,” AND

Blake-Anthony Johnson

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WHAT IS IT CODE FOR?

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Photo: Forestt Strong LaFave

do I need to meet today?” It changes with every room you walk into—undefinable, yet almost like a secret code.

Alejandra Valarino Boyer, executive director of the Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute, posed that question to begin a panel discussion at Chamber Music America’s June 2023 Chicago ChamberFest.

It was a revealing way to begin “Confronting Marginalization through the Power of the Creative Life,” a dialogue centered on building sustainable, lasting models for arts equity. Excellence, after all, is an abstract concept that often leads directly to exclusion. As the conversation wove through personal histories, action items, and resonant moments, the loaded concept of “excellence” kept peeking through.

Alejandra Valarino Boyer

Alejandra Valarino Boyer: When we’re making decisions about who gets to participate, or what gets programmed, we get to a conversation of “excellence,” especially if we talk about institutions, organizations, events that we view as high level. And we exclude a lot of artists who we may not deem “excellent” simply because we don’t understand the art that they’re making, or it’s unfamiliar or new to us. It doesn’t have to be malicious, but it falls outside our definition of “excellence.”

But why does any one person’s definition matter any more than anyone else’s? Is it code to exclude a group of artists or a type of art?

I followed up with the panelists: Boyer; violinist and educator Caitlin Edwards; Chicago Sinfonietta president & C.E.O. Blake-Anthony Johnson; and flutist and newly-minted Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras executive director Jennie Oh Brown, who served as the conversation’s moderator. We teased out yet further their notions of excellence, the ways in which the classical music sphere sometimes weaponizes it, and how we can move toward a more pluralistic idea of what is “excellent.”

(Conversations edited and condensed for clarity.)

—Emery Kerekes

Jennie Oh Brown

Caitlin Edwards: Discarding one type of music just because it doesn’t fit into your mindset of “excellence” or “tradition”—I automatically associate that with elitism.

At a rehearsal I was recently playing, we were discussing the fact that Taylor Swift was in town that weekend, and people constantly made the same joke: “Oh, Taylor Swift! Who even listens to that?”

In this classical setting, other genres are kind of treated like apples and oranges, but if we want organizations and ensembles to continue to grow with community support, you have to be inclusive. Taylor has millions of fans for a reason—and she dedicates as many, if

Caitlin Edwards

not more, hours to practicing, rehearsing with tech teams and choreographers, and writing her songs . . . as we do to our work.

Blake-Anthony Johnson: For orchestra managers, there’s this status quo. People don’t always like change, because there’s a notion that you’ll lose something in return. I always say if you don’t like change, you’ll hate extinction. So it’s kind of like a C.Y.A.—a cover your ass. You have to protect yourself and show your work: yes, we’re being inclusive, but here are all these other artistic elements we’re also providing. We’re not losing artistic integrity or “excellence.”

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E XC E L L E N C E

Boyer: I think of the debate that’s happening right now at Lincoln Center— this big lament over the idea that what was once there is not there now, and that we’ve lost something great and amazing, and the caliber has gone down as a result. Really, it’s just different forms of music, all excellent in their own right.

When you’re confusing excellence for elitism, it becomes a weapon for exclusion.

Jennie Oh Brown: What really strikes me about the word “excellence” is that it’s some sort of bar to hit. Whose bar is it? Is there really a single ideal that everybody should shoot for? It’s really very subjective, and there are so many different criteria.

Boyer: I mean, isn’t that one of the artist’s dilemmas? You walk into audition after audition, and it’s, “Whose definition of excellence do I need to meet today?” It changes with every room you walk into— undefinable, yet almost like a secret code.

In those spaces, someone is holding the definition of excellence. They may not be able to articulate it, but they’re certainly making decisions based on that vision and idea. Who moves on in the audition. Who gets programmed. You have to look around the table and ask whose vision isn’t there.

Whose definition of excellence is missing?

Brown: These badges of excellence we all pretend to wear essentially exclude so many voices from our artistic realm. In the D.E.I.A. [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility] sphere, we’ve started to look at this idea of belonging. Who are the people and the voices that belong, and the ones that don’t? Why? You think about how much richer the dialogue is when you have so many different voices and new interpretations—that should be our universal bar of excellence.

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Edwards: And people are starting to forge their own paths of excellence, too. When I was in school, I learned that there were two main careers for musicians: orchestral jobs and teaching. If you were lucky, you’d win a competition and become a soloist.

But now, there are so many fields to go into. They’re not lowering the bar of excellence. The metrics are just different.

Johnson: What metrics do performers use to define artistic excellence, anyway?

I spend a lot of my time with students who are still forming their definitions of “excellence.” It has a lot more to do with your humanity than anything that you’re doing with the instrument as a craftsman.

If I go onstage, and the only thing I’m thinking about is if I play every single note, I’ve set myself up for failure. But if I go on stage thinking about smiling at someone in the audience, connecting with the piece, making the audience’s world a little bit bigger or brighter? In that case, artistic excellence is a much more robust animal. The artist has a lot of control.

Edwards: I feel like excellence is whatever someone dedicates themselves to with intention. However they make people happy, or carry out their personal art.

But of course, we have to reconcile our personal notion of excellence with that of our environment—you can’t go into the Chicago Symphony Orchestra audition without knowing Don Juan. It’s about becoming one with whatever environment or organization you want to align yourself with, and seeing what values you all share.

Brown: Yes, and to Blake-Anthony’s point, what does it mean that we’re constantly hammering these young musicians with expectations of excellence? We don’t even know what excellence means. And so,

I spend a lot of my time with students who are still forming their definitions of “excellence.” It has a lot more to do with your humanity than anything that you’re doing with the instrument as a craftsman.

when we’re raising these young students to strive for excellence all the time, they don’t even know what it is that they’re reaching toward. Think about what responsibility we have for the duress to their emotional and mental health when we’re perpetuating what are essentially lies.

