A Murmur in the Trees

Welcome!

Today’s Program

Brent Michael Davids — Touching Leaves Woman
For Four Singers and Bird Roars

Eve Beglarian — A Murmur in the Trees
For 24 Bassists

During the performance, we highly encourage you to wander through The Farm, staying close to the music making and discovering your own version of the piece. Please also take pictures and videos as you do so and share them with us - your pictures and videos will be this production’s documentation. In order to use the form below, you will need a google account. Please email us if you have any questions or issues - kassof@networkfornewmusic.org

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Program Notes

Touching Leaves Woman —

A hand-notated manuscript, inked on vellum, the new musical work honors Nora Thompson Dean (1907-1984), a Lenape teacher and herbalist who dedicated her life to preserving Lenape culture. Nora was a beloved cultural treasurer for the Lenape.

The sung and spoken lyric consists entirely of her name “weènchipahkihëlèxkwe” in Uhanmi. Translated, her name was “Touching Leaves Woman” or as Nora herself suggested ‘Leaves-that-touch-each-other-from-time-to-time.’ The Unami morphology of her name suggested by linguist Carl Masthay (with Ives, Goddard, Raymond, Whritenour, and Jim Rementer) is “the leaves (of trees) on either side (of the path) come together (overheard rustling).” The name was given to Nora by her mother Sarah Wilson Thompson, and Nora’s name remains a beautiful expression of her life.

“weènchipahkihëlèxkwe” is pronounced “WEN-jee-paH-kee-LEKH-kway (CAPS indicate a stressed syllable, where “H” is a stressed breathy aspiration sound).

The piece also calls for four “bird roars,” custom built instruments that mimic bird calls and roars. They are small metal pipes tied to long strings that are spung rapidly around the heads of the performers, creating whistles and chirps from the air blowing over the edges of the pipes.

Program Notes are provided by the composer, Brent Michael Davids.

With humble deference, we want to acknowledge the land we perform this program, and all of our programs upon. The following land acknowledgement comes from the The Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation:

“The land upon which we gather is part of the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape, called “Lenapehoking.” The Lenape People lived in harmony with one another upon this territory for thousands of years. During the colonial era and early federal period, many were removed west and north, but some also remain among the continuing historical tribal communities of the region: The Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation; the Ramapough Lenape Nation; and the Powhatan Renape Nation, The Nanticoke of Millsboro Delaware, and the Lenape of Cheswold Delaware. We acknowledge the Lenni-Lenape as the original people of this land and their continuing relationship with their territory. In our acknowledgment of the continued presence of Lenape people in their homeland, we affirm the aspiration of the great Lenape Chief Tamanend, that there be harmony between the indigenous people of this land and the descendants of the immigrants to this land, “as long as the rivers and creeks flow, and the sun, moon, and stars shine.”

Learn more about the history of the Lenape People.

A Murmur in the Trees —

The following program notes are taken from Eve Beglarian’s website about the premiere of A Murmur in the Trees. The premiere was on September 11, 2021 in Brandon, Vermont and was co-produced by the amazing New Music on the Point and wonderful Scrag Mountain Music.

I’m really happy to be collaborating with bassist Robert Black and composer/programmer Matt Sargent to make a piece for twenty-four basses in a grove of trees, called A Murmur in the Trees, after a line of Emily Dickinson. For the 11 September Brandon performance, the performers will be arrayed along the allée of trees on Park Street Extension that once lined the entrance to a golf course now long gone. The next day, the piece will be performed in Hubbard Park in Montpelier.

We are creating the music by treating a piece of birch bark as a musical score, where the lines on the birch bark are notes that are read at the rate of one-third inch per minute, which is said to be the speed at which plant signals travel.

Robert Black, a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, will be leading a group of bass players ranging from fellow professionals to local students in the half-hour piece, which will be staged so that audience members can move along the entire length of the allée. You get to shape your own unique experience of the piece and the place. The music will be quite soft (acoustic basses don’t project very far in the open air), and will mix with the natural ambience of a late-summer afternoon.

