The Performing Arts Program at Sweet Briar College presents a Babcock Season Event
Akropolis Reed Quintet
Wednesday, March 2, 2022 | 7:30 pm | Mills Chapel
Program Notes
Les Biches in Blue - Francis Poulenc/Irving Berlin, arr. Daniel Schlosberg
The concert opener is a medley of two pieces of music, Francis Puolenc's ballet, "Les Biches," and Irving Berlin's "Blue Skies," and was originally conceived for Akropolis' upcoming collaboration with BodyVox Dance in Portland, Oregon which will celebrate the vibrant, eclectic 1920s arts movements. "Les Biches In Blue" captures a few of the era's many styles of art and music by combining Poulenc's ragtime and neoclassical inspirations with Berlin's famous melody. The portion of "Les Biches" heard is from the Adagietto of Poulenc's 1-act ballet choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska. The arranger of this medley, Daniel Schlosberg, is experienced and apt at re-imagining traditional works in new settings, as he does for Heartbeat Opera in New York City.
Maktub - Willem Jeths (1959)
The word "maktub" appears throughout the international best-selling book, The Alchemist, by Brazilian Author Paulo Coelho, and is the inspiration for Dutch composer's Willem Jeths' reed quintet composition. "Maktub" is first used in The Alchemist by a crystal merchant, who, when giving advice to the book's main character, Santiago, introduces to Santiago the idea of his "personal legend," or Maktub. Maktub means, "it is written," and becomes the subject of Santiago's journey throughout the book to discover his personal legend. Maktub is the concert's most meditative composition. Rather than specific images, Jeths paints a landscape in one, through-composed movement that allows the listener to fill in their own images and ideas, considering the meaning of "Maktub" and their own personal legend. The Alchemist asks the timeless and basic question, "are we in control of the events in our lives, or are they written by fate?" In the novel, Santiago encounters circumstances which make it plain to him that the universe is conspiring so that he can achieve his personal legend, but he also makes key choices along the way.
mÆtAnŸm - Joshua Harris (1977)
“‘metanym. [taxonomy] A name that is rejected because a valid name (based on another member) already exists for the same group.’ —Wiktionary (Also, in my case it’s a misspelling of metonym, which is what I originally intended as the title for this piece.)
Morton Feldman said of his friend Mark Rothko’s obsessively repetitive style of painting: “Freedom is best understood by someone like Rothko, who was free to do only one thing—to make a Rothko—and did so over and over again.” I have thought about Rothko many times over the past two years as I have carved out an intuitive compositional process that is firmly rooted in static, ambient textures and evolving loops. In the past year I’ve created over 20 pieces of improvisation on the electric guitar (I’m not a guitarist!), almost all of which follow similar trajectories, luxuriate in the same reverberations and echos, and use looper pedals to build dense textures out of simple lines. For mÆtAnŸm, I began with a long guitar improvisation, which you can hear in the fixed media component, then added the reed quintet to significantly multiply the textural density. I embraced the colors and textures that have swirled in my head since my formative years listening to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, et al. The noisy style we called grunge is generated in part by electric guitars and dirt pedals (i.e., distortion, overdrive, etc.). Grunge was low, noisy art, and mÆtAnŸm celebrates the low and noisy because to me, there’s nothing more beautiful.” —Joshua Harris
Homage to Paradise Valley - Jeff Scott (1967)
Homage to Paradise Valley was commissioned by and composed for Akropolis in 2019, with support from the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Paradise Valley, a now-displaced neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan, became of interest to Jeff Scott after he and Akropolis visited the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, while Jeff's quintet, Imani Winds, was passing through Detroit on tour. Homage to Paradise Valley utilizes Jeff's diverse musical background as a jazz and studio musician in New York City.
Comprised of 4 movements, Jeff Scott provides these notes about each movement:
"1. Black Bottom was a predominantly black neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan. The term has sometimes been used to apply to the entire neighborhood including Paradise Valley, which reached from the Detroit River north to Grand Boulevard. In the early 20th century, African-American residents became concentrated here during the first wave of the Great Migration to northern industrial cities. Informal segregation operated in the city to keep them in this area of older, less expensive housing. The name of the neighborhood is often erroneously believed to be a reference to the African-American community that developed in the 20th century, but it was named during the colonial era by the early French settlers because of its dark, fertile topsoil (known as river bottomlands). Black Bottom/Paradise Valley became known for its African American residents' significant contributions to American music, including Blues, Big Band, and Jazz, from the 1930s to '50s. Black Bottom's substandard housing was eventually cleared and redeveloped for various urban renewal projects, driving the residents out. By the 1960s the neighborhood ceased to exist.
2. Hastings Street ran north-south through Black Bottom and had been a center of Eastern European Jewish settlement before World War I, but by the 1950s, migration transformed the strip into one of Detroit's major African-American communities of black-owned businesses, social institutions, and nightclubs. Music was the focal point of Hastings Street, with world-famous jazz and blues artists visiting almost daily.