Boyer: I’m optimistic about the way we’re moving forward. I think there has been a lot of drive by artists to start to challenge these assumptions. Artists who have already achieved “excellence” are starting to bring elements of a broad range of repertoire and traditions that audiences may not know are excellent, and people are more accepting of it because of the name attached. I think about all the violinists who are tapping into Appalachian fiddling, and showing that it’s just as excellent and beautiful as the sonata they just played next to it, and understanding that those two things can live together in that hallowed, revered musical space often reserved for classical music. Music should always take us out of our everyday lives and bring us into something beyond ourselves, regardless of what that is.

Winner of the 2022 Rubin Prize in Music Criticism, Emery Kerekes has contributed to EMAg (the magazine of Early Music America), Opera News, Musical America, and Which Sinfonia, for which he is a founding editor.

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E XC E L L E N C E is an idea imposed from above, whereas the bonds of community, our attunements to what matters

WHOSE EXCELLENCE?

I

’m honored to contribute to this special issue, even though I’m not sure I’d be anyone’s first choice to weigh in on this topic. But I do teach at Harvard, a school to which, reputedly, admission is secured by demonstrating a lifetime of high achievement. Most people take this reputation as a given from the college’s 4% acceptance rate alone. Nonetheless, a self-affirming, triumphalist ethos appears continually in the institution’s official communications and internal messaging, especially the language of “excellence,” that cursed cudgel of a word. During the first full-blown pandemic year, the cringeworthy tagline was “online excellence.” I started calling it “toxic bestness”: an ideology of exceptionalism threatening to curtail growth, learning, and self-awareness.

In music-making courses, I find it helpful to begin by taking these facile notions of “excellence” off the table entirely—which is often a big leap for Harvard students. You can’t set about making anything new if you are convinced of your own greatness; it’s paralyzing. You must accept tension, vulnerability, failure, and dead ends at every stage. Also, the “excellence” paradigm tends to focus on solitary achievement, but most of music takes place

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with, for, and among others. Music education must hold space for these fundamentally relational skills—the musical capacities to support, reinforce, and hold each other together. For students used to an ultrahigh standard of individual accomplishment, I find it most effective to let them experience the gift of each other: to help them discover how collaborative music-making builds real ties among people.

Notions of excellence have come to define Western classical music, a field that is bound up with pan-European cultural nationalism. A culture of perfectionism developed through the conservatory model, which became predicated on faithful adherence to stylistic and aesthetic norms of the “common practice period,” particularly on fidelity to the score. In a professional environment where thousands of highly trained conservatory graduates aspire to a handful of open slots in orchestras or even fewer opportunities as career soloists, adjudicators and audition panels are invariably splitting hairs when deciding among equally qualified players. One criterion, surely, is expressiveness; but an easier one to measure, practically taken as a given, is flawlessness.

Photo: Stacy Kimball

B Y Vijay Iyer

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It’s no secret that Asian and Asian American players have flooded this arena, as if following a promise of acceptance in the otherwise hostile or indifferent cultures of the West. There is a body of research on classical musicians of Asian ethnicities— see, for example, Mari Yoshihara’s Musicians from a Different Shore (2007) and Grace Wang’s Soundtracks of Asian America (2015)—which reveals that irrespective of how they play, they tend to be described by (almost always white and male) critics and judges as if they were robots: technically accomplished, but viewed as inherently less expressive than white players, and even treated as if interchangeable.

For some white gatekeepers, it turns out, even excellence isn’t enough if you don’t look the part. As the composerperformer Pamela Z once said, “When people can see you, they hear something else.”

The conservatory model was replicated in “jazz performance” college programs, which have proliferated in the West in recent decades. These programs have become the primary method of transmission of what is called jazz today, by presenting a bowdlerized, institutionally sanctioned version of 20th-century Black music. The (mostly white and male) teachers and students in these programs strive to master a narrow range of artificially codified Black musical practices, largely centered around the discographies of a small handful of (overwhelmingly male) music-makers prominent in the 1950s and early 1960s. Most of these artists, if still living, have long since moved away from the music of that era. These programs’ curricula include few or no Black women composer-performers, virtually nobody associated with the Black Power movement or the various avant-gardes, and hardly any music from the last half-century that wasn’t written by a white man. Conservatories should be understood as sites of erasure as much as they are repositories of knowledge.

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Photo: Stacy Kimball

to each other, are achieved from within. I’d call this quality musicality. If excellence dominates, then musicality liberates.

Young musicians-in-training cannot help but internalize a capitalist drive to excel, win, conquer. It is fed to them on social media, which has gained an outsized influence on the music industry, with its reliance on metrics of attention: clicks, likes, shares, and other forms of monetizable “engagement.” Today’s extremely online musicians know how to work the algorithms to achieve success in this arena. What I’d call a viral aesthetic— short, pleasurable bursts of visually dazzling, tehnically impressive, exuberant performance—has become the preferred and most profitable expressive mode of the current music business.

But as Ornette Coleman once told the guitarist Brandon Ross: “Do you want to be in the music business, or the music world?”

Following the implications of this question: What would it

You can’t set about making anything new if you are convinced of your own greatness; it’s paralyzing.

You must accept tension, vulnerability, failure, and dead ends at every stage.

mean to make music that matters to the people in your world, the people who matter to you? And how large can that circle become?

