NewMusic

Silent Partners

Sometimes words speak the loudest when they can't be heard.  Finding inspiration in text that's sometimes intimate, sometimes sublime, composers Michael Hersch and Stephen Jaffe take words as silent partners in sensitive and eloquent musical explorations of the worlds they find in the language of Bruno Schulz and Brian Peterson.  These world-premiere performances will also feature Ronald Caltabiano's exquisite Lines from Poetry for solo violin.

Stephen Jaffe's work, Light Dances (Chamber Concerto no. 2) draws its title from the journals of his longtime friend, Philadelphia artist and curator Brian Peterson. Light Dance's movements reference Peterson's journals, published recently in his book The Smile at the Heart of Things. There is no direct correlation between Jaffe's music and Peterson's text, but Jaffe's piece takes its title from Peterson's phrase "my whole creative life is a dance around the light," and the movements reflect dance and light in different ways.

Michael Hersch continues his decades-long series of major works silently pairing text alongside music with A Forest of Attics, incorporating the words of Polish writer and graphic artist Bruno Schulz (1892-1942). Schulz was one of the most consequential authors of the 20th century; his writing made a strong impression on Hersch, who was introduced to it over ten years ago. A Forest of Attics is not intended to be representational in any sense, but Hersch found that the texts came to mind during the composition of the work, becoming relatively constant companions that "were impossible to ignore."