Julia Alvarez (center right) with Haverford College students, and soprano Ida Faiella (far left), composer Heidi Jacob and Prof. Theresa Tensuan (far right)

On December 1, Bryn Mawr College hosted a cultural double bill called Julia Alvarez: Words and Music. Last week, I wrote about the first part of the evening, which showcased the four new songs Haverford music professor Heidi Jacob composed to poems of Julia Alvarez. Today I’ll talk about the second half of the show, in which Ms. Alvarez took the stage to read her poems and to speak about her life and unusual literary influences.

What radiates beyond both words and music is Ms. Alvarez’s irrepressible personality, a trait she deliberately tried to tone down when she moved from the Dominican Republic to the United States at the age of ten. At the time, she wanted more than anything to be an All-American girl (not realizing until later that she was already American.) Holding back her warm Latin side was a challenge, as the cultural differences puzzled her. For instance, when one of her teachers said, “Julia, I’m very disappointed in you,” she had a hard time believing the woman because the criticism was delivered in such a controlled, calm tone of voice.

My friend Ariadne, who was in the audience and who teaches advanced-level Spanish, told me later that she found herself thinking, “Yes! Sometimes I want to say to a student – you turned in such a bad paper, you can do so much better – I want to kill you! In Mexico City I would say that, but of course I can’t here.”

I suspect that Julia Alvarez’s irrepressible nature might have less to do with her cultural background, and more to do with who she is. As a child, she was “overly affectionate,” only allowed to fully express her love for her family members when she ironed their clothes. Ironing, she explained, was a privilege and a step up in the pecking order of domestic chores because “You could be trusted with something you could do damage to.” It’s beautifully shown in the poem she read called Ironing Their Clothes, where she is “forced to express my excess love on cloth.”

Domestic chores in general were the unlikely catalyst for her first collection of poems. She described how, as a young fellow at the MacDowell Colony, with the lofty canon of English literature in her ear (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre” and so on,) listening to the other fellows busily clacking away on their typewriters while she waited vainly for inspiration, she was suddenly freed by the sound of the vacuum cleaner in the hallway. She realized that her first training was in the household arts. She thought, “Why dismiss this?”

And so she produced her first collection of poems, Homecoming, as well as the poems in the following collection El Otro Lado about her muse, Gladys, a warm-hearted maid from her childhood who was always singing (and who, in the poems, abruptly stops singing whenever Ms. Alvarez’s formidable mother appears on the scene – perhaps a metaphor also for parental repression of Alvarez’s natural, exuberant impulses.)

Another of Ms. Alvarez’s muses was the old photographer who had the unenviable job of trying to capture all 24 of her father’s siblings and their offspring in the annual family photo. “You don’t know they are muses until you look back,” she said. Nor is it obvious at first what will become a departure point for writing -– an image as random as “men coming out of holes” (like manholes) has proved a recent whimsical influence for her lately.

The day following the concert and reading, Julia Alvarez spoke even more frankly about her work at an informal luncheon at the Women’s Center at Haverford College, when she spent time with students in Theresa Tensuan’s Contemporary Women Writers class. When Homecoming was published, Ms. Alvarez said, she wanted suddenly to silence herself, afraid of her family’s reaction. However, not a single person questioned her honest portrayal of family life; her aunts and mother even proudly displayed the book on their coffee tables. Since it was poetry, nobody actually read it! But when her first novel came out, exploring some of these events and observations in prose, her family was outraged, her mother especially.

“Why do you have to write about unhappy things?” her mother demanded.

Implied was the larger question, “Why read?” Ms. Alvarez described how, growing up in the outgoing Dominican culture, people told her, “If you read too much, you will get sick. If you read too much, nobody will want to marry you -–” a pointed reference to a bookish maiden aunt, who had given Julia and her sisters a much-loved copy of Scheherezade.

Ms. Alvarez said that as a child, she was not much of a reader; she did not like reading the censored material taught in the Dominican Republic, and she fidgeted in class (she thinks that nowadays she most likely would have been diagnosed with ADHD.) The stories she heard were not found on the printed page, but were told around the kitchen table.

