Back to the 2014-2015 Greenwood Listening Guide

April 2-10, 2015

Performance at Next Stage on April 9th

The connection of fully notated “art music” to its folk traditions is one that makes it vital, powerful, and relevant. Works of Bartók, Dvořák, Janáček, and Prokofiev for violin and piano form the cornerstone of this residency that explores folk influences on the music of these composers, both those of their respective countries and those of other cultures. In some cases this influence is explicit – Janáček and Bartók, for example, spent years of their lives collecting and notating folk songs, and subsequently absorbing aspects of these traditions into their own music. Janáček and Dvořák were friends and colleagues, and two of the leading Czech composers of their era. Both were strongly influenced by their native Czech folk traditions – Moravian and Bohemian. Janáček was particularly interested in using the inflections of normal Czech speech as a basis for the rhythmic and melodic structures in his music.  Dvořák wrote the Sonatina for violin and piano, Op. 100 while living in the United States, and it is clearly influenced by Native American and African American folk music. The connection to folk traditions is not as immediately clear in Prokofiev's case. The Soviet Communist authorities were at the time suspicious of any music deemed too “abstract” or “intellectual”, and rather encouraged composers to embrace Russian folk music and write music for the masses. Naturally, an iconoclastic artist like Prokofiev would rebel against such manipulation from the top, and there are certainly no watered-down, folk “adaptations” within his oeuvre. Still, one hears in the achingly beautiful melodies of Op. 35 something quintessentially Russian, with echoes of traditional Russian vocal music, both sacred and secular.

playlist

The following playlist is a summary of the MP3 audio files located at the bottom of this page. (Look for additional program notes in the MP3 descriptions.) As the year progresses the Greenwood School community will receive the examples of source materials that Joe and Grace find relevant to their project so that they can follow their process.

Luciano Berio
Naturale for viola, percussion, and tape
(Also for the December residency)

Brett Dean
Carlo
(Also for the February residency)

Antonín Dvořák
Trio in E Minor, Opus 90 “Dumky”

Jonathan Harvey
Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco
(Also for the December residency)                            

Leoš Janáček
String Quartet, No.2 “Intimate Letters”