For a Bag of Donuts
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
As our American Music Festival continues our traversal of U.S. composers, here’s a trivia question for you: what composer wrote what work for what group for a bag of doughnuts?
You’ll get your answer soon enough, but some other American music first, including the appropriately titled “A Song after Sundown” by David Raskin, whose work for clarinet and string quartet is played by the Music Amici chamber ensemble. Ken Benshoof was there at the inception of the Kronos String Quartet in Seattle, and received the group’s first commission. His only pay for “Traveling Music” was that bag of doughnuts. It’s worth a great deal more, as you’ll hear: Benshoof loved to accompany himself on a banjo as he traveled the country singing American folk tunes, and “Kisses sweeter than wine” shows up at the end of the second movement.
No one can resist listening to Don Gillis’s “A Dance Symphony” (No. 8) after reading the four movements’ titles: ‘Juke Box Jive’; ‘Deep Blues’; ‘Waltz (of sorts)’; and ‘Low Down Hoe-Down.’ Ian Hobson conducts the Sinfonia Varsovia.
Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade for Solo Violin, Strings, Harp, and Percussion (after Plato’s “Symposium”) features the extraordinary young violinist Hilary Hahn; David Zinman leads the Baltimore Symphony.
The final hour features the LaSalle Quartet’s go at John Cage’s “String Quartet in Four Parts” and composer John Adams conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in his own “Shaker Loops.” According to Peter Avis, “The title refers both to the Shakers—members of the religious sect so-called because their worship involves them in shaking and trembling—and to the musical idea of a trill or shake.”
You’ll get your answer soon enough, but some other American music first, including the appropriately titled “A Song after Sundown” by David Raskin, whose work for clarinet and string quartet is played by the Music Amici chamber ensemble. Ken Benshoof was there at the inception of the Kronos String Quartet in Seattle, and received the group’s first commission. His only pay for “Traveling Music” was that bag of doughnuts. It’s worth a great deal more, as you’ll hear: Benshoof loved to accompany himself on a banjo as he traveled the country singing American folk tunes, and “Kisses sweeter than wine” shows up at the end of the second movement.
No one can resist listening to Don Gillis’s “A Dance Symphony” (No. 8) after reading the four movements’ titles: ‘Juke Box Jive’; ‘Deep Blues’; ‘Waltz (of sorts)’; and ‘Low Down Hoe-Down.’ Ian Hobson conducts the Sinfonia Varsovia.
Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade for Solo Violin, Strings, Harp, and Percussion (after Plato’s “Symposium”) features the extraordinary young violinist Hilary Hahn; David Zinman leads the Baltimore Symphony.
The final hour features the LaSalle Quartet’s go at John Cage’s “String Quartet in Four Parts” and composer John Adams conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in his own “Shaker Loops.” According to Peter Avis, “The title refers both to the Shakers—members of the religious sect so-called because their worship involves them in shaking and trembling—and to the musical idea of a trill or shake.”