Historically, Black American musical practices have valued different forms of innovation, expression, interaction, and technical prowess, often linked together into more complex constructs like “flow,” “sound,” or “concept”: community-specific understandings of what is musical—of what matters to them.

In a 1959 piece for The Jazz Review on John Coltrane’s album Soultrane, Cecil Taylor wrote: In short, his tone is beautiful because it is functional.

In other words, it is always involved in saying something. You can’t separate the means that a man uses to say something from what he ultimately says. Technique is not separated from its content in a great artist.

I don’t mean to suggest that excellence and “saying something” are opposites; rather, I’d offer that excellence is an idea imposed from above, whereas the bonds of community, our attunements to what matters to each other, are achieved from within. I’d call this quality musicality.

If excellence dominates, then musicality liberates. Excellence is top-down; musicality rises up from below. Excellence is how you are “supposed” to sound; musicality is how you say something unprecedented. Excellence is known; musicality is unknown. Excellence is for the brochures, board rooms, and brand names; but musicality is for the people. Excellence is what we are taught to strive for; but musicality is literally what matters.

Composer-pianist Vijay Iyer will release his twenty-sixth album, Compassion, featuring his trio with drummer Tyshawn Sorey and bassist Linda May Han Oh, on ECM Records in February 2024. A professor at Harvard University, Iyer holds a joint appointment in the departments of Music and African and African American Studies, and directs the Ph.D. program in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry.

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Chamber music educators consider the art of nurturing excellence in a changing world.

B Y Rebecca Schmid

WHAT DO WE

Photo: Shanna Madison/Chicago Tribune

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E XC E L L E N C E is about your approach more than even the outcome. Excellence demands curiosity.

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rofessional chamber and classical musicians spend years mastering their craft on a technical level.

Ideally, each musician also finds an individual voice and a way to communicate profound values with new audiences. Meanwhile, the twenty-first century has brought a heightened and overdue awareness of the need to expand the canon to include female and nonbinary composers, composers of color, and non-Western idioms—not to mention more modern and contemporary music in general. And the drive to create educational opportunities in under-represented communities remains steady. As such, the notion of excellence may be evolving toward a more holistic understanding of what music-making means to society. But has it changed, fundamentally?

The Juilliard School, long considered a bastion of what might be called excellence in the arts, has since 2018 made Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (E.D.I.B.) one of the three core values of the school’s strategic plan, according to its website. For David Ludwig, dean and director of the conservatory’s Music Division, the values of artistic excellence and community are inextricable from one another.“You can’t have an excellent

community without diversity, and you can’t engage the community without creativity and imagination,” he said, and then explained further: “We don’t view excellence individually, as if it were an ineffable quality that you immediately know when you hear it.

As much as that may be true, we think of these elements as preconditions for each other. That’s the idea we’re striving for.”

Merry Peckham, who was named Juilliard’s assistant dean and director of chamber music earlier this year, goes a step further in terms of this essential connection between notions of excellence and of community. To her, a chamber music group is “a microcosm of society” in its ideal form. This involves “how we treat one another, how we listen, and how we create together,” she said. “My whole life has kind of been dedicated to empowering students to be their most excellent selves as musicians and collaborators. If you can create the right safe environment, hopefully they can also feel confident in being who they are.”

As the Juilliard curriculum has broadened to include community outreach and 21st-century performance practice, according to Ludwig, students have new ways “to find meaning in their work.” The chamber music program “starts very

Photo: Shanna Madison/Chicago Tribune

RIVE Composer Jessie Montgomery takes a bow after the premiere of her work Transfer to Grace at the Symphony Center in Chicago.

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The notion of E XC E L L E N C E may be evolving toward a more holistic understanding of what music-making

Left to right: David Ludwig, Merry Peckham, and Jessie Montgomery.

foundational, and then branches out from there.” But the barriers between core repertoire and less traditional works are becoming less opaque: “We talk a lot about playing new music like it’s old, and old music like it’s new,” he explained, “so that students give all the respect and reverence and care to a new piece that they would give to Brahms, and that they approach pieces they’ve played dozens of times with a fresh, open perspective. By and large, our faculty are totally open to hearing new works, in part because they’re learning themselves.”

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According to a recent report from the League of American Orchestras, performances of works by living composers almost doubled last year, rising from approximately 12% to 22%. And the number of works by women and composers of color climbed from 4.5% in 2015 to 22.5% in 2022. Among the composers to recently become more widely heard in concert halls and conservatories is Jessie Montgomery, whose works are as fresh in their harmonic language and textures as they are firmly rooted in Western classical tradition. Since 1999, her affiliation with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African-American and Latinx string players, has included serving as composer-in-residence for the organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble; being a two-time laureate of its annual Sphinx Competition; and receiving its highest honor, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence.

Montgomery, who is also a violinist, distinguishes between excellence that is “execution-based” and “what’s being asked of musicians these days in terms of certain styles and techniques.”

It’s important to “make space for young people to try out different stylistic approaches or bring in interests that are outside of classical music.” she said. “That can perhaps create a richer palette or richer musical language.” As she put it, “Excellence is about your approach more than even the outcome. I have 74

experienced people approaching a new piece with a kind of caution or skepticism, and to me that that lacks excellence. It lacks the attention to fulfilling what’s needed in a piece of music.

Excellence demands curiosity. That can happen in learning how to play a really strong backbeat, or the way that you translate your ideas through notation. As long as you’re exercising the ability to question—and knowing what questions to ask.”

A visiting faculty member in composition at Bard College, she has observed that younger students often want to know the answers right away. “They want instant gratification instead of the constant investigation that’s necessary to do something properly.” Put bluntly: “The ‘practice, practice, practice’ thing does not go away. Our minds are designed for that kind of repetition.

