2020 Festival – Page 32

Picture of the Day – July 12, 2012

Looking back at the 2011 Festival for yesterday’s picture brought back so many memories that we’ve decided to focus on shots from past Festivals for the next few days, so get ready for a few more blasts from the past! To kick it off, here’s a photo from the 2008 Festival.

The Hartford Sound Alliance – members Katie Kennedy and Charles Huang shown in the picture above – was our featured ensemble in 2008. They performed a number of works by Twentieth Century composers on their concert, including Ruth Crawford Seeger‘s Diaphonic Suite No. 4 for Oboe and Cello.

Ruth Crawford began her composing career as a teenager and eventually became the first woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930, the year that saw the composition of her four Diaphonic Suites. Two years later, Crawford married her teacher Charles Seeger and took a twenty year hiatus from composing, choosing instead to focus on the study of American folk music. She returned to composing in 1952, but her career was cut short by cancer. Despite the brevity of her career, Crawford Seeger remains an important figure in American music known for her “ultra-modern” style.

For a detailed study of Crawford Seeger’s music, check out Joseph N. Straus’s The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger.

Picture of the Day – July 11, 2012

Here’s a peek at the 2011 Festival’s opening concert:

The Hartt Independent Chamber Orchestra led by Erberk Eryilmaz performed works by 2011 Composer-in-Residence Gilda Lyons, Eunsook Baek, Jessica Rudman, and the winner of our inaugural Composition Competition, Sang Mi Ahn.

The Composition Competition was a new addition to the Festival in 2011, and the high quality of the submissions received in both the first and second years encouraged us to continue offering this award annually. Each year, the prize involves the performance of a selected work by our featured ensemble – stay tuned to find out who it will be for 2013!

Picture of the Day – July 10, 2012

The Dahlia Flute Duo performs “Two Flutes and Tape” by Nomi Epstein at this year’s Electro-acoustic Concert. The composer provided the following notes about the piece: “Written for Australian flutist Janet McKay’s 2009 US Tour “Those Vanished Hands,” the work explores material as sonic block both as live player and prerecorded tape parts. Juxtaposition of blocks are presented through stratification and variation of durational properties.”

Picture of the Day – July 9, 2012

Jim Liddle narrates Inés Thiebaut’s work Forget Nothing and Forgive Me Anyway while accompanied by Janet Jacobson on violin. Inés writes the following:

This is the second major collaboration with poet and dear friend Molly Bain. She wrote this poem on commission, and my only instructions to her were: “just make it abstract, don’t tell a story…” But Molly always writes stories, for she is a storyteller, even when they are not linear. Her words are the sole inspiration for the music, which is just a sound representation of them. In conversation, the voice and the violin follow each other while narrating the sense of aloneness, the notions of past and future, and how sometimes the simple things in life are not that simple…

Picture of the Day – July 8, 2012

Another singer from the 2011 festival! In addition to being our guest composer for the 2011 festival (our first featured composer to speak around the Greater Hartford area), Gilda Lyons performed her cycle A Small Handful (2002), an emotionally powerful setting of Anne Sexton’s poetry, on the Concert Pro Femina. Of the piece Gilda writes:

While Anne Sexton’s troubled existence was littered with depression and suicide attempts, she remained committed to turning the detritus of her life into poetry. Maxine Kumin, a close friend and trusted colleague of Sexton’s, wrote “I am convinced that poetry kept Anne alive for the eighteen years of her creative endeavors. When everything else soured… the making of poems remained her one constant.”

The three poems that I have chosen to set for unaccompanied voice span the length of these creative endeavors: from “Music Swims Back To Me” found in her first publication To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960); to Seven Times from the cycle “The Death Baby” found in her 1974 publication The Death Notebooks; and, finally, to “Where It Was At Back Then” from 45 Mercy Street (1976), Sexton’s first posthumous publication.