Later, when she moved to the U.S., she discovered books. The kids on the playground were not particularly friendly to her, but in books, she was “welcome at the table” again. In the world of stories, she “could become anybody.” So although she came to reading late, she knew early on that this fellowship of writing, of story-telling, of words and literature, was where she wanted to be.

Julia Alvarez shared other insights into her creative life. Among the folders in her file cabinet, she keeps one called “Curiosities,” and another called “Letters Not Sent.” She writes, not to tell, but to find out about things. When asked why she did not write the screenplay for the movie version of her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, she quoted Chaucer: “Time is so short and the craft so long.”

A wise thing for all artists to remember.

Heidi Jacob, conductor and composer

Several years ago, my colleague Heidi Jacob took a sabbatical from conducting and teaching at Haverford College in order to study for her Ph.D. in composition. I was impressed; having earned two terminal degrees myself, I would not want to become a doctoral student again. Heidi was excited by the prospect, though; I could tell she couldn’t wait to plunge in.

She’s been back teaching for a couple of years, but I had yet to hear any of her compositions. So I was delighted to see a poster announcing that four of her songs based on poems of Julia Alvarez would be premiered on the Bryn Mawr College Creative Writing series, with Julia Alvarez herself in attendance.

“Tell me about this!” I said, when we saw each other in the hallway at the beginning of the semester.

With an enthusiasm she usually expresses for a particularly talented student we share, Heidi talked, eyes shining, not about herself, but about the great Dominican- American author’s work. “Gladys,” Heidi said. “Remember Gladys? The first song is about her.” We agreed we both loved How the Garcia Girls Got their Accents. And In the Time of the Butterflies. And Yo!

Accelerando to December 1, the evening of the premiere, which Bryn Mawr appropriately named “Words and Music.” When I arrived, a crowd had already gathered at Thomas Great Hall, on the majestically gothic Bryn Mawr campus.

Stepping into Thomas Hall is like stepping into a minor wing of the Houses of Parliament -– it is an enormous, rectangular space with a soaring ceiling, stone walls, and high mullioned windows. Acoustically it can be tricky, but the sound produced by L’Ensemble (the professional chamber group made up of Ida Faiella, soprano; Barry Finclair, violin, and Charles Abramovic, piano) was clear, focused, and full.

“Gladys sang as she worked

in her high, clear voice”

began Faiella, in her commanding, expressive soprano. Radiant, harplike colors produced by pianist Abramovic, and playful, sweet trills from violinist Finclair, gave Gladys Singing the compelling sound of tropical bird song.

However, nothing remains easy and amiable in this piece. At the end of Gladys Singing, the mother of the singer/narrator roars up the driveway in her powerful car, and in her high heels click-clacks up to the front door to enter the suddenly silent house. The birds stop singing, the music becomes static as a “tomb,” and the listener understands why Gladys, warm-hearted Gladys of the author’s childhood, became a muse and a symbol of life to her.

In the next song, Folding My Clothes, Heidi Jacob has changed the structure of Alvarez’s poem so that the bitter-sounding phrase composed to the final words

“until I put them on, breathing life back

into those abstract shapes of who I was

which she found so much easier to love”

is redeemed, musically, by the re-appearance of the rounded, berceuse-like first line, “Tenderly she would take them down and fold the arms in and fold again…”

“Are we all ill with acute loneliness” is the shortest song, yet terrifying in its bleak and deliberate use of pizzicato descending minor seconds (doubled by the piano) and the use of Sprechstimme to harshly speak the question, “and we are all well?”

The most dramatic song in the cycle is the final one, Beginning Again. In this complex piece, the listener is brought face-to-face with the immigrant girl’s sense of anxiety and loss, depicted by restless shifting meter and spiky dissonance. Gradually, the listener travels with the immigrant singer/narrator through reconciliation and hope, depicted by the use of an open-sounding descending modulation by thirds, an oasis of A major, a celestial-sounding B-flat major texture, and at the end, a sprightly and regular rhythmic pattern which brings us –- and are we not all immigrants, in our own way? — to the acceptance, and anticipation, of home.

