Program:
Loren Loiacono- Besides
I. Nocturne
II. Scherzo
III. “A Chantar M’er”
Isaac Schankler - unveiling
i. ideation
ii. agitation
iii. congregation
iv. capitulation
Intermission
Juhi Bansal - Cathedral of Light
Leoš Janáček' - String Quartet no. 1 “The Kreutzer Sonata”
I. Adagio - Con moto
II. Con moto
III. Con moto - Vivo - Andante
IV. Con moto - (Adagio) - Più mosso
Friction Quartet:
Otis Harriel, violin
Kevin Rogers, violin
Mitso Floor, viola
Doug Machiz, cello
Program Notes
Besides by Loren Loiacono is a piece that Friction Quartet first encountered in 2016 at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, in Detroit, Michigan. As a part of the Shouse Institute, two quartets were invited every year to the festival to perform and be mentored by some incredible quartets, including the Emerson Quartet. As a part of the program each quartet was also matched with a composer who would write a piece to be premiered at the festival. We created some relationships with composers at that festival that have resulted in some of our favorite collaborations and wonderful commissions, like the music of Piers Hellawell. We were not paired with Loren during our time at Great Lakes in 2016, but we came to adore the piece she wrote for the program, Besides.
This pieces follows a three movement structure that is centered around the last movement. This movement directly quotes the melody of A chantar m'er de so qu'ieu non volria, a surviving cancos (song) from the 13th century written by the Comtessa de Dia, whose name was perhaps Beatriz or Isadora. This ancient piece is the only surviving song by a female troubadour with melody and lyrics intact. The movement is crafted as a reimagining and expansion of the original melody, weaving its way across the quartet, either in lonely pairs or in the full terrifying force of the whole group. The other movements frame this longer movement as an expansion of perhaps what this enigmatic ancient composer could have written - and paradoxically have little shared material with the original melody. A nocturne introduction slowly suggests rippling movement and a whirlwind and rustic dance movement provide exactly the right context for the original melodic inspiration for the piece, A Chantar M’er.
As I remember Loren introducing this piece all the way back in 2016, she talked a little bit about the title Besides. She discussed the creative process of creating a piece from “nothing” and the whimsical nature of inspiration. She related how when starting a creative endeavor, you may have an idea and then the thing you actually produce may be something not at all related to that original idea. Just like in the process of sculpting or woodworking where you are left with a lot of extra material, so you are left with material when composing. This stuff can be useful or not, but sometimes it is that stuff left behind or stumbled upon that can sometimes make for a great piece of art. So in the way that the piece Besides is both based on a pre-existing idea and also entirely original, so are many creative pursuits.
-Otis Harriel
unveiling by Isaac Schankler
The root word for "apocalypse" can be literally translated as unveiling. We can imagine the apocalypse not as a single event but as an ongoing process, where long-held, cherished beliefs give way to painful truths. This piece runs the gamut of reactions to this process: fear, disillusionment, anger, sorrow, determination, acceptance. It reckons with the music of the past and present (clipping, Shostakovich, Low, Beethoven) through this lens, sometimes lifting material wholesale, sometimes smearing it beyond recognition.
unveiling was commissioned by the Friction Quartet, who have my greatest thanks.
- Isaac Io Schankler
Cathedral of Light by Juhi Bansal is a wonderful, fast and short journey. Commissioned by the Hartt School for the Uncertainty of Fate Festival, Cathedral of Light draws upon imagery of looking for light in dark places, using a simple melody elaborated, orchestrated and constantly reinvented through varying shades of color. It is wonderful that sometimes the simplest inspiration can be the most effective. Throughout history composers have been inspired by the music they hear and interact with, but also the physical world. This piece uses the color of the quartet to achieve its goal of painting a scene, and I’m sure if you close your eyes you while listening you will both see and hear what this music evokes.
