Agarita is excited to return to the San Antonio Botanical Garden’s Kelso Center for a collaborative program featuring award-winning poet Jenny Browne. Weaving Browne’s poetry with musical selections, the show invites poetry to the dance of musical expression, delivering an intimate narrative and a powerful journey.
Program
Caroline Shaw | The Evergreen | Moss
Nico Muhly | Common Ground
Michael Daugherty | Diamond in the Rough | Magic | Wig Dance
Lou Harrison | Varied Trio | Bowl Bells | Rondeau in Honor of Fragonard | Dance
Kenji Bunch | Danceband | Backstep | Waltz | Disco Fantasy
Salina Fisher | Komorebi
Chris Cerrone | Double Happiness
Shelley Washington | Middleground
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Jenny Browne, Poet
Jenny Browne is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where she also directs The Humanities Collective. A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas, she has received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two Distinguished Fulbright Fellowships to Belfast, Northern Ireland from the US/UK Fulbright Foundation. She is the author of four collections of poems, most recently Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems and one anthology: Texas, Being: A State of Poems. Her work has appeared widely, most recently in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Oxford American, Poem a Day, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times and The Slowdown. She served concurrent terms as the 2016-2018 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate, and the 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate. In 2023, she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
FEATURING
Samantha Bennhett, Violin
Hailed by the Chicago Tribune as a violinist “full of subtlety and poise”, Samantha Bennett is an active and varied performer around the globe. Ms. Bennett is a violinist in The Dallas Opera Orchestra, having previously served as the Principal Second Violin of the Sarasota Orchestra from 2016-2022. She was a member of the Fort Worth Symphony and The Florida Orchestra. She performs frequently with the Fort Worth Symphony, the Dallas Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra and the Boston Symphony. Alongside her husband, percussionist George Nickson, Ms. Bennett is the founder and Co-Artistic Director of ensemblenewSRQ (enSRQ), a new music collective based in Sarasota, FL. As Co-Artistic Director of enSRQ, Ms. Bennett is known for her performances of some of the most challenging contemporary repertoire, and has premiered works by Gunther Schuller, Toshio Hosokawa, Oliver Knussen, John Cage, George Benjamin, Augusta Read Thomas, and Philip Glass. Born in Ames, Iowa, Ms. Bennett completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees at the New England Conservatory in Boston studying with Donald Weilerstein and Malcolm Lowe.
George Nickson, Percussion
A percussionist and conductor of great versatility and virtuosity, George Nickson has been hailed by The New York Times as “a performer handling his role with ease and flair.”
Prior to Dallas, Nickson served as Principal Percussionist of the Sarasota Orchestra from 2012-2019. He received the Master of Music degree at The Juilliard School where he studied with Daniel Druckman and completed his undergraduate studies at the New England Conservatory with Will Hudgins. In addition to his position with the Sarasota Orchestra, Nickson has had the privilege of performing with the orchestras of Boston, Detroit, Washington D.C., Toronto, Honolulu and San Francisco.
Recent highlights include world premiere concerto performances at ensembleNEWSRQ in Sarasota, Florida and at Tanglewood, solo performances at The Spoleto Festival, and solo recording projects that can be heard on NAXOS, Bridge and Albany Records. Nickson frequently appears as conductor in notable performances with ensembleNEWSRQ, including world premieres, Charles Wuorinen’s New York Notes and Le Marteau sans Maitre of Pierre Boulez.
Program Notes
Caroline Shaw’s personal and approachable compositional style is grounded in a deep understanding of musical form, texture, balance, and timbre. As a singer and violinist herself, Shaw has a fundamental understanding of how chamber music feels for the performers, and how to write in a way that invites good musical conversation. In tonight’s case, that also means a gratifying cohesiveness. Moss is the first movement of her four-movement suite The Evergreen, which features Moss, Stem, Water and Root. With Moss, we hear a texture that is undefined, airy, and just on the surface –the closer we listen (and the closer we look), the more we hear a microcosm of self-supported tendrils that have no central body, only the structure they’re attached to. Brief moments of rich harmony and resonance are a grounding surprise and offer clarifying shape to an otherwise scattered environment.
Nico Muhly is a prolific composer who, while classically trained, writes music well beyond the traditional classical mediums. His collaboration with Björk, arrangements of songs by the indie rock band Grizzly Bear, and list of film music credits all speak to his omnivorous musical taste and compositional abilities. About his piano trio Common Ground, he writes:
Common Ground employs three different repetitive techniques. The first third of the piece is a cycle of chords of expanding and contracting length, with the violin and cello trading agitated little lines. The second is a pastoral obsession over essentially one chord: light changing over a field. Here, the cello leads, and the violin and piano offer insect-like interruptions. After a metronomic interlude and a free-form interlude, the piano begins stating a ground bass – a repetitive line around which the harmonies constantly shift. This sort of thing pops up in Purcell, where I first encountered it as a choirboy.
Michael Daugherty is a multiple Grammy-winning composer whose roots as a jazz and country and western artist have fused with a rigorous classical training for a dynamic and bold musical expression. About his work Diamond in the Rough, Michael Daugherty writes:
Diamond in the Rough is inspired by the multifaceted music of Mozart, a composer whose life, like a diamond, reflects and refracts many stories and myths. In the first movement, “Magic,” complex rhythms and unusual orchestrations create different angles on Papageno’s glockenspiel heard in The Magic Flute. “Wig Dance” mirrors the image of Mozart as an avid partygoer who once remarked he preferred “the art of dancing rather than music.”
