Over the past several years, and especially through the pandemic lockdown and my livestream series Live from Lowville with Love, I’ve come to find a deep love for and creative exhilaration in programming. As an avid reader and admirer of great story-tellers, it is a joy to imagine interweaving and juxtaposing music to tell new stories.
While dreaming up this musical program, it was inevitable to find roots and inspiration in the land of Tippet Rise. Although I had no idea what Geode would look like, knowing some of the other sculptures on the land, and imagining the vast expansiveness and awe-inspiring stillness here definitely influenced what felt most meaningful to share musically.
I want everyone to sit back and experience for themselves what the intersection of art, music, and this particular nature can bring to them, so I’m going to try to give just enough context/background that might be of interest, while letting your imaginations and souls be your primary guide.
When Peter, Cathy, and Pedja invited me to give a recital here in celebration of a new piece of art on the land, my only real parameters were that they wanted me to reprogram Reena Esmail’s Sandhiprakash, which they commissioned for the reopening of Tippet Rise after the pandemic in August 2022, and that they wanted to commission a new piece for this specific occasion. We came to ask Dawn Avery, who has written a gorgeous piece which could not possibly be any more perfect for this setting and this day.
Not having any idea what Dawn’s piece would sound like (since it didn’t exist yet), programming came solely from the seed of Reena’s piece — and ruminations on this magical place. Sandhiprakash, meaning joining of light, is based on a Hindustani Raag sung at twilight (sunrise and sunset). Reena spoke of how striking the difference between Hindustani and Western Classical music representations of dawn are — how in Hindustani music the colours tend to be darker and more mysterious. With this sound palette in mind, my program began to emerge.
Bach’s immense and powerful Fifth Cello Suite seemed perfect for this setting. I loved the idea of juxtaposing the Prelude with Reena’s piece, as while in some ways they are a surprising pairing, they share these incredible sweeping gestures emerging from the lowest range of the cello and reaching, reaching towards the top. While the material of the music may be different in many ways, the shapes mirror each other and bring out new elements in one another.
Continuing our slightly dark, but hope-filled wandering journey, we meander through Domenico Gabrielli’s Ricercar No 1 — one of the earliest pieces composed in cello history (1689). To me this piece has always felt like it grows directly out of the earth, and I also love leading from it directly into Gabriel Kahane’s “Hollywood & Vine” — a piece (finally) filled with light in it’s cheerful, charming. singing melodies. Like Reena’s music, this piece is also searching for commonalities across genres — specifically here, “Hollywood & Vine” is a reference to the music of Laurel Canyon, and Gabe’s roots in both songwriting and classical concert music.
This leads us into Paul V Cortez’s Hyacinth Gardens, one movement from a 12 movement suite Paul has been working on as a wrongfully incarcerated artist at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, through Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections program. Paul also has a background in pop music as well as in Broadway, which comes through strongly in many movements of his “Cello Suite Bouquet”. Because Paul cannot be here to introduce his music for himself, I wanted to share with you what he wrote about it. With each movement named for a different flower, Paul spoke with me of how “a flower is one of the most fleeting expressions of beauty that nature gives, with many varieties feeling like they can be here today, gone tomorrow. Especially once taken from the soil, in an effort to hold onto the beauty our human interference only shortens its lifespan. In its short life, it is cherished by all who receive it and are able to enjoy it’s delightful and intoxicating beauty.” He wanted to write the suite for me as his gift to a world he feels has become “so mad with violence, revenge, and exerting power, to remind the world of our humanity, of love, of peace — and that our lives are not permanent; to make the most of what we have.”
This movement is the deepest and darkest of the suite, and tonally fits in the most clearly with this program. To juxtapose it’s melancholy, we, for a brief moment, harken back to Bach via his 4th Suite 2nd Bourrée — a piece, and composer, that Paul loves deeply and has found great inspiration in for his own music. We then fly off into Sulkhan Tsintsadze’s “Chonguri”, from his Five Pieces based on Georgian Folk Tunes — folk tunes often being the closest we can get to our histories and our connections with the natural world in song. This one emulates a traditional Georgian instrument called the Chonguri or Choghur.
Now we find ourselves in cello land(!) — with 3 stunning improvisations from Frankie Carr, a brilliant cellist himself as well as a beautiful composer. Then — our highly anticipated world premiere from cellist-composer Dawn Avery. Àkweks Katye means “The Eagle Flies,” and is inspired by the open spaces, natural habitats, and expansive skies of Montana. As taught by Dawn’s Haudenosaunee elders, Tawen’tese and Teahen:te, the eagle (or àkweks in Kaniènkéha Mohawk language) is believed to be our helper. It is the creature that flies the highest and, upon our birth, carries our spirit from the stars into the waters. When the time comes, the eagle may also carry our spirit back into the tail of a shooting star so that it may return to the Sky World. Dawn wrote a breathtaking piece full of soaring melodies and quiet interplay that has come to life for me in a new way since getting to play it here, on this land of Tippet Rise.
To finish, I wanted to take a moment to meditate on where we are and whatever we may be feeling at this point in the program with Leyla McCalla’s Meditation No 1. As with so many of the artists featured on this program, Leyla is a multi-faceted artist who is known best for her American folk music, but is also a classically trained cellist and composer. Her meditation seamlessly leads us into Bach’s 2nd Suite Prelude, which surprisingly seemed like the perfect book-end to his 5th Suite Prelude — with the fugal material sharing many rhythmic and shapely similarities to this 2nd Suite Gigue. A brief moment of celebration and thanks to the journey we’ve gotten to take together in this most magical of places, Tippet Rise.