-Otis Harriel
String Quartet no. 1 “Kreutzer Sonata” by Leoš Janáček is one of my absolute favorite string quartets of all time. I still remember hearing Janáček’s music for the first time when I was in high school; it was performed by Takács Quartet and I had my mind blown. I had no idea when this composer was writing music, all I knew is I wanted to hear more! How sad I was to learn that although he was a prolific composer, he only began composing fruitfully in his mature writing style in his late sixties and then died a few short years later.
His life is a story very unlike the Mozarts and Mendelssohns of the world - a serially unsuccessful composer until his later years, he struggled to have his compositions recognized throughout his life. This changed when he met Kamila Stösslová, who became his muse. She was the primary motivation for his most famous compositions and his abundant period of composition near the end of his life. Despite being 38 years her senior and both of them being married, he continued nearly daily correspondence with her, revealing a deep love that certainly crossed into the realms of obsession and delusion. Janáček wrote over 700 letters (perhaps over 1000) to Kamila over the years they knew each other and they continually grew in their ardent fervor. He professes his love for her, admonishes her for not replying, describes to her in detail how he has inserted her as characters in operas and other musical works, and refers to her as “his soul”. Despite this, his intense interest remained—unsurprisingly—unrequited. Kamila often did not write back, and when she did she remained emotionally aloof and cordial. She never attended the premieres of the works that Janáček wrote about her and did not seem to care for his music.
It is no surprise that with a background like this Janáček was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s story The Kreutzer Sonata. This story is named after a Beethoven violin sonata dedicated to the French violinist, Rodolphe Kreutzer. For a slight bit of context and a humorous backstory: this violin sonata originally was dedicated to the British violinist of African descent, George Bridgewater. Unfortunately this dedication was not to last, as they had a personal quarrel reportedly over some comments Bridgewater made about a woman Beethoven cherished. This history is dubious, but whether or not the story is true, Beethoven did remove Bridgewater’s name and replaced it with Kreutzer’s name. Kreutzer then never performed the work, as he didn’t seem to like it at all. This particular sonata is a very difficult and passionate work amongst Beethoven’s violin sonatas and is featured in Tolstoy’s story of the same name.
In Tolstoy’s story the plot is relayed to the narrator by an inconsolable man who has murdered his supposedly adulterous wife in a fit of rage. The man is consumed by regret and disillusionment with his marriage and connects these thoughts to his feelings of rage and jealousy. Throughout this retelling, the character’s wife, who is a pianist, has been practicing the Kreutzer Sonata with her supposed lover, a violinist. The music takes center stage as the man spends pages of the story describing his wild and dangerous reaction to the passionate music and the situation as he sees it. This story was absolutely scandalous when released and has been banned many times throughout its history. The thrust of the plot deals with the questions of passion, love and marriage. When this story was written is of importance - it was conceived of and written after Tolstoy’s spiritual awakening, in which he began to literally interpret Jesus’ moral teachings and became a Christian Anarchist and pacifist. Surprisingly, the moral of the story is about the immorality and passions of infatuation and love - seemingly side-stepping the immorality of murder, or at least providing a framework and justification for it. Though this story has experienced years of discussion and continues to foster differing interpretations, it is hard not to imagine that the collateral damage in this story is Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Seemingly linked with obsession, passion, murder and lust, the art itself is almost a rationalization for the plot of the story - as if the art was powerful enough to cause the actions of the characters involved.
So with a story mired in all of the feeling that Janáček seems to be experiencing late in his life, he decides this is his inspiration for his first quartet. Comically, Janáček manages to write a piece that would be even more fitting to be inserted into Tolstoy’s story as a plot device. Did Janáček read Tolstoy’s story in agreement with his assessment that passion and love is a vice in society or did he read it in disagreement of this thesis? We will never know, but it is clear that the piece is full of completely unrestricted passion. From one stop to another, the piece is almost entirely full of transitions from one extreme to another. I love how absolutely committed the music is to an almost picture based story. Whether or not it has any themes that directly connect it to Beethoven’s sonata or Tolstoy’s story is an open debate, but it surely shares the same obsessive quality of Janáček’s final years and the passionate and twisted nature of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata.