None of us has ever heard twenty-four basses playing in a grove of trees, and we’re thinking it might be kind of amazing. Basses were once trees, after all, and they might have something really interesting to say to one another.

BIOGRAPHIES

Brent Michael Davids has received awards from ASCAP, National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, Emmy Awards, US-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission, Joffrey Ballet, Park City Film Music Festival, Kronos Quartet, National Museum of the American Indian, School for Advanced Research, Chanticleer, Meet-The-Composer, Miró Quartet, National Symphony Orchestra, Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from prestigious Indian Summer Festival.

Davids holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Music Composition from Northern Illinois University (1981) and Arizona State University (1992), respectively, trained at Redford’s Sundance Institute (1998), and apprenticed with Oscar-Winning film composer Stephen Warbeck (“Shakespeare In Love”) (2003). He has garnered the Distinguished Alumni Awards from both of the universities he attended, NIU (1996) and ASU (2004), and has been nominated for the prestigious CalArts Alpert Award two times (1995, 2006).

Dedicated to education, Davids founded a new organization in 2004, the First Nations Composer Initiative, as a virtual chapter of the American Composers Forum, and served as Artistic Advisor in its first year. FNCI sponsored re-granting programs for composers, and initiated additional composer programs and educational residencies in several communities in MN, MD, CO, SD, WI and CA.

Davids founded the Native American Composer Apprentice Project (NACAP) in Arizona (2000), and the Composer Apprentice National Outreach Endeavor (CANOE) in Minnesota (2005) and Wisconsin (2015), to teach Native youth to compose written music. Under these programs, 200 students have successfully composed for string quartets; and, many of these students did so without the ability to read music prior to Davids’ innovative curriculum. The Wisconsin CANOE program (2015) is coordinated with the Civic Symphony of Green Bay, where area students are composing works for full orchestra.

Many of Davids’ compositions employ traditional Native American instruments and instruments of his own design, including a soprano quartz crystal flute (1989), a bass quartz crystal flute (1991), and many other percussion devices that chirp or whistle. With an expert hand, Davids has fashioned inked manuscripts that are themselves visual works of art and performable sheet music.

As a film score composer, Davids won a Silver Medal for “Excellence in Original Scoring” from the Park City Film Music Festival for his orchestral score to the animated feature “Valor’s Kids” (2011), and “Best Original Music” from the N.A. Film Festival of the Southeast for his orchestral score to “Iroquois Creation Story” (2015). Davids has been featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, PBS, and NAPT.

The NEA named Davids among the nation’s most celebrated choral composers in its project “American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius,” along with Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Foster and 25 other composers (2006). Among his current projects, Davids is composing “Requiem For America” for s.a.t.b. soloists, s.a.t.b. chorus, Native American singers, Native American flute, and full orchestra (2017).

Beglarian’s current projects include a collaboration with writer/performer Karen Kandel and writer/director Mallory Catlett about women in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present, a piece for twenty-four double basses in a grove of trees, and a song cycle setting texts by and about mid-20th-century women for the Brooklyn Art Song Society. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days, “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.”(Los Angeles Times)

In 2009, “Ms. Beglarian kayaked and bicycled the length of the Mississippi River [and] has translated her findings into music of sophisticated rusticity. [Her] new Americana song cycle captures those swift currents as vividly as Mark Twain did. The works waft gracefully on her handsome folk croon and varied folk instrumentation as mysterious as their inspiration.” (New York Times)

Beglarian’s chamber, choral, and orchestral music has been commissioned and widely performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the American Composers Orchestra, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the California EAR Unit, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, loadbang, Newspeak, the Ekmeles Vocal Ensemble and individual performers including Maya Beiser, Lara Downes, Lucy Dhegrae, and Thomas Feng.