With this last statement, Heidi Jacob achieves a satisfying symmetry for the cycle: the first and last songs are the longest, and, as the mood of the first song begins with comfort and ends with a sense of desolation, here, in the last song, the composer begins with unease and ends with hope.

Julia Alvarez address the audience in her musical voice

There was a pause following the enthusiastic applause as Julia Alvarez mounted the stage and took the microphone. With her high cheekbones and petite frame, she bears a resemblance to Bryn Mawr’s most famous alumna, Katherine Hepburn, though the glamour this night was endearingly softened by a green pencil stuck into her upswept bun. Clearly touched by the musical tribute, she looked straight into the audience and said, “Who needs a funeral?”

She then began to read her poems with the poise, timing, and phrasing of a fine musician.

It was ear-opening to hear the author read the same poem that Heidi had set to music with such different results, most notably in Folding my Clothes. The inflections were in different places, the cadence hypnotic. Occasionally I have found myself at poetry readings, brain straining, wishing I were at a concert instead, but not in this case. The pure words, as read in Alvarez’s musical voice, held the audience captive with phrasing as seductively compelling as a Chopin melody.

Her introductions to the poems she read and the pearls of wisdom she bestowed on young writers will be discussed in my next post.

After the reading, I asked Julia Alvarez what it was like to hear her words re-interpreted through music.

“Like I said, who needs a funeral?” she said, glowing. “Heidi was able to bring out the emotion inside the lines.”

I thought about that. Emotion is outlined, heightened and dramatized by music in a way that enhances the words. Music makes us listen in a different way, forces us to experience the words with greater intensity –- that is, when the words are good, and the music’s good. They certainly were that night.

Julia and Heidi, words and music

Manhattan Diary – Holiday

Winter's Eve on Broadway

Friends and I often muse about how we may have wanted to live in Manhattan when we were younger, but now that we’re older, we know it wouldn’t be worth the noise, the commotion, nor, most of all, the expense. Yet after spending a magical day there, I change my mind again.

Case in point: last Monday, I drove up from Philly to hear the American Composers Orchestra perform my colleague Curt’s new piece at Zankel Hall. It was 2 p.m. when I arrived in New York, and pouring rain. I parked my car, decided not to wait for a cab, took the subway from the Port Authority station and zipped up to Columbus Circle. Fortunately, the rain had eased by the time I walked up Columbus Avenue to meet my friend Deborah Jamini at Alice’s Teacup on 73^rd.

Debbie had suggested Alice’s Teacup as a quintessentially New York place to nosh. You descend a small flight of stairs to enter the teacup. The floorboards are worn, the bakery cases simple, there are fairy wings for sale displayed on the wall. There are hundreds of varieties of teas to choose from, buttery scones, and delicate tea sandwiches and salads, which a waitress in the aforementioned fairy wings cheerily brings to your table. The place was packed, not with “ladies who lunch,” but with “ladies (and men) who tea.”

Debbie and I hadn’t spent time with each other since high school and music camp, and it wasn’t until last summer, at a memorial celebration for our teacher William Appling that we met up with each other again. Debbie looks as if she’s in her twenties, and can wear leather pants in the rain with aplomb. (She credits her vegan diet for her eternal youthfulness.) Debbie’s career has evolved far beyond piano performance, which she majored in at the Mannes School. She is also a marvelous alto, a cantor at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and composer-in-residence there. She teaches theory and conducts a choir at a branch of the New School and has published a theory textbook. I’ll be profiling Deb’s versatile music career in a future post.

