75TH SEASON

OF CONCERTS

FEBRUARY 19, 2017 • NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Kerry James Marshall, Great America, 1994, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 

Gift of the Collectors Committee

-ZJSS*

PROGRAM

3:30 • West Building, West Garden Court

A Far Cry with Roomful of Teeth

Music in Common Time

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)

Visions Fugitives

Ted Hearne (b. 1982)

Selections from Coloring Book

Intermission

Ted Hearne

Selections from Law of Mosaics

Caroline Shaw (b, 1982)

Music in Common Time
The Musicians

A Far Cry stands at the forefront of an exciting new generation in classical music. According

to the New York Times, the self-conducted orchestra "brims with personality or, better, 

personalities, many and varied." A Far Cry was founded in 2007 by a tightly knit collective

of seventeen young professional musicians, and since the beginning has fostered those

personalities. A Far Cry has developed an innovative process where decisions are made

collectively and leadership rotates among the "Criers" For each piece, the members elect 

a group of principals, and these five musicians guide the rehearsal process and shape the

interpretation. Since each program includes multiple works, this multiplicity of leaders adds

tremendous musical variety to the concerts.

A Far Cry's omnivorous approach has led the group to collaborations with artists

such as Yo-Yo Ma, Jake Shimabukuro, Urbanity Dance, and Roomful of Teeth. By expanding

the boundaries of orchestral repertoire and experimenting with the ways music is prepared, performed, and experienced, A Far Cry has been embraced throughout the world

with hundreds of performances coast to coast and across the globe. In 2014, A Far Cry

launched its in-house label, Crier Records, with the album Dreams and Prayers, which

received critical acclaim and a Grammy nomination. The second release, Law of Mosaics,

followed in November 2014 and has also garnered much critical attention, including many 

2014 Top-10 lists, notably from New Yorker music critic Alex Ross and WQXR's Q2 Music,

which named A Far Cry as one of the "Imagination-Grabbing, Trailblazing Artists of 2014."

The Criers are proud to call Boston home, and maintain strong roots in the city,

rehearsing at their storefront music center in Jamaica Plain and fulfilling the role of Chamber 

Orchestra in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Collaborating with local

students through an educational partnership with the New England Conservatory, A Far Cry

aims to pass on the spirit of collaboratively empowered music to the next generation.

Violin

Alex Fortes

Angelia Cho

Annie Rabbat

Ari Isaacman-Beck 

Jae Cosmos Lee

Jesse Irons

Miki-Sophia Cloud 

Robyn Bollinger

Zenas Hsu

Viola

Frank Shaw

Jason Fisher

Rimbo Wong

Sarah Darling

Cello

Loewi Lin

Michael Unterman

Rafael Popper-Keizer

Bass

Erik Higgins 

Karl Doty

4 • National Gallery of Art

Roomful of Teeth is a Grammy-winning vocal project dedicated to reimagining the

expressive potential of the human voice. Through study with masters from vocal traditions the 

world over, the eight-voice ensemble continually expands its vocabulary of singing techniques

and, through an ongoing commissioning process, forges a new repertoire without borders.

Founded in 2009 by Brad Wells, Roomful of Teeth gathers annually at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts, where they've studied 

with some of the world's top performers and teachers in Tuvan throat singing, yodeling, Broadway belting, Inuit throat singing, Korean P'ansori, Georgian singing, Sardinian cantu a tenore, 

Hindustani music, Persian classical singing, and Death Metal singing. Commissioned composers include Rinde Eckert, Fred Hersch, Merrill Garbus (of tUnE-yArDs), William Brittelle,

Toby Twining, Missy Mazzoli, Julia Wolfe, Ted Hearne, and Ambrose Akinmusire, among 

many others.

