Casella Sinfonietta

“Don’t get me wrong. Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern were very great composers. They gave expression to the emotional climate of their time. But for composers today to recreate the angst of ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ in Ohio, or in the back of a Burger King, is simply a joke.”

— Steve Reich (1986)

Titled “Prized Compositions,” tonight’s faculty and student side-by-side concert features two Pulitzer Prize–winning compositions in Steve Reich’s Double Sextet and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring and a GRAMMY Award–winning composition in Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks. However, beyond their award-winning appeal and framed by Steve Reich’s 1986 quote, these pieces also offer a perspective on access and belonging in the concert hall. Given that, a better title for this concert might be: “Popular Compositions.”

Written in 2008, Steve Reich’s Double Sextet is a classic example of minimalism. Minimalism began in the mid-1960s as a reaction against some of the more “extreme” movements of the mid-20th century including the total serialism of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen and the indeterminacy of John Cage. As opposed to other modernist movements that explore an expansion or even destruction of 19th-century musical language, minimalism embraces relatively straightforward rhythmic, pitch, formal, and harmonic materials as well as non-Western and popular music. This approach to composition, which emphasizes accessibility to audiences, stands in direct opposition to a central tenet of many modernist movements which is clearly articulated in Milton Babbitt’s 1958 article/manifesto “Who Cares if You Listen?”  In the essay, Babbitt describes “modern” music (modern for 1958, at least) as “…for, of, and by specialists” thereby explicitly denying the average listener access. Minimalism rejects this principle on its face and instead creates music which is “spun out” from a germinal cell and, through repetition and gradual change, is clearly revealed to the listener. In Reich’s words, “[w]hat I’m interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing.” In this way, minimalist music is often viewed as more listener-centric when compared to other streams of modernist music which seem more composer-centric. Or put differently, music that could be performed in the back of a Burger King.

Winner of the 2013 GRAMMY® for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks is a contemporary song cycle based on the poetry of Ted Kooser. Typically, when audiences think of song cycles, they imagine pieces like Franz Schubert’s Winterreise or Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, both 19th-century mainstays. If anything, though, Schneider’s offering to the genre is more Sondheim than Schumann. Rather than distancing herself from the audience, Schneider’s musical language freely synthesizes elements of classical music, jazz, and musical theater to create an intimate landscape that is uniquely accessible, personal, and touching.

Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring (1943) is the most famous work from the composer’s third period: his so-called populist or Americana period of the 1940s. While Copland’s work prior to 1940 tended towards abstraction, his work in the 1940s represents a more direct and accessible form of expression. As Copland described in Our New Music (1941):

During these years [the 1930s], I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. The old “special” public of the modern music concerts had fallen away, and the conventional concert public continue apathetic or indifferent to anything but the established classics. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum. Moreover, an entirely new public for music had grown up around the radio and the phonograph. It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.

Subtitled “Ballet for Martha,” Appalachian Spring also bears direct connection to Martha Graham, the founder of the Martha Graham Dance Company which will celebrate its centennial in 2026. Like Reich, Schneider, and Copland, Graham offers a kind of natural and accessible technique albeit in a very different context. While audiences may find Graham’s choreography to be abstract and inaccessible, it must be considered in contrast to classical ballet technique. In classical ballet, the dancer is in a constant state of suspension while they hold themselves up (quite unnaturally) against the forces of gravity. By contrast, Graham’s technique and other schools of modern dance focus on the relationship between the dancer and gravity, a form of tension and release as the dancer works within the constraints of a natural force. In that sense, it is Graham’s floorwork and use of falling techniques that offers the dance a different kind of “natural” than classical ballet. Specifically with regards to Appalachian Spring, Graham’s choreography also incorporated folk dancing including square dance, skips, paddle turns, and curtsies, to complement the populist and folk elements found in Copland’s score and the ballet’s dramatic narrative.

Questions like “Who belongs in this space?” and “For whom is this music written?” are certainly not new for classical musicians. Tonight’s concert offers four different answers to those questions about belonging from Steve Reich, Maria Schneider, Aaron Copland, and Martha Graham. But we may be asking the wrong question. Using Reich’s framework, perhaps the question would better be posed as “Is this music giving expression to the emotional climate of our time?” If that is the question, this evening’s concert should hopefully yield a satisfactory answer.

The following people contributed significant time and effort to support tonight’s concert. Thank you to each of them.