Starry Time-Warner Center

I met another friend for dinner at Bouchon Bakery in the Time-Warner Center, where the Christmas stars floated like swans in the air, a children’s choir sang in the background, and the enormous expanse of front windows looked onto twinkling lights enwrapping the bare-branched trees outside. All along Broadway, nearly every restaurant of note in the Lincoln Center area had set up a tented booth, festooned with lights, from which they served something delicious, as part of the Winter’s Eve at Lincoln Square festival. The line of people waiting to taste treats from such restaurants as Picholine and Bar Masa snaked down the sidewalk.

I was in a festive mood by the time I took my seat in Zankel Hall (the smaller, newer performance space at Carnegie.) Here’s a brief summary of the new pieces I heard.

Curt Cacioppo’s When the Orchard Dances Ceased: lush orchestration, evocative use of Navajo melodies and percussion, pictorial use of army trumpet calls, haunting Navajo chanting by the composer. I admire Curt’s compositional integrity, which is without gimmick and always deeply felt. He hits the right balance between mental rigor and emotion, I think.

Huang Ruo’s Leaving Sao: Here is another composer who can sing; this time, Peking- opera style. There was an arresting duet between the solo vocalist and one of the orchestra’s percussionists, using two “hummers,” tubes that create a high-pitched, fluctuating tone when swung in a circle high up in the air.

Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece xiii: Mathilde of Loci, Part :This composer too vocalized – her work was preceded by a video presentation describing her process of breaking down vocalization into its most elemental parts. The sounds she created reminded me, interestingly enough, of the U of Penn a capella group, Off the Beat.

Donal Fox’s Peace Out for Improvised Piano and Orchestra, with the composer at the piano: This brother can play! As a pianist, I appreciated Mr. Fox’s fearsome technique and power at the keyboard. The three movements of this jazz-inspired concerto are not unified in theme, at least not in any readily apparent way, but they were each appealing, and the audience, which included school kids, went wild for it.

Conductor Stefan Lano deftly held all these disparate pieces together, as well as two Tone Roads by Charles Ives.

There were warm welcomes by the president of the ACO, Robert Beaser, and an executive from Louis Vuitton Moet Hennesy, which is sponsoring the orchestra for 2 years. The audience was invited to Twitter in the lobby. After the concert, I attended a reception at an elegant upper floor space on 57^th, where guests descended a spiral staircase carpeted in ice blue. Plenty of Moet-Hennessy champagne abounded. I drove home listening to good jazz. At that hour, only about three other cars shared the New Jersey turnpike with me, and I made it home not too long after midnight.

The next morning, I took my dog for a run in the woods near my house. The air was crisp, and we passed not another soul on the pristine trails. I’d gotten very little sleep the night before, but still I felt rejuvenated. Was it the fresh air? Or the ten-hour holiday I’d had in Manhattan? Maybe I do have the best of both worlds.

Could you play that passage again?

Two years ago, my husband and I took the plunge and got our daughters a dog. It was only after we brought Kizmit home for the first time did I belatedly read the dog training book that advised “choose a docile, eager-to-please eight-week-old puppy that you can train and socialize easily.”

I realized we had done the opposite: we had chosen the non-shedding, 10-month-old adolescent Lakeland Terrier with the intelligent eyes and aloof demeanor. My daughter and husband loved Kizmit’s red color and adorable face. I loved her calm stance –- unlike all the other canines bouncing around the breeder’s house, I had the feeling that she would stay quiet during my hours of piano practice.

Well…I realize now that her calmness should have signaled to me that she is an “alpha” dog. Our little pooch, all fifteen pounds of her, thinks she is Madame Mao. She snaps at our favorite friends (the nicer the people, the more she wants to dominate them,) she runs away given half a chance, she sits only for tasty treats, and she barks at deer from the window at ear-splitting decibels. But about her listening to music, I was right.

When I begin to play, Kizmit trots over to the piano and bumps my knee with her nose. Then she will choose a spot nearby, turn around three times and lower herself to the floor, as if submitting to the music. If it’s Bach or a contemporary piece I’m practicing, she lies down in an adjoining room. At the first strains of Liszt or Chopin, however, she walks directly to the piano, lies down by the pedals, rolls on her side or even on her back, and promptly falls asleep.