There’s got to be new language for explaining that same basic function. Maybe you can talk to kids more in the way of thinking of your brain like a computer: you have to give your brain the right algorithm by programming it with the right repetition.”

In that sense, digital technology provides students with potentially valuable resources. Ludwig recalls a violin student asking how to execute a “chop,” a bluegrass technique that has made its way into concert music. Some twenty instructional videos were available on YouTube. “We all need to understand a little bit better how we can use technology to maximize how we communicate our art with others. When I went to Oberlin, the library boasted that it had 80,000 recordings. Now my phone has five million. So our role as educators is very much to guide students—to help them navigate this huge bounty of information.”

The Covid era may have had one silver lining—the online and streaming opportunities that emerged during that period.

Building upon some of those developments, Juilliard launched its own live-streaming platform in September. For Peckham, the ability to share and have exposure to concerts is part of the picture when we talk about excellence: “Our students have such opportunities to connect in a global way with other musicians and listen to all kinds of different performances. And I think it’s really important that they have the time to think about, what can I do to be my best self? Who am I? What am I saying with this music that I’m playing? I think that’s the kind of environment that that we’re trying to create for these wonderful young artists.”

“We don’t view excellence individually, as if it were an ineffable quality that you immediately know when you hear it.”

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means to society. But has it changed, fundamentally?

“We talk a lot about playing new music like it’s old, and old music like it’s new, so that students give all the respect and reverence and care to a new piece that they would give to Brahms, and that they approach pieces they’ve played dozens of times with a fresh, open perspective.”

unfold on his side of the pond, perhaps particularly in Austria.

“Classical music is so engrained in the culture here,” he said.

“Excellence also has to do with the action of striving for it,” he said. On a more basic level, that means “always going into rehearsals prepared and with the intention to present what you can to the best of your ability.” Technique itself remains fundamental. When coaching with players as a member of the Philharmonic’s academy, in both chamber and orchestra music, he said that learning about the style of a composer was very much connected to “using my bow in a different way to achieve colors or sounds.”

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An important virtue within this context is authenticity.

Montgomery points out that “there are a lot of musical technicians out there, who can really play their instruments well, but finding expression and your own voice is really important.” She points out that as technology evolves (especially in terms of artificial intelligence), “the real version of a thing” may become a “prized possession.”

That sense of authenticity comes not only from what a musician discovers as they develop but also from where they began. Montgomery made her start as a teacher at Community MusicWorks (C.M.W.) in Providence, Rhode Island, an after-school program that offers instruments and lessons to children and teenagers in low-income neighborhoods. The program aims for a non-dogmatic approach. “We are not trying to proclaim classical as the standard or the best,” said the violinist Sebastian Ruth, who founded the program in 1997. “But it is the tradition that most of my colleagues and I are trained in. We want to offer a really rich experience but hopefully present it in a way that is not exclusive of other musical forms or seen as superior.”

The artists of C.M.W. come together as a professional ensemble of up to fourteen string players. The organization will soon be opening its own concert space, having raised 14.4 million of the needed 15 million dollars. Half of its current season is dedicated to composers of color or women composers. C.M.W. has also adapted its rehearsal process to try to give “full attention and full expression to every person’s ideas and create a process where everyone’s voice directs the process,” says Ruth. “That’s an easy commitment to make on paper and harder to make in practice. It is living up to a set of community agreements that reflect a larger commitment to equity and anti-racism. It’s much more in people’s consciousness now that music shouldn’t operate in a bubble.”

Juilliard’s Ludwig thinks that notions of excellence are shifting naturally “because conservatories are full of young people who want to know more and who have been exposed to a wide variety of media, art forms, and composers. Their social awareness in general gives me a lot of hope.” He echoes Peckham’s idea—that “music has always been about having community, about communication, about observation.”

For 26-year-old violinist Lucas Stratmann, a Juilliard graduate who last season became a first-chair player in the second violin section of the Vienna Philharmonic, “the key point in matters of musical excellence is listening to the people around you and being extremely sensitive moment to moment to what’s happening—what someone might be intending, going along with that and being very flexible.” Since 2006, the Philharmonic has run an outreach program to engage younger audience members. Stratmann notes the ease with which such initiatives

If excellence means different things in different contexts, surely a healthy ensemble (or even a healthy society) plays to the strengths of all its constituents. Some musicians have a particularly natural gift for rhythm, Stratmann points out; others carry a melody like no one else. Performers learn from and enrich each other through the different skills and experiences they bring to the task at hand, whether within a professional ensemble or in an outreach activity for which they probe the role of music in society.

Montgomery stresses the need to balance traditional values with the needs of the outside world. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation,” she says. “You want to give young musicians opportunities to investigate what’s out there. But they also need the skills to enter the real world with some sort of excellence or high value. So we need to assess what components of the traditional model really work, and then put that into context.”

Ruth, for his part, emphasizes the need to “form a stance, form a voice, and create a career that connects to the world.” He quotes the jazz pianist, singer, songwriter, and activist Nina Simone: “‘How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?’ I think that’s excellence,” he said. “It’s about being responsive to what is.”

Rebecca Schmid, Ph.D., is a music writer and the author of Weill, Blitzstein, and Bernstein: A Study of Influence (University of Rochester Press/ Boydell & Brewer).