Lou Harrison was an influential 20th century American composer whose style changed over his career from dissonant, ultramodernist writing to an aesthetic heavily influenced by Asian cultures, particularly Indonesia through gamelan. His work for Varied Trio obviously draws on Asian styles: the movement Bowl Bells asks the percussionist to use chopsticks against Chinese rice bowls. Rondeau for Fragonard whisks the listener back to 18th century France for a sentimental duet. Harrison’s ability to illustrate a time and place immediately through sound and structure is unique and captivating. The final Dance combines different elements from the trio, ending in unison with all three players.
Kenji Bunch has developed a compositional style that incorporates elements of hip hop, jazz, bluegrass, and funk into a traditional classical framework and instrumentation. The result is often a grooving, unrestrained, and uplifting aesthetic. Danceband was originally written for just piano trio in 2007, but this reimagined version (2022) with percussion adds a new dimension to this wildly fun work. From virtuosic fiddle music that gets out of control, to a simply passionate, lyrical waltz, to an ecstatic disco party, the trio covers different dance forms in a brand new way.
The youngest recipient of New Zealand’s SOUNZ Contemporary Award, composer Salina Fisher draws on her background as a multi-instrumentalist (violin, koto) and her mixed Japanese heritage. About her work Komorebi for percussion and violin, she writes:
This is my response to the beautiful Japanese word ‘Komorebi’ which means ‘sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees’. The piece is based on the Ryukyu mode of Okinawa, Japan.
Christopher Cerrone, on faculty at the Mannes School of Music at The New School, is a Gammy-nominated composer who often utilizes electronics to enhance the timbres, colors and expression of his music. With influences from the minimalism aesthetic, his music blooms patiently and organically, inviting a vulnerable sense of attention and eventual catharsis.
About his work Double Happiness, he writes:
Much of the piece was inspired by a summer spent in Italy while I was a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation’s castle in Umbria. I spent a lot of my time in Italy collecting field recordings of the Italian countryside, the sounds of church bells, train stations, and rainstorms. All of these sounds eventually found their way into Double Happiness as I constructed an emotional narrative around the sounds I experienced. The first movement, ‘Self Portrait, Part I’, explores the simple repetition of four simple notes, obsessive in their melancholy. The piano plays only harmonics, while the vibraphone always plays gently sustained notes; both are paired with ambient noises and simple sustaining electronics (hovering in and around the pitches) that further maintain the mood. The movement ends on an optimistic note as the four repeated notes slowly transform into a downward-moving chorale that leads inexorably to a celebratory D major chord.
The mood of the first movement is cut off quickly. Summer in Umbria is hot and dry and always ends quite abruptly with a long and extreme rain storm that cuts the heat; unexpectedly, out of nowhere, it’s autumn. I used the sound of this rainstorm to create the same effect in my interludes in Double Happiness. This interlude between the first and second movement features the rainstorm, two gentle chords in the piano and the vibraphone player who plays my transcription of four church bells heard ringing asynchronously in the distance.
If the first ‘Self Portrait’ explores extremes of melancholy, the third movement, ‘Self Portrait, Part II’ is an extreme study in joy, ecstatic joy that comes from the feeling of creation itself—the feeling can be almost as uncontrollable as melancholy. The third movement features a field recording of a rhythmic train station bell. This sound is coupled with the percussionist playing a simple and very rhythmic melody over and over again, augmented with resonant and microtonal electronics, giving the whole movement an extremely bright, metallic sheen. Eventually, the piano joins the vibraphone in a very careful and detailed rhythmic hocket as the movement spins out
more and more vibrantly.
Currently on faculty at New York University, Shelley Washington is a composer whose music incorporates elements of pop, rock, and American folk genres for a unique style that defies traditional expectations. Her work as a saxophonist and in the band Good Looking Friends and with the Grammy Nominated contemporary ensemble Wild Up has influenced her musical voice and speaks to her artistic range. About her string quartet Middleground, she writes:
MIDDLEGROUND: the space grounded, the between, the center. The Heartland. The prairie, the grasslands, Konza, Flint Hills, Manhattan, Emporia, Salina. Where we gathered.
Home of the heart, heart of the home.
The years spent in cars, daydreaming, scooping handfuls of wheat, racing out into amber fields, cycling together, water wheel ice cream, fireworks and apples. The stories shared, books read sprawled in the yard, family prayers over anything, late evening walks, quiet nights. Open arms, open hearts, humble and extraordinary.
Together, with our wonder, our joy, we created an incredible painting with abounding colors. The kinds of colors that linger in the minds eye long after they are out of sight and cradle you long after goodbyes are spoken and car doors closed. The kinds that find you counting the days until the next birthday, the next holiday, the next bike ride, the next Camp, the next anything just so you can see them again. When you close your eyes you feel their warmth. They stay.
The middle ground: my refuge born from the land living in my heart. Where my home is, living and breathing outside of my body, thousands of miles apart. This hallowed ground.
For my family.