Despite her non-comprehension when it comes to obedience training, Kizmit can distinguish between good and bad piano playing. Once I brought her to an informal recital given by my college students. When a student stumbled and played wrong notes, Kizmit paced restlessly around on her leash. But when a student played smoothly, with technical ease and musical expression, she lay on her side and fell asleep, waking only to bark furiously at the applause.

Perhaps it should be no surprise that any creature with such an acute auditory sense might appreciate Ravel. Kizmit can hear a deer walk through the neighbor’s yard from an upstairs bedroom – she charges downstairs, ready to attack. What surprises us is the extent to which Kizzie is charmed by sonorous chords and beautiful melodic lines.

Whatever the books say, I know we’ve chosen the right dog -– one who loves music.

American elm

One of the most haunting compositions I heard last season was Curt Cacioppo’s Lenape Refrains, a large-scale orchestral work premiered by the Philadelphia Classical Symphony, Karl Middleman, artistic director. Refrains is a deceptively mild term for this eight-movement work, which depicts the celebration, dances, and fate of the Lenape people, who are native to the Philadelphia region.

From a musical standpoint, the piece convinces because of its structural integrity, but it also captivates because of its striking use of Native American rhythms, chanting by the orchestra musicians, solo singing, and Native American instruments. One instrument in particular, the corn husk rattle, caught my ear.

I asked Curt Cacioppo if it was difficult to come by such an instrument.

“No. I got it at Trader Joe’s,” he replied with his usual frank nonchalance.

Rattles, modern version

He explained that an actual corn husk rattle would be too delicate to project in a concert hall, so he constructed his own more durable version, using strips of paper bags from the popular grocery store. Recently, he was kind enough to show me this unique instrument up close. I admired his ingenious use of the aforementioned brown paper strips, broom handle, rubber chair feet, and metal washer. The sound this modern instrument produces is surprisingly terrifying.

Happily, it will be heard again on November 30 at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York City, in a new piece by Cacioppo called When the Orchard Dances Ceased, The American Composers Orchestra, Stefan Lano conducting. Besides the corn husk rattle, a Navajo water drum (filled with water to dampen its leather head and tapped by deerskin-covered mallets at different points to produce different pitches) and a beautiful large drum from Taos Pueblo will help the orchestra describe, in musical narrative, the scorched earth campaign by the U.S. Army against the Navajo people in Canyon de Chelly.

Navajo water drum

Tragedy weaves itself prominently and necessarily into the tapestry of both these compositions, but both also end on a redemptive note, symbolized by potent images from nature. In the case of When the Orchard Dances Ceased, peace comes in the remembrance of the peach orchards planted by the Navajo in Canyon de Chelly where their dances of celebration and life took place. In Lenape Refrains, peace is symbolized by the depiction of the magnificent elm tree under which William Penn signed a treaty with the Lenape in 1682. A scion of this same tree, one of the only remaining large elms in America, stands on the Haverford College campus, where I teach. One enormous branch descends and rests against the earth, and then, undaunted, reaches up toward heaven.

I’m looking forward to hearing the premiere of When the Orchard Dances Ceased. I think the spirits will be listening, too.

Due to a bit of ongoing drama lately, I’m behind in writing about my concert with The Ohio Valley Symphony, but here’s the short version: it was a wonderful homecoming. Beautiful weather along the beautiful Ohio River, and a sensitive and energetic orchestra. The musicians come from six states, and they’re young – a lot of them were probably scratching out their first Suzuki lesson when the orchestra and I played its first season 20 years ago! The OVS is the brainchild of Lora Lynn Snow, an oboist who dared to dream up her own professional orchestra for Gallipolis, the small town in Appalachia that is also my husband Tom’s hometown.

Beautiful Gallipolis

Lora Lynn involved the entire community (which numbers less than 5000 people) to fund a full symphony orchestra that is not only solvent but has a nice healthy endowment. She discovered an abandoned Victorian opera house in town and drummed up enthusiastic helpers — students, doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers, teachers –- to paint, build, and renovate the old place into a lovely and jewel-like theater. Did I mention she also plays principal oboe? (We had some lovely piano/oboe solos in the slow movement of the Mozart concerto.)