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EMPOWER YOUR ARTISTRY FIND YOUR PATH AT CCPA • BM in Performance & BMA Honors (Brass, Harp, Percussion, Strings, Woodwinds) • BM in Music Education & double major in Performance • BM & MM in Music Composition • BA in Arts, Entertainment, & Media Business • MM in Performance (Brass, Harp, Percussion, Strings, Woodwinds) • MM in Multiple Woodwind Performance • Performance & Professional Diploma (Brass, Percussion, Strings, Woodwinds)

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Boston ChamBer musiC soCiety

Marcus A. Thompson, Artistic Director

Season

2023/24

Member Musicians

Peggy Pearson, oboe • Romie de Guise-Langlois, clarinet • Jennifer Frautschi, violin • Alyssa Wang, violin • Yura Lee, violin/viola • Dimitri Murrath, viola • Marcus Thompson, viola • Raman Ramakrishnan, cello • Thomas Van Dyck, double bass • Max Levinson, piano

”Vivid, compelling, and first-rate.”

The Boston Globe

”...set such a high bar for musical camaraderie and inspired choice of repertoire.”

The Boston Musical Intelligencer

Guest Artists

Lucy Shelton, soprano • Tara Helen O’Connor, flute • David Bowlin, violin • Gabriela Diaz, violin • Isabelle Ai Durrenberger, violin • Carol Rodland, viola • Clancy Newman, cello • Benjamin Hochman, piano

Available for concerts, tours, workshops and residencies

New release First of three in the series, “Our Art in Our Time: BCMS Commissions, Volume 1” features recordings from the world premiere of Scott Wheeler’s Sextet (2022) as well as reprise performances of Pierre Jalbert’s Street Antiphons (2015) and David Rakowski’s Entre Nous (2016), all recorded during the 2022/23 season at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall.

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ARTIST REPRESENTATION • PUBLIC RELATIONS • SPECIAL PROJECTS “Those in attendance will not forget this delicious evening. It delighted and even thrilled a packed house ... nothing could exceed it.

Piccinini, Kashkashian, & Magen are “Musicians with absolute conviction, bringing to life both the musicʼs nostalgia and its dancing joy.”

SAN DIEGO TIMES

THE STRAD

T R E VO C I

L AT E N I G H T W I T H L E O N A R D B E R N S T E I N

This Klezmer-infused, lifeaffirming celebration melds traditional Jewish songs with Western classical music and virtuosic improvisations.

Grammy-winning soprano Hila Plitmann and Avery Fisher Grant recipient clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein join other brilliant performers to bridge our divides with compassion, humor and understanding.

“Bold...adventurous...superb.”

THE NEW YORKER

MUSIC FROM COPL AND HOUSE

I HEARD MY MAMALE SINGING COMPOSERS:

KIM KASHKASHIAN

violist

AARON JAY KERNIS • PIERRE JALBERT • LAURA KARPMAN

MICHAEL BORISKIN

pianist

MARINA PICCININI

flutist

HILÁ PLITMANN

soprano

elizabeth dworkin 914.244.3803 elizabeth@dworkincompany.com

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FLUTE | VIOL A | HARP

TIM FAIN

violinist

MOAB MUSIC FESTIVAL

MAHANI TEAVE

pianist

CYNTHIA PHELPS

violist

allison weissman allison@dworkincompany.com 347.642.0386

9/30/23 8:40 PM

Poiesis Quartet - Grand Prize & Gold Medal Winner

Kodachrome - Gold Medal Winner

FaMa Quartet - Gold Medal Winner

Incendio Saxophone Trio - Gold Medal Winner

photo credit: Peter Ringenberg Photography

Congratulations to the 2023 Fischoff Winners!

Senior Strings

Senior Winds

Junior Strings

Junior Winds

Grand Prize & Gold Medal Poiesis Quartet

Gold Medal Kodachrome

Gold Medal FaMa Quartet

Gold Medal Incendio Saxophone Trio

Oberlin Conservatory Oberlin, OH

Arizona State University Tempe, AZ

Silver Medal Quartet Luminera

Silver Medal Cerus Quartet

Colchester, VT

Silver Medal Pelios String Quartet

New England Conservatory Boston, MA

University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI

The Academy of the Music Institute of Chicago Evanston, IL

Bronze Medal Amnis Piano Quartet

Bronze Medal IGNIS

Bronze Medal Evie Quartet

Yale School of Music New Haven, CT

University of Maryland College Park, MD

Lift Every Voice Prize Poiesis Quartet

Lift Every Voice Prize Sound Session

Horszowski Trio Prize for Piano Trio Trio Osceola

American Brass Quintet Brass Ensemble Prize Amo Brass

Oberlin Conservatory Oberlin, OH

University of Miami Coral Gables, FL

Michigan State University East Lansing, MI

Yale University New Haven, CT

Ed & Mari Edelman Chamber Music Institute of the Colburn Community School of Performing Arts Los Angeles, CA

Horszowski Trio Prize for Piano Trio Nth Trio

Victor J. Andrew High School & Carl Sandburg High School Tinley Park, IL

Silver Medal Quid Nunc Saxophone Quartet Ronald Reagan High School San Antonio, TX

Bronze Medal Halcyon Saxophone Quartet Andy Dekaney High School Houston, TX

American Brass Quintet Brass Ensemble Prize The Bone Rangers

Ed & Mari Edelman Chamber Music Institute of the Colburn Community School of Performing Arts Los Angeles, CA

Merit School of Music Chicago, IL

The 51st Annual Fischoff Competition will be held May 10-12, 2024 Entry deadline is February 2024

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fischoff.org for Rulebooks & Entry Forms

9/30/23 8:40 PM

2023-2024

OCT 07

ISIDORE QUARTET 3:00 PM

LIO KUOK-WAI & EVAN GRAY

3:00 PM

FEB 03

CONCERT SEASON www.friendsofchambermusic.org

THALEA QUARTET 3:00 PM

HAGEN QUARTET

3:00 PM

APR 27

JAN 14

MAR 02

THIRD COAST PERCUSSION 7:30 PM

Applications are open for the 7th Cycle of the Rapido! Composition Contest Finals held in Atlanta, April 14, 2024