If you do decide to read Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, I highly recommend also reading two books in response to it, both written by Sophia Tolstaya, his wife. These provide extra context into not only his life, but hers. She was simultaneously incensed by his story and wanted to respond to it and also worked tirelessly to keep the original story from being banned. These books are Whose Fault? and Song Without Words, and although they were written in the 1890’s, they were only published in the year 2000.
-Otis Harriel
Bios
Friction Quartet, lauded for performances described as "terribly beautiful" (San Francisco Classical Voice), "stunningly passionate" (Calgary Herald), and "exquisitely skilled" (ZealNYC), is dedicated to modernizing the chamber music experience and expanding the string quartet repertoire. The quartet achieves its mission by commissioning cutting-edge composers, curating imaginative concert programs, collaborating with diverse artists, and engaging in interactive educational outreach.
Friction made their debut at Carnegie Hall in 2016 as participants in the Kronos Quartet Fifty for the Future Workshop. They returned in March of 2018 to perform George Crumb’s Black Angels as part of “The 60’s” festival and their performance was described as, “one of the truest and most moving things I’ve ever heard or seen.” (Zeal NYC)
Since forming in 2011, Friction has commissioned 43 works for string quartet and given world premiere performances of more than 80 works. They developed the Friction Commissioning Initiative in 2017 as a way to work together with their audience to fund specific commissions. The $14,000 raised to date has helped Friction commission a total of 12 new works, including six by young composers between the ages 16 and 21. They were awarded a 2019 Intermusic SF Musical Grant to develop a participatory educational program with composer Danny Clay that is designed to be accessible and sensory-friendly. The project is slated to premiere in the Fall of 2020 at the Pomeroy Recreation and Rehabilitation Center in San Francisco. Friction’s past grants include a grant from Chamber Music America that was used to commission a piano quintet from Andy Akiho, which debuted in November 2016, as well as project grants from Intermusic SF and Zellerbach Family Foundation supporting special projects involving the performance of commissioned works.
While Friction has garnered international attention as commissioners and interpreters of new music, they are also devoted to performing masterworks of the string quartet repertoire at the highest level. They won Second Prize in the 2016 Schoenfeld Competition, they were quarter-finalists in the 2015 Fischoff Competition and placed second at the 2015 Frances Walton Competition
Friction has held residencies at the New Music for Strings Festival in Denmark, Interlochen Arts Camp, Lunenburg Academy of Music in Nova Scotia, Napa Valley Performing Arts Center, Old First Concerts, San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music, and was the first ensemble in residence at the Center for New Music.
Friction Quartet is dedicated to building new audiences for contemporary music through interactive musical enrichment programs. They are participating for the third consecutive year in the San Francisco Symphony’s Adventures in Music program, visiting over 60 public schools annually. They are Ensemble Partners with Young Composers & Improvisors Workshop, workshopping and premiering new works written by young composers in the Bay Area. They have also given presentations at Oakland public schools through KDFC’s Playground Pop Up program. In collaboration with Meridian Hill Pictures, they created a short documentary, titled Friction, that profiles their early educational outreach in Washington DC’s Mundo Verde Public Charter School. Their presentations regularly utilize Doug’s adventurous arrangements of Pop songs alongside excerpts from standard string quartet repertoire to help young audiences build connections to musical concepts.
Friction appears on recordings with National Sawdust Tracks, Innova Records, Albany Records, Pinna Records, and many independent releases. They released their full-length debut album, resolve, in 2018 through Bandcamp. Friction has appeared on radio stations such as NPR, KALW, KING-FM, and KUT, among others.
