The Taos Chamber Music Group

“Shards of Sounds� From Their Sixteenth Season

September 20, 2008

The Taos Chamber Music Group is back for its sixteenth season with a concert series at the Harwood Museum of Art running from October 2008 through May 2009.The opening program on Saturday, October 4 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, October 5 at 5:30 p.m., called “Point Counterpoint,� is emblematic of TCMG’s adventurous mix of music. With works by Maurice Ravel, Bohuslav Martinu, Steve Reich, and Pierre Boulez, more familiar pieces will be presented alongside avant-garde compositions. Also featured will be the New Mexico premiere of composer-in-residence Edie Hill’s evocative Land Meeting Sky: Four Musical Sketches of New Mexico’s Landscape. Performers include myself on flutes, David Felberg, violin, Sally Guenther, cello, and Pamela Pyle, piano.

TCMG’s repertoire, artists, and organization continue to be a unique product of Northern New Mexico, informed by the magic and magnificence of the land that surrounds us. Throughout the sixteenth season of concerts and educational programs, our presentations aim to enhance and expand the traditional concept of chamber music, in hopes of interesting new audiences and keeping the excitement of chamber music performance alive and well. In November, for example, an unusual collaboration with ZoukFest founder Roger Landes will incorporate melodies and rhythms inspired by music of the Balkans, Spain, Ireland, the Middle East, and India. Also featured will be a bouzouki concerto, In Blue Spaces, written for Landes and named by composer Paul Elwood for the “vast blue spaces of the high desert outside Taos.� And in January the exceptional landscape photography of Geraint Smith will be accompanied by Arvo Pärt’s meditative Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirrors in the Mirror) arranged for alto flute and marimba.

But back to opening weekend. Probably the most well-known work is Maurice Ravel’s riveting Trio for piano, violin, and cello. Written less than 100 years ago in 1914, it aptly sets the tone of musical innovation. Although Ravel remained a classicist in terms of melodic and harmonic structure, he was one of the first composers to go global, drawing on—in the case of the Trio—Basque folk music and Malayan verse forms, as well as Baroque dance forms.

The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu’s distinctive voice is imbued with the Bohemian and Moravian folk elements of his homeland. But like Ravel’s Trio, the Madrigal for flute, violin and piano of 1942 mixes up genres and influences. Stylized trills hark back to the French Baroque, while a jazzy feeling is created by syncopated rhythms and a blues-inflected melody, perhaps acquired while Martinu lived in New York.

More contemporary are Steve Reich’s Vermont Counterpoint (1982) and Pierre Boulez’s Anthèmes 2 (2003), both for live performer with recorded or computer-generated sound. Vermont Counterpoint—which inspired the name and ensuing thematic relationships between the pieces on this program—is based on something Reich came up with as early as 1967 and called “music as a gradual process.� I will play flute, alto flute, and piccolo with a recording of 10 flute parts that consist of the contrapuntal layering of repeated motifs that subtly shift both melodically and metrically in a veritable flurry of flute sound.

The wonderful violinist David Felberg (Concertmaster of the Santa Fe Symphony and Associate Concertmaster of the New Mexico Symphony) proposed Boulez’s piece to me last season. David is perhaps the only violinist performing this piece in the Southwest, and I am thrilled to have him bring it to audiences in Taos. The work is for a live, amplified violinist and computer assistant (the adept CK Barlow). With downloaded sampled sound and programs (which David procured directly from Pierre Boulez’s organization IRCAM in Paris) providing a sonic environment, and with the live performer triggering responses from those programs in addition to the 200 or so mouse clicks involved, the piece is really a duet between sound engineer and performer. Six speakers will be set up around the upstairs Harwood Gallery, resulting in a 3-dimensional affect, according to David, of “shards of sound thrown around the hall.�

In Edie Hill—whom I met at the annual National Flute Convention held in Albuquerque in the summer of 2007—I feel that I have found a kindred spirit. A native of New York City who now resides in Minneapolis, she has family in Santa Fe and has visited New Mexico often. Her description of the piece for flute and cello that we will perform is insightful and echoes the underlying theme of connection to the land that I feel is so essential to the Taos Chamber Music Group: “New Mexico’s landscape is one of fierce, unyielding beauty. The huge expanse of land meeting sky is awesome and humbling. Upon viewing this untamed land, it is impossible to deny one’s connection to the cycle of life, to past, present and future, and one cannot help but realize the real balance of things.� With movements titled Zenith, Cumulonimbus, Blazing Twilight, and Moon Shadows, Hill’s music crystallizes the natural and numinous forces of New Mexico’s landscape. She will be on hand at the concerts to introduce her piece and will also conduct school programs that combine art and music while she is in Taos.

For ticket information, full season’s schedule and artists’ biographies, visit taoschambermusicgroup.org.