Prizes valued at over $9,000 Deadline to apply is November 22, 2023 info@rapidocompositioncontest.com https://www.facebook.com/rapidocontest/

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D ISPEKER AR TISTS

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I N T E R NAT I O NA L

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CONDUCTORS

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ENSEMBLE S

Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser

Hélène Brunet

Aeolus Quartet

Christoph Campestrini

Tracy Dahl

Busch Trio

Nicolas Ellis

Karina Gauvin

Calefax Reed Quintet

Todd Ellison

Kelley Nassief

Naumburg Trio

Bernard Labadie

Christina Pier

New York Brass Arts Trio

Mathieu Lussier Gregory Vajda

Signum Quartet MEZZO-SOPRANO

Trio Valtorna

Abigail Nims PIANISTS

SPECIAL PROJECTS

Anderson & Roe Piano Duo

CONTRALTO

Concerto Italiano &

Katherine Chi

Emily Marvosh

Rinaldo Alessandrini Thorgy Thor & The Thorchestra

David Kadouch Benedetto Lupo

TENORS

Jorge Federico Osorio

Christopher Pfund

Gilles Vonsattel

Daniel Weeks

Troupe Vertigo CHORUS La Chapelle de Québec

VIOLINISTS

BARITONES

Mayuko Kamio

Anton Belov

Kerson Leong

Jochen Kupfer

Elina Vähälä BASS-BARITONES FRENCH HORN

Michael Dean

David Jolley

Kevin Deas

GUITAR Grigoryan Brothers

D I S P E K E R .C O M

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MONTCLAIR STATE UNIVERSITY CALI SCHOOL OF MUSIC

G R A D U AT E O P P O R T U N I T I E S GRADUATE STRING QUARTET • 2-Year Graduate Artist Diploma program for pre-formed String Quartets • Carnegie Weill Recital Hall Concert • Collaborations with Immersive Residency Artists • • •

(Caroline Shaw pictured)

Featured Artists in the Bridges Series at Merkin Concert Hall Dedicated Quartet Studio Full Tuition with an annual stipend

CALI COLLECTIVE ENSEMBLE

• 2-Year Graduate Artist Diploma Program preparing young professional musicians for careers integrating performance, teaching, community engagement, advocacy, entrepreneurship, and leadership.

• Featured Artists in the Bridges Series at Merkin Concert Hall • Individual applicants are welcome • Full tuition plus a modest stipend per semester

photo: Anja Schütz

MONTCLAIR.EDU/MUSIC

11th Annual

FOR MORE INFO:

alkemie.org

NYC & Touring* 2023-2024 Concert Season Nov 4: PENTIMENT LIVE

music from the BAFTA award-winning video game

MARCH 2 & 3, 2024 Presented by the Austin Chamber Music Center Held at the University of Texas Butler School of Music

SUBMISSION DEADLINE December 20, 2023

Jan 11: A FINE COMPANION electro-acoustic album release

Jan 29: CALL ME MARIE*

with Grammy-nominated Chapter House

Feb 25: A WORTHY MIRROR 11 commissions of trobairitz texts

April 13-14: LOVE TO MY LIKING album release of 13th-century French music

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AustinChamberMusic.org/Coltman

9/30/23 8:40 PM

EXCEL ENCE

THE PLAYLIST B Y Moor Mother

86

FALL 2023

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10/15/23 9:00 PM

E XC E L L E N C E A perpetual, looping exploration that defies linearity, inviting us to consider our endless potential.

T

his mix, based on the theme of excellence, serves as an acoustic chronicle and an exploration of the myriad dimensions of musical brilliance that resonate through time and space. Each track embodies a facet of excellence, whether in musicianship, message, or the ability to transport listeners to different temporal realities.

Through this compilation, I aim to unravel not just the artistic prowess that Black musicians have historically exuded, but also the layered temporalities and quantum resonances that they bring into existence.

“GOD BLESS THE CHILD” ARETHA FRANKLIN FROM The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin, RELEASED IN 1962

In choosing Aretha Franklin’s “God Bless the Child,” I honor a voice that is not only powerful but also temporally expansive, echoing through decades. This song, first recorded by Billie Holiday in 1941, reflects the intrinsic resilience and excellence of navigating Black life with a wisdom that defies linear time.

“SEARCHING” ROY AYERS UBIQUITY FROM Vibrations, RELEASED IN 1976

Photo: Ebru Yildiz

“Searching” by Roy Ayers Ubiquity is an endless quest encapsulated in rhythm and harmony. I chose this song to portray the journey towards excellence as a perpetual, looping exploration that defies linearity, inviting us to consider our endless potential.

“EARTHLY THINGS” LONNIE HOLLEY FROM Just Before Music,

“ISIS AND OSIRIS” ALICE COLTRANE FROM Journey in Satchidananda,

RELEASED IN 2012

RELEASED IN 1971

Lonnie Holley’s “Earthly Things” delves into the tactile and the tangible while also dancing around abstract realms. I selected this piece to represent how excellence often lies in the ability to connect the cosmic with the quotidian, to make profound the everyday experiences that shape our lives.

Alice Coltrane’s “Isis and Osiris” bridges spiritual, cosmic, and earthly realms. I included this track as a nod to the quantum interconnectedness of Black music, and as an example of how excellence often manifests in forms that transcend conventional classification.