• Ian Jones
• Shar Joyner
• Dennis Hopson
• Brad McMillan
• Mark Engebretson
• Ally Harvel and the UNCG Electronic Music Studio
• Andrew Keiser and Maria Schneider
• Molly Allman, Jaden Brown, Jordan Owen, and Patty Saunders
• Joyce Herring, Raíssa de Sousa Lima, and Antonio Fini (Martha Graham Dance Company)
• Nick Nosko (WQED)

Funding for tonight’s performance was provided, in part, by the John R. Locke Endowment for Excellence in Music fund. For more information on giving to the UNCG School of Music, please visit https://vpa.uncg.edu/music/giving/

Double Sextet

There are two identical sextets in Double Sextet. Each one is comprised of flute, clarinet, vibraphone, piano, violin and cello. Doubling the instrumentation was done so that, as in so many of my earlier works, two identical instruments could interlock to produce one overall pattern. For example, in this piece you will hear the pianos and vibes interlocking in a highly rhythmic way to drive the rest of the ensemble.

The piece can be played in two ways; either with 12 musicians, or with six playing against a recording of themselves.

The idea of a single player playing against a recording of themselves goes all the way back to Violin Phase of 1967 and extends though Vermont Counterpoint (1982), New York Counterpoint (1985), Electric Counterpoint (1987) and Cello Counterpoint (2003). The expansion of this idea to an entire chamber ensemble playing against pre-recordings of themselves begins with Different Trains (1988) and continues with Triple Quartet (1999) and now to Double Sextet. By doubling an entire chamber ensemble one creates the possibility for multiple simultaneous contrapuntal webs of identical instruments. In Different Trains and Triple Quartet all instruments are strings to produce one large string fabric. In Double Sextet there is more timbral variety through the interlocking of six different pairs of percussion, string and wind instruments.

The piece is in three movements fast, slow, fast and within each movement there are four harmonic sections built around the keys of D, F, A-flat and B [Major] or their relative minor keys B, D , F and G-sharp. As in almost all my music, modulations from one key to the next are sudden, clearly setting off each new section.

Double Sextet is about 22 minutes long and was completed in October 2007. It was commissioned by eighth blackbird and received its world premiere by that group at the University of Richmond in Virginia on March 26, 2008.

— Steve Reich

Winter Walks

These nine poems were selected from Ted Kooser’s wonderful book, Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison.

They were written during his recovery from treatment for cancer, after he began taking two mile walks each morning. He’d been told to stay out of the sun for a year because of skin sensitivity, so he exercised before dawn, hiking the isolated country roads near his home in Garland, Nebraska. He sometimes walked with his wife but most often alone. 

During the previous summer, depressed and preoccupied, he’d stopped writing. But as that winter (1998) approached, his health began to improve. One November morning, following his walk, he tried his hand at a poem, and soon was writing every day.

As he wrote in his foreword to Winter Morning Walks, “Several years before, my friend Jim Harrison and I had carried on a correspondence in haiku. As a variation on this, I began pasting my morning poems on postcards and sending them to Jim, whose generosity, patience and good humor are here acknowledged. What follows is a selection of one hundred of those postcards.”

These poems feel so like home to me, connecting with my southwest Minnesota roots at so many different levels, that I find it almost astonishing. There’s nothing to explain about this music, except to say it was very hard to pick which poems from Ted Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks I would choose. I could have gone on composing more, and someday hopefully will.

These poems were originally titled with the date, for instance Perfectly Still This Solstice Morning was titled December 21, Clear and five degrees. I changed the titles, as the dates were no longer chronological once musical considerations for song ordering entered the picture. But it did feel natural to open with the poem he wrote on the winter solstice, and to close with the poem he wrote on the vernal equinox, which seemed like the perfectly natural way to bookend Winter Morning Walks.

— Maria Schneider

Appalachian Spring

Some of Copland’s most populist “American” music was produced during the Depression and war years, including the overtly patriotic morale boosters Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man. Appalachian Spring capped a trilogy of dance interpretations of the American frontier spirit, beginning with Billy the Kid (1938) and continuing with Rodeo (1942). This was music that created the concert and theater equivalent of the poignant “high lonesome” bluegrass sound emerging at the same time, music of open chords and spare textures that often drew on traditional sources. 