3. From the Bantu language of Swahili, "Roho, Pumzika kwa Amani" (Spirits, Rest Peacefully) is a lullaby. My humble offering to the many souls who came before me, and preserved through the middle passage, decades of slavery, disenfranchising laws, and inequality. I am who I am because of those who stood before me. May their spirits rest peacefully.
4. Orchestra Hall, where the Detroit Symphony Orchestra now performs, closed in 1939, but reopened in 1941 as the Paradise Theater. For 10 years it would then offer the best of African-American musicians from around the country. Duke Ellington opened Christmas week with his big band, admission was 50 cents, and patrons could stay all day. There were 3 shows every day and 4 on weekends. "B" movies were shown between acts. During the glory days of jazz the Paradise Theater saw Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, Billie Holiday, and many more. "Paradise Theater Jump" is dedicated to the famed theater and harkens to the up-tempo style of "jump blues," usually played by small groups and featuring saxophone or brass instruments."
One can learn more about this part of Detroit's history by visiting the Detroit Historical Society website at detroithistorical.org.
Akropolis Reed Quintet
Celebrating their 13th year making music with “faultless detail and refreshing artistry” (I Care if You Listen) as a “collective voice driven by real excitement and a sense of adventure” (The Wire), Akropolis has “taken the chamber music world by storm” (Fanfare). As the first reed quintet to grace the Billboard Charts (May 2021), the untamed band of 5 reed players and entrepreneurs are united by a shared passion: to make music that sparks joy and wonder.
Winner of 7 national chamber music prizes including the 2014 Fischoff Gold Medal, “the performance standards of Akropolis are award winning for a reason” (Fanfare). Remaining the same 5 members since their founding in 2009, Akropolis delivers 120 concerts and educational events worldwide each year and has premiered and commissioned over 130 works by living artists and composers. They are the first ensemble of their kind to grace the stage on noteworthy series like Oneppo (Yale University), Chamber Music San Antonio, Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.), Summerwinds Münster (Germany), Flagler Museum (Palm Beach), and many more. The “rise of the reed quintet” (Chamber Music America) and Akropolis’ “infallible musicality and huge vitality” (Fanfare) make them one of the most sought-after chamber ensembles today.
Experimenters and creators at their core, “there's nothing tentative in their approach, and that extends to their programming of multifariously challenging and imaginative new works” (The Wire). Akropolis has collaborated with poets, a metal fabricator, dancers, small business owners, string quartets, pop vocalists, and more. Currently, Akropolis is collaborating with GRAMMY-nominated pianist/composer Pascal Le Boeuf and drummer Christian Euman on an album and touring program drawing classical and jazz idioms together to reflect on American identity, entitled, Are We Dreaming the Same Dream?
Akropolis’ chief collaborators are youth and their Detroit community. Winner of the 2015 Fischoff Educator Award and a nonprofit organization which has received 5 consecutive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Akropolis runs a summer festival in Detroit called Together We Sound and holds an annual, school year long residency at Cass Tech, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Detroit School of Arts high schools. Akropolis believes anyone can compose great music and during their 20-21 season premiered and recorded more than 30 works by youth aged 12-22 alone.
An engine perpetually generating new sounds and ideas, Akropolis’ 22-23 season will include world premieres by Pulitzer Prize finalist Augusta Read Thomas and Omar Thomas; imaginative renditions of music by Ravel, Bernstein, Rameau, Shostakovich, and Gershwin; Storm Warning, a concerto grosso for reed quintet and wind band by Roshanne Etezady; and touring their recently released 4th album, Ghost Light, lauded for its “range, agility, and grace” (The Whole Note), by “exploring everything from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to racial violence in their native Detroit" (AnEarfull).
The “pure gold” (San Francisco Chronicle) Akropolis Reed Quintet performs worldwide and is represented exclusively by Ariel Artists. They come to you with joy and wonder, ready to be unleashed.
Joshua Harris
Joshua Harris is a composer from Pilot Mountain, North Carolina. He holds degrees from Appalachian State University, Brigham Young University, and the University of North Texas, where he studied with Andrew May, Joseph Klein, and Harvey Sollberger. Joshua is currently an associate professor of music and chair of the music program at Sweet Briar College. Previously he taught at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, the University of North Texas, and Brigham Young University.
His music is grounded in a fascination with visual art, textures, sound spectra, non-linear narratives, and extreme temporal manipulations, and it has been heavily influenced by studio techniques of electroacoustic composers. Perhaps more than these, however, is a constant experimentation with chance processes that produce “choose your own adventure” pieces that can surprise and delight the audience and the composer alike.
Joshua has been commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, the Nova Ensemble at UNT, Akropolis Reed Quintet, Virginia Wesleyan University, and many amazing musicians. He is the composer of two feature film scores—King Rat (2017) and HUM (2020), and his concert works have been performed throughout the United States as well as in South Korea, and are available on the SEAMUS and Ravello record labels. When he is not composing he enjoys teaching and writing about art and music, traveling with his wife and two daughters, and thinking about the formal structure of sitcoms.