Projects in 2016 - 2017 include The Colorado, a music-driven documentary film that

explores water, land, and survival in the Colorado River Basin (featuring former Kronos

Quartet cellist Jeffrey Zeigler and Wilco's Glenn Kotche); collaborations with A Far Cry and

Nick Zammuto of The Books; appearances at new music festivals in the United States, Canada,

and Sweden; and partnerships with nearly two dozen higher-education institutions across

the country.

Soprano

Estelf Gomez 

Martha Cluver

Alto

Eliza Bagg

Virginia Warnken

Tenor

Steven Bradshaw

Baritone

Thann Scoggin

Thomas McCargar

Bass

Cameron Beauchamp

75th Season • 5
Program Notes

Visions Fugitives

When reflecting on the works of Prokofiev, the pieces that generally come to mind are works

of power and angularity, mixed with stylish classical-era sophistication and flourish. Less

known are the often more impressionistic miniature pieces for piano, the Visions Fugitives,

so named after a poet friend heard them and penned the line, "In every fleeting vision I see

worlds...." These works seem to be indebted somewhat to the sound worlds of Debussy,

Scriabin, and in their brevity and charm, Schumann's miniatures.

Written in two years from 1915 to 1917, these twenty "movements" can be played in

small groups, and Prokofiev would sometimes use them as encores. He recorded them in

1935, and, to date, you can listen to those recordings on YouTube. Here, the piano pieces

are arranged for strings, providing a way to "deconstruct" the lines enough to find room to

stand in the midst of the moving parts. Program notes by Kathryn Bacasmot

Coloring Book

They will never, so long as their whiteness puts so sinister a distance

between themselves and their own experience and the experience of

others, feel themselves sufficiently human, sufficiently worthwhile, to 

become responsible for themselves, their leaders, their country, their

children, or their fate.

— James Baldwin, from "An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" (1970)

Ted Hearne's Coloring Book sets the words of three Black American writers of different

generations —Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Claudia Rankine. Hearne sets

these texts, each addressing the idea of identity, in surprising and personal ways, using

stylistic juxtaposition to explore the boundaries separating the authors' conception of 

cultural identity from his own, and to better understand the differences between them.

Coloring Book was commissioned with generous support from the Barlow Endowment 

for Music Composition. Program notes by Ted Hearne

I. The game of keeping

[The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult.]

No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat.

No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed.

[The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game

of getting.]

— Zora Neale Hurston "How it feels to be colored me" (1928)

6 • National Gallery of Art

II. You are not the guy

And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is

only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.

Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn't begin the same way, each

time it begins it's the same. Flashes, a sired, the stretched-out roar —

And you are not the guy and still you fit the description 

— roar —

still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always

the guy fitting the description.

This is what it looks like. You know this is wrong. This is not what it looks

like. You need to be quiet. This is wrong. You need to close your mouth

now. This is what it looks like. You can't drive yourself sane. You are not

the guy.

And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is

only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description. Get on the

ground now. Then I just knew.

Yes officer rolled around on my tongue, which grew out of a bell that 

could never ring because its emergency was a tolling I was meant to 

swallow.

— Claudia Rankine from Citizen (2014)

IV. Letter to my father

Him. He

He has only heard what I

I felt. He

He is far away but I

I see him.

Him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen

between us.

Us. He

He is so pale with his whiteness then and I

I am so colored.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him.

He is so pale with his whiteness then and I

I am so colored.

— Zora Neale Huston from "How it feels to be colored me" (1928)

75th Season • 7
Law of Mosaics

"Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the

miracles, leaving only the teachings."

"Meaning is a matter of adjacent data."

"The law of mosaics: how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes."

These passages, along with many others, are appropriated from a variety of sources and

arranged by David Shields into his 2010 book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. It is a patchwork

treatise on art and digital culture, and is an inspiration for Law of Mosaics, a new thirty-minute

piece for A Far Cry.