The day before the concert, as she drove me to Huntington, W. Virginia for an interview with Channel 3′s Carrie Cline, I asked her how the orchestra won the attention of its angel, Mrs. Ann Carson-Dater, who once lived in Southern Ohio but now lives in Arizona and who, without ever having heard or seen the orchestra, began her support of the OVS with a gift of 2 Million dollars,

“Well,” Lora said, as she navigated along Route 7, (and I’m paraphrasing a bit,) “about twelve years ago, I was running around taking care of my kids, and I got a long-distance phone call from this lady in California. I didn’t have time to talk just that second, but when I sat down to nurse my son, we finally had the opportunity for a more leisurely conversation. She asked me several questions, and I told her what the orchestra was up to. A few months later, she set up our endowment…”

No doubt Lora’s idealism and her absolute passion for classical music inspired confidence in Mrs. Dater, who loves classical music as well. A few years ago, Mrs. Dater bought the theater building for the orchestra so that it will always have a home. Classical music will never die, despite headlines to the contrary, as long as there are Lora Snows and Mrs. Daters around.

Marquee at the Ariel Theater

A few memorable highlights of the Saturday night concert: my dear friend and colleague David Kim, who, in addition to his position as concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, still concertizes as soloist around the world, played a gorgeous rendition of the Sibelius Violin Concerto though about to collapse from the flu. That’s a true artist for you! (David is fine now.) I also enjoyed working closely with Maestro Ray Fowler (he’s co-founder of The OVS,) who is so alive to the music the notes practically leap from his skin. Many old friends came from around Ohio and made my day (Olev, Trish, Bob, Sally, Ken, Bobbie, Waltraut and Richard, Manfred, Marille, RuthAnn, Hank, and many more.) My parents-in-law Sig and Alix took wonderful care of me.

And here’s the icing on the cake -– two music students from Marshall University asked me at the reception, “Did you write your own cadenzas? We loved them!” If you’ve read my last blog post, you’ll know that was a thrill for me indeed.

scribblings with pumpkin

I’m performing Mozart’s inimitably effervescent Concerto Nr. 21 in C Major, K. 467, in a couple weeks’ time. Although Mozart performed this concerto at its premier in 1787, he did not write down the five cadenzas that he no doubt improvised on the spot during the performance. Hence, modern pianists are left to use some other composer’s cadenzas or write their own. I enjoy writing my own. However, when I dug out what I’d written for my last performance of this piece, I realized that the long cadenza I’d penned (or — more accurately –penciled) for the first movement sounded rather confused. I decided I’d like to write a new one.

A cadenza has to fulfill certain structural parameters while allowing the composer/performer a chance to indulge in some individual musical fun. Like any creative endeavor, sometimes it flows easily, like it did for four out of five of the cadenzas I’d already written, and sometimes it is a struggle, like for this first movement problem child.

Seeking inspiration, I discovered among my shelves Beethoven’s cadenza for Mozart’s concerto in D Minor. It is quintessentially Beethovian – dramatic and virile, while not out of line with Mozart’s own style. I also found a book of Mozart cadenzas I’d bought after browsing in the late Joseph Patelson Music House behind Carnegie Hall (whose closing I will discuss in a future post.)

Ah, Mozart. Those cadenzas. Upon examining them, I found that Mozart keeps his framework rather simple: the key modulations are never crazy, the technical parts are not wildly boastful, he doesn’t throw in a kitchen sink full of re-worked themes. The cadenzas aren’t very long. But within a logical structure of chord progressions, he creates unexpected, fresh moments that are simply gorgeous. He probably didn’t have to slave over them, either!

It’s taken me several days, but I think I have a cadenza I really like. I do foray into a few more modern chord progressions than is strictly Kosher for classical style, but that’s all part of the fun. We’ll see if the audience likes it.