Gabriel Fauré / Violin Sonata in A major, Op, 13
Michi Wiancko / Tyranny of Coordinates for Piano Quartet (2022 BCMS Commission)
Maurice Ravel / Piano Trio in A minor (1914; first performance January,1915)
“Falling might very well be flying—without the tyranny of coordinates.“
Báyò Akómoláfé
Our March concert in the BCMS Season 42 offers the opportunity to focus on significant anniversaries of two familiar French composers, Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), and return to the 2022 BCMS Commission from celebrated violinist/composer Michi Wiancko.
To many the presence of Fauré and Ravel on any program may highlight the absence of Claude Debussy, who is regarded as the one who brought French music to its pinnacle by exploring affects and colors of musical scales, subjects, and forms of Far Eastern cultures beyond the reach of Western European practice in response to similar developments in the visual arts, literature, and poetry.
In Fauré’s Violin Sonata, the ecstatic response to young love, the composer almost disguises the simplest use of tonal scales and arpeggios in the violin part with the most complex harmonic movement in the piano part, anticipating elements to follow in music of Wagner, Strauss, and Schoenberg leading to atonality.
Following the examples of Debussy, for his Piano Trio Ravel casts an even wider net for inspiration—from his own Basque background, from Malaysian poetry, from the use of the passacaille that originated in the Middle Ages. He also asks the string players to use extreme ranges of their instruments and effects such as harmonics, pizzicato, glissando, double trills, i.e., techniques considered today as a normal part of the virtuoso’s tool kit. For the pianist, his is one of few chamber music scores that employs so many extremes that at times the musical score for two hands can only be rendered on three separate staves! The work was completed in haste so that Ravel could enlist in the French army during WW 1.
Michi Wiancko has introduced her Tyranny of Coordinates (2002) as:
This piece is deeply inspired by an array of people who have changed (or are currently changing) the world. Movement 1 is dedicated to Yuri Kochiyama, a prominent Japanese-American civil rights leader who worked alongside Malcolm X. Movement 2 quotes a line from one of my favorite poems by the teacher and Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh, widely known as “the father of mindfulness.” Movements 3 and 4 are inspired by adrienne maree brown, whose work has had a significant impact on my life. Finally, the title of the piece comes from one of my all-time favorite living writers, Báyò Akómoláfé.
Her piece and those of Fauré and Ravel are reminders that seeing, celebrating, and embracing cultural differences are keys to even greater achievement.
Enjoy!
MT