“FREEDOM DAY” MAX ROACH FROM We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite,

“OUR LAND BACK” IRREVERSIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS FROM Protect Your Light,

RELEASED IN 1960

RELEASED IN 2023

The urgency and palpable energy of Max Roach’s “Freedom Day” (with lyrics by Oscar Brown, Jr.) serves as a temporal bookmark, reminding us of historical struggles while demanding excellence in the fight for justice in the hereand-now. This song is a tribute to the relentless pursuit of freedom, and the excellence that it necessitates.

Irreversible Entanglements’ “Our Land Back” is a clarion call for spatial and temporal sovereignty. I picked this track as a testament to the collective power and excellence in reclaiming spaces—both physical and metaphysical— that are intrinsically ours but have been erased or co-opted.

Songwriter, composer, vocalist, poet, and educator Camae Ayewa—better known as Moor Mother—spent years organizing and performing in Philadelphia’s underground music community before moving to Los Angeles to teach composition at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music.

Her most recent releases are Jazz Codes, and, in the free-jazz collective, Irreversible Entanglements, Protect Your Light.

87

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CMA Scores

From Edward Simon’s

Mujer Remolino (For María Sabina) (2022) For Piano, Bass, Drums, Percussion, and Vocalist

88

that combine his working trio (drummer Adam Cruz and bassist and Reuben Rogers) with two close collaborators, Mexican vocalist Magos Herrera and Venezuelan percussionist Luis Quintero.

“Latino Soy” was premiered live at The Bowes Center in San Francisco, Ca., in March 2022.

It is, he says, his purest expression to date of “what it means, culturally, to be Latin American.” The three pieces include “Naked Sky,” a fast bolero with English lyrics by Herrera; “Bulería,” which distills the influence of Spain through the pulse and emotion of flamenco music; and “Mujer Remolino,” a section of which is reproduced here, and which was inspired by a conversation between Simon and Herrera.

“Magos told me about this famous chamana [female shaman] in Mexico named María Sabina,” he says. “One of the many names she would go by was ‘Mujer Remolino (Whirlwind Woman).’

We have a strong tradition for those healers in Latin America. In Venezuela, we called them brujas [witches], and we seek their help to solve personal problems, health issues, and all sorts of things.

María Sabina used herbs and plants to cure, but she also used the spoken word.

Her poetry had special powers.”

Musically, this piece is a chacarera, a genre that originated in Argentina.

This section, which follows a piano solo, features Herrera narrating the sorts of things Sabina would say during her healing sessions, as inspired by a book of transcriptions. “Out of that piano solo, we resolve into a big B-minor chord, which is the tonal center of this piece,” he explains. “Then, we begin with a light, airy feeling, like what you hear is coming from another world. The piano is coloring with cascading chords every six measures. And then the music builds gradually as the text becomes more intense.”

Mujer Remolino was made possible

by CMA’s New Jazz Works program with generous funding from the Doris Duke Foundation.

Photo: Ramin + Rahimian

“L

atin American culture is broad and deep, representing the confluence of many traditions that manifest differently in each Latin American country. But there is a connecting thread you can hear in all of the music,” says Edward Simon. That thread runs through all of his work.

Simon, who grew up in a musical family in the oil refinery town of Punta Cardón, Venezuela, first came to the U.S. in 1981 at age twelve, then settled permanently with his family several years later.

During the past few decades, he has earned wide-ranging acclaim as a jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and bandleader; his credits include early and important associations with trumpeter Terence Blanchard and saxophonist Bobby Watson, along with his ongoing work as a member of the celebrated SFJAZZ Collective.

As a composer and musician, Simon explores the commonalities jazz shares with the folkloric sounds of Latin America, as well as the full range and depth of Latin American expression and its connections with his own personal experiences.

His recording Femeninas: Songs of Latin American Women honored female songwriters from throughout Latin America. It also included “Latino Soy,” three connected original compositions FALL 2023

88-93_CMA Scores.indd 88

10/15/23 9:56 PM

Photo: Ramin + Rahimian

Edward Simon Edward Simon

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88-93_CMA Scores.indd 92

10/15/23 9:50 PM

CMA Scores 33

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/

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‰

‰

e ej e e e e e e ej e e e e e V™ V™ V™ V™ V™ V™ V™ V™

(bs. & pno.)

‰

e ej e e e e e e ej e e e e e V™ V™ V™ V™ V™ V™ V™ V™

(bs. & pno.)

V™ V™ E™ V™ V™

ee e V™ V™

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{

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j œ #œ œ nœ #œ

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34

# & ## ˙˙ ™™

n ˙˙ ™™

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# & ## ˙˙ ™™ ˙˙ ™™

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135

S.

‰ j‰ ‰ j‰ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ ‰ œœ œœ œœ œœ ‰ œœ œœ œœ ‰ œœ œœ œœ œœ ‰ œœ J J

j ?## œœ œœ ‰ œœ

œœ œœ œœ ‰ œœ

j œœ œœ ‰ œœ

?## œœ œœ ‰ œœ J

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. œ ‰

j œœœ

Œ

j j œ œœ

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/

e ej e V™ V™

e e e e V™ V™

e ej e V™ V™

V™

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‰

Perc. ¢ /

e ej e V™ V™

e e e e V™ V™

e ej e V™ V™

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A. Bass

Dr.

°

‰

‰

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93

88-93_CMA Scores.indd 93

10/15/23 9:50 PM

SilencedVoices Season 16 • 2023-2024

2024

FRANCES WALTON Competition “...taking one bold step after another...”