Highlights of Beglarian’s work in music theater includes music for Mabou Mines’ Obie-winning Dollhouse, Animal Magnetism, Ecco Porco, Choephorai, and Shalom Shanghai, all directed by Lee Breuer; Forgiveness, a collaboration with Chen Shi-Zheng and Noh master Akira Matsui; and the China National Beijing Opera Theater’s production of The Bacchae, also directed by Chen Shi-Zheng.

She has collaborated with choreographers including Ann Carlson, Robert LaFosse, Victoria Marks, Susan Marshall, David Neumann, Take Ueyama, and Megan Williams, and with visual and video artists including Cory Arcangel, Anne Bray, Vittoria Chierici, Barbara Hammer, Kevork Mourad, Shirin Neshat, Matt Petty, Bradley Wester, and Judson Wright.

Performance projects include Brim, Songs from a Book of Days, The Story of B, Open Secrets, Hildegurls’ Ordo Virtutum, twisted tutu, and typOpera.

Recordings of Eve’s music are available on ECM, Koch, New World, Canteloupe, Innova, Naxos, Kill Rock Stars, CDBaby, and Bandcamp.

This communal sharing of such daring music was a revelation.  It was mind blowing.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was developing a taste for the 'new', for the 'other' - for all of those peoples, cultures, and musics that I didn't know.  I was forever hooked on 'the possibilities' and 'the unknown.'  The public school system changed my life in other ways.  My Junior High School music teacher suggested I try the double bass. Mr. Gillian showed me how to play my first two notes on the instrument and the next minute I was in the jazz band playing 'Eleanor Rigby'.  I came home from school that afternoon and told my parents that I wanted to play the bass for the rest of my life.  And what a life. The sense of exploration and discovery that I experienced from the radio and on my first day with the bass have never stopped.  

As a result, I've focused my performing energies on New Music.  New Music - an unending source of challenges and discoveries.  New Music - never sits still, never runs out of ideas, never ceases to thrill, amaze, and engage.  New Music - it has taken me throughout the world, involved me in technology, improvisation, world musics, pop music, and all things traditional and experimental,  It has allowed me to collaborate with actors, dancers, painters and musicians of all sorts.  This same passion for exploration and discovery has led me deeper into the history of the double bass and its repertoire, which has led me deeper into the performance of the Classical Literature and the world of Teaching.  Teaching - another passion.  

I've had many mentors, people who have reached back and grabbed my outstretched hand, pulled me along and propelled me forward, showing me everything along the way. And now, with my outstretched hand still being pulled, I can reach back and grab the outstretched hands of others, helping them along, propelling them forward, showing them.  

So the circles complete.  The Helped becomes the Helper becomes the Helped. Performing becomes Teaching becomes Performing.  The New becomes the Old becomes the New.

Bassists

Special thanks

Each of Network’s programs comes together through the dedicated work of NNM staff, volunteers, and - of course - the performers. But, it also comes together through the generous support of our patrons, donors, and granting organizations, as well as our partners across Philadelphia who share their spaces, time, and resources with us. Working with Vivian Rowe and the Awbury Arboretum has been an incredible experience and one that has changed how Network will make music moving forward. We have been constantly inspired by the brilliance, love, and dedication of Eve Beglarian and Robert Black in both the conception of Murmurs and the exciting, collaborative production of the work. Without them, the bass section leaders, and all the players, this complex, unusual production would have been impossible. The possibilities inherent in these partnerships - new experiences, new people, new sounds - allow us to continue reimaging what new music can mean in our wonderful Philadelphia community! Thank you all for coming today and we hope to see you at our May 7th performance at the Mary Louise Curtis Branch of Settlement Music School where we will premiere two new works!

For a full list of our supporters, please visit our new Donors Page!

Sincerely,

Thomas Schuttenhelm (NNM AD), Karen DiSanto (NNM ED), Evan Kassof (NNM Producer), and the NNM Board (Anne Silvers Lee, Chairwoman)