The musical material from the first movement, Excerpts from the middle of something, 

is lush and climactic but it is also a fish out of water, removed from surrounding music that

might help it be better contextualized. It could follow a tense build-up, or precede a climax

and resolution, but instead we hear it repeated and revised. As the material circles in on

itself, it begins to make sense on its own, but never really "goes" anywhere.

The second movement, Palindrome for Andrew Norman, is constructed entirely of 

samples lifted from other pieces of music. Each plays an important or climactic role in the

piece from which it is lifted, but is used here as a single building block in the construction of 

a symmetrical (and rather arbitrary) formal structure: the palindrome. Each sample is altered 

from its original composition in some way: it may appear backwards, or revoiced, or as a

canon with itself, but an element of its essential character is always preserved.

Andrew Norman is a contemporary composer from New York whose 2010 string

trio The Companion Guide to Rome is heard among the many snippets of source material in

this movement.

In some way, the rich history of works written for the string orchestra informs and

influences every performance by every individual string orchestra active today, whether

they choose to perform those works or not. Climactic moments from Adagio for Strings

and The Four Seasons, slowed down and layered on top of one another, explores what can

happen when two "staples" of the repertoire (likely to be found on a Best Classical Hits

CD) are stretched out and mashed up.

The fourth movement, Beats, is driven by noise, punk, and electronic music more 

than classical music influences. A simple and clear form is filled with music that plays with

the space between pitch and non-pitched sound.

Climactic moments from movement three, three times as slow as before is simply

a reframing of music you have already heard. The warp and woof refers to the lengthwise

(warp) and crosswise (woof) threads that together create the texture and foundation of a

woven fabric. It is a fitting end for a piece that imagines the framing of musical content to

be as integral to the structure of a work as the way that content is framed. Program notes

by Ted Hearne

8 • National Gallery of Art

Music in Common Time

From the beginning, Music in Common Time was a dream project. Not just for the prospect

of bringing together some of my favorite musical colleagues from different worlds, but also

for the sonic possibilities of combining A Far Cry's rich string sound with Roomful of Teeth's

varied vocal timbres. The music begins with a D-major chord unraveling into arpeggiating

strings and humming voices, eventually settling into a darker harmonic world. The heart

of the piece, about halfway through, is a continuously rising harmonic sequence that pivots

toward and away from expectation. What follows is a quiet reflection on the inevitable

passing of time and perhaps the ephemerality of music. Program notes by Caroline Shaw

75th Season • 9
Upcoming Events of the SeventyFifth Season of The William

Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot

Belin Concerts

Works by Jeffrey Mumford

"Washingtonians on Wednesdays"

"in soft echoes ...a world awaits":

music for strings and piano

February 22,12:10

West Building, West Garden Court

New York Opera Society 

American Inspiration, Norwegian Innovation

Program in collaboration with the

Norwegian Embassy

February 26, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

Carmen Balthrop, soprano

Jose Caceres, piano 

"Washingtonians on Wednesdays"

Music by David DiChiera, Leslie Adams,

Charles Davidson, and others

March 1,12:10

West Building, West Garden Court

Eya

Florence: The Cultural Crucible

Presented in honor of

Della Robbia: Sculpting with Color

in Renaissance Florence

March 4,12:00 and 2:00

West Building, West Garden Court

Ji, piano 

March 5, 3:30

West Building, West Garden Court

General Information

Admission to the National Gallery of Art

and all of its programs is free of charge,

except as noted.

The use of cameras or recording equipment

during the performance is not allowed.

Please be sure that all portable electronic

devices are turned off.

Concerts are made possible in part

through the generosity of donors to the

National Gallery of Art through The Circle. 

Reserved seating is available in recognition

of their support. Please contact the

development office at (202) 842-6450 or

circle@nga.gov for more information.

www.nga.gov

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The department of music produced these

program notes. Copyright © 2077 Board of

Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Back cover West Building, Constitution

Avenue entrance, viewed from Sixth Street NW,

1941, National Gallery of Art, Washington,

Gallery Archives