Appalachian Spring was commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge for Martha Graham. Copland began work on Graham’s then-untitled scenario in Hollywood in June 1943, completing the ballet a year later in Cambridge, MA. “After Martha gave me this bare outline, I knew certain crucial things—that it had to do with the pioneer American spirit, with youth and spring, with optimism and hope,” Copland later wrote.  

Graham took the eventual title from “The Dance,” a poem by Hart Crane, though not the narrative of an Appalachian housewarming for a pioneer and his bride. Copland originally scored the ballet for an ensemble of 13 instruments, since the premiere was in the small Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress (with Graham herself as the Bride, Erick Hawkins as the Husbandman, and Merce Cunningham as the Revivalist). In the spring of 1945 he arranged a suite from the ballet for full orchestra, which won the Pulitzer Prize for music that year. 

O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Of Adirondacks!—wisped of azure wands,

— from “The Dance,” Hart Crane

Graham told Copland that she wanted the dance to be “a legend of American living, like a bone structure, the inner frame that holds together a people,” and the ballet and its music were immediately understood as reflections of a national identity, of hope and fulfillment in a difficult time. “… the Spring that is being celebrated is not just any Spring but the Spring of America; and the celebrants are not just half a dozen individuals but ourselves in different phases,” John Martin wrote in his New York Times review. 

— John Henken 

Lindsay Kesselman

Lindsay Kesselman is a twice GRAMMY®-nominated soprano known for her warm, collaborative spirit and investment in personal, intimate communication with audiences. She regularly collaborates with orchestras, wind symphonies, chamber ensembles, opera/theater companies, and new music ensembles across the United States, often premiering, touring and recording new works written for her by living composers. She is a passionate advocate for contemporary music, and has commissioned/premiered over 100 works to date.  

Recent and upcoming highlights include performances of Darkening, then Brightening by Christopher Cerrone across the country, National CBDNA with the UNC Greensboro Wind Ensemble, premieres of wind transcriptions of Caroline Shaw’s Is a Rose and Maria Schneider’s Winter Morning Walks, Pierrot Lunaire with Ensemble ATL, Energy in All Directions by Kenneth Frazelle with Sandbox Percussion at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, the role of Anna in Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins with the Charlotte Symphony, Astronautica: Voices of Women in Space with Voices of Ascension, the John Corigliano 80th birthday celebration at National Sawdust (2018), a leading role in Louis Andriessen’s opera Theatre of the World with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Dutch National Opera and an international tour of Einstein on the Beach with the Philip Glass Ensemble (2012–15). 

She is featured on several recent recordings, including: David Biedenbender’s all we are given we cannot hold (2023, Blue Griffin), Chris Cerrone’s opera In a Grove (2023, In a Circle Records), Caroline Shaw’s Is a Rose (2023, Blue Griffin), Chris Cerrone’s The Arching Path (2021, In a Circle Records), and Louis Andriessen’s Theatre of the World with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (2017, Nonesuch). 

Kesselman is Assistant Professor of Voice and Choral Music at UNC Greensboro and co-directs the Heretic’s Guide to Musicianship with Kevin Noe. She holds degrees in voice performance and music education from Rice University and Michigan State University. She is represented by Trudy Chan at Black Tea Music and lives in Charlotte, NC with her husband Kevin Noe and son Rowan.

Flute
Erika Boysen*
Amrutha Koteeswaran
Joeli Schilling

Oboe
Kristen Daniel

Clarinet
Concetta Brehmer
Luke Ellard*
Cat Keen Hock*
Sarah Lucas-Page
Taylor Stirm
Anthony Taylor*

Bassoon
Emily Klinkoski
Angela Moretti
Ryan Reynolds*

Saxophone
Robert Young*

Trumpet
Ninon Kirchman

Horn
Abigail Pack*

Euphonium
John Cowger

Percussion
Shunan Gui
Joe Turner
Eric Willie*

Harp
Alyssa Hall

Piano
Angelita Berdiales
Jim Douglass*
Annie Jeng*
Matthew Roxas

Violin
Marjorie Bagley*
Xin-Yu Chang
Chloe Li
Fabián López*
Yi-Ju Shih
Siana Wong

Viola
Sarah Bahin
Scott Rawls*

Cello
Alex Ezerman*
Davis Lingner
Cori Trenczer

Double Bass
Zach Hobin*
Jack Hopper

* School of Music Faculty/Staff

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