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1. Publication Title: Chamber Music 2. Publication Number: 018-011 3. Filing Date: October 1, 2023 4. Issue Frequency: Quarterly (January, April, July, October) 5. Number of Issues Published Annually: Four 6. Annual Subscription Rate: $35.00 7. Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication: 12 West 32nd St, 7th Floor, NY, NY 10001 8. Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: Chamber Music America, 12 West 32nd St, 7th Floor, NY, NY 10001 9. Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor: Publisher: Chamber Music America, 12 West 32nd St, 7th Floor, NY, NY 10001. Editor: Larry Blumenfeld, Chamber Music America, 12 West 32nd St, 7th Floor, NY, NY 10001.

Managing Editor: Andrew Frank, Chamber Music America, 12 West 32nd St, 7th Floor, NY, NY 10001. 10. Owner: Chamber Music America, 12 West 32nd St, 7th Floor, NY, NY 10001 11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or other Securities: None 12. Tax Status: The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes has not changed during the preceding 12 months. 13. Publication Title: Chamber Music 14. Issue Date for Circulation Below: Summer 2023 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation: Average No. Copies each issue during preceding 12 months/No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: a. Total No. Copies 2,847/2,290 b. Paid Circulation (by Mail and Outside the Mail) (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: 2,518/2,049 (2) Mailed In-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: 0/0 (3) Paid Distribution Outside the mails, including sales through Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution outside USPS: 0/0 (4) Other Classes Mailed Though USPS: 0/0 c. Total Paid Distribution: 2,518/2,049 d. Free or Nominal Rate Distribution (1) Outside-County Copies included on PS Form 3541: 0/0 (2) In-County Copies included on PS Form 3541: 0/0 (3) Other Classes Mailed Through the USPS: 22/35 (4) Free or Nominal Rate Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or other means): 182/0 e. Total Free Distribution or Nominal Rate Distribution: 204/35 f. Total Distribution: 2,722/2,084 g. Copies Not Distributed: 125/206 h. Total: 2,847/2,290 i. Percent Paid: 92.5%/98.3% 16. Electronic Copy Circulation: NA (a) Paid electronic copies: NA (b) Total Paid Print Copies (Lin 15c) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a): NA (c) Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a): NA (D) Percent Paid (Both Print & Electronic Copies) (16b divided by 16c x 100): NA 17. Publication of Statement of Ownership: Is printed in this (Fall 2023) issue of this Publication. 18. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including civil penalties).

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10/14/23 11:50 PM

2O 24

CHAMBER MUSIC AMERICA

NATIONAL CONFERENCE JANUARY 18-21, 2024

Join us

for the small ensemble world’s largest gathering.

Paola Prestini

go 98

Fall 2023

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Michael Abels

WESTIN NEW YORK AT TIMES SQUARE NEW YORK CITY

FEATURING KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Paola Prestini, composer & co-founder, National Sawdust Michael Abels, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize Terri Lyne Carrington, NEA Jazz Master & three-time Grammy Awardee AND

Daily sessions that spark captivating conversation Inspiring performances from the most promising new ensembles and time-honored titans Networking opportunities to forge meaningful connections

Inspiration awaits.

Terri Lyne Carrington

To register, visit chambermusicamerica.org. Magazine subscribers should register using the CMA Member rate. While we hope you can join us for the full four days, three-, two-, and one-day passes are also available.

At each level, passes are all-inclusive of all daily activities, from sessions to concerts to receptions. No add-ons are required. Special rates are available for students and groups. Contact conference@chambermusicamerica.org.

10/15/23 8:30 PM

The Last Word

Blind Spots and Bright Futures

I

Jennifer Grim

President of the Board Chamber Music America 148

FALL 2023

Photo: Tracey Hagen

n music school, many of us practiced countless hours before each lesson to receive that elusive compliment from our professors, classmates, or audience members. We thrived on this attention.

If we didn’t receive it, it might have motivated us to work harder, or perhaps we saw it as a failure.

In almost every outcome, the idea ingrained in us was that our “value” as an artist was tied to how others perceived our work.

For centuries, musicians trained to fit into a particular style and modify our musical instincts to be acceptable to others. Maybe it’s by adjusting our vibrato, blending our sound with our chamber colleagues, or phrasing in a way that has been done for hundreds of years. As an educator, students often ask me about interpretation, and whether phrasing a particular piece or excerpt will advance them past the first round of an audition or competition. In the past, I would often urge them to play in a way that most adjudicators would accept so as to improve their chance of succeeding. In effect, I advised them to compromise their own musical voice. But is this really the best way to guide our students?

The artistic expression and technical proficiency of all students is what inspires me to be a better mentor. But as an educator tasked with articulating the standards of our field, I often wonder if the way we determine “excellence” really serves all our students in an equitable way. Who sets our standards? Who appoints the gatekeepers, and how are they vetted? What are the criteria for their selection?

These questions are often on my mind when I am asked to serve on audition panels. The selection committee must come to the decision with an open mind, willing to accept performances that may appeal to ears other than their own. I think about how a candidate’s technique shines without difficulty, whether their intonation enhances or distracts from the performance, how they blend within an ensemble. But I also notice how engaged I am as I listen, and whether the performance stands out, either through innovative approaches to traditional repertoire, a blend of the practices of multiple genres, or an incorporation of themes of social justice. Someone will always want to listen if you have something compelling to say.

The students I interact with at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami inspire me with their creativity and curiosity. They take required courses in improvisation and often study and blend music from several genres. That doesn’t make them less serious about their study of classical music. On the contrary, it deepens their knowledge and provides them with more tools for expression. The skills required to play Ludwig van Beethoven and Celia Cruz are not mutually exclusive.

Where Beethoven and Cruz meet, however unexpectedly, is the future of chamber music. For far too long, our field has been dominated by rigid standards riddled with blind spots. We need more innovation, curiosity, and experimentation to move forward. The most beautiful artistry will come from seeking out our blind spots and bringing them to light.

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