Friction’s video of the second movement of First Quartet by John Adams was named the #2 video of the year in 2015 by Second Inversion. John Adams shared this video on his own homepage and called it “spectacular.” Their video for Andy Akiho’s In/ Exchange, featuring Friction and Akiho, was also chosen by Second Inversion for their Top 5 videos of 2016. The video was also featured on American Public Media’s Performance Today.
Friction Quartet takes risks to enlarge the audience’s understanding of what a string quartet can be using arrangements of pop music, digital processing, percussion, amplification, movement, and additional media. Their multimedia and interdisciplinary projects have received critical acclaim. In 2017 they produced Spaced Out, an evening-length suite of music about the cosmos that utilizes surround sound electronics and includes a Friction Commission written by Jon Kulpa. The San Francisco Classical Voice called it “accessible, yet surreal.” No matter where their musical exploration takes them, they never lose sight of the string quartet’s essence– the timeless and endlessly nuanced interaction of four analog voices.
Isaac Io Schankler is a composer, accordionist, and electronic musician living in Los Angeles. Their music has been described as “powerful” (Sequenza21), “delightful” (I Care If You Listen), “ingenious” (The Artificialist), “masterfully composed” (Boston Musical Intelligencer), and “the antidote to sentimentality” (LA Times).
Schankler’s performances and commissions include works for the Nouveau Classical Project, the Ray-Kallay Duo, Friction Quartet, gnarwhallaby, the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, Lorelei Ensemble, Juventas New Music Ensemble, flutist Meerenai Shim, and bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood. Recent honors include awards and grants from Meet the Composer, the National Opera Association, the American Composers Forum, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the American Prize. Schankler is a past winner of the USC Sadye J. Moss Composition Prize and the ASCAP/Lotte Lehmann Foundation Art Song Competition.
As a composer for video games, Schankler has written music for critically acclaimed and award-winning independent games, including Ladykiller in a Bind, Analogue: A Hate Story, Hate Plus, Redshirt, and Depression Quest.
As a writer and researcher, Schankler has written numerous articles for NewMusicBox, the multimedia publication of New Music USA, and in 2013 was a winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism. Their writing has also appeared in the International Journal of Arts and Technology, Computer Music Journal, and the proceedings of various international conferences.
Schankler is the artistic director of the concert series People Inside Electronics, and holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from the University of Southern California, as well as Master of Music and Bachelor of Music degrees in composition from the University of Michigan. Schankler is currently Associate Professor of Music at Cal Poly Pomona, where they teach composition, music technology, and music theory.
“Radiant and transcendent”, the music of Juhi Bansal weaves together themes celebrating musical and cultural diversity, nature and the environment, and strong female role models. Her music draws upon elements as disparate as Hindustani music, the spectralists, progressive metal, musical theatre and choral traditions to create deeply expressive, evocative sound-worlds. As an Indian composer brought up in Hong Kong, her work draws subtly upon both those traditions, entwining them closely and intricately with the gestures of western classical music.
Recent projects include Love, Loss and Exile, a song cycle on poetry by Afghan women commissioned by Songfest; Songs from the deep, a new orchestral work inspired by humpback whale songs commissioned by the Oregon Mozart Players; and Waves of Change, a digital operatic short on womanhood, identity and clash of cultures inspired by the story of the Bangladesh Girls Surf Club. Working across orchestra, choral music, opera, chamber music, art song and electronics, recent seasons have included commissions from the Tonhalle Düsseldorf, Virginia Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Beth Morrison Projects, Choral Arts initiative, New York Virtuoso Singers and more. Her music has been featured on several Grammy nominated albums, and is regularly performed throughout the U.S. Europe and Asia.
A conductor as well as composer, she has been awarded fellowships by the Douglas Moore Fund for American Opera, the Atlantic Music Center, Seasons Music Festival, Oregon Bach Festival Composer’s Symposium, and the Pacific Music Festival. She frequently premieres the work of other composers and accompanies singers at the piano.
The music of Loren Loiacono has been described as “plush...elusive” (New York Times), “vivid and colorful” (Albany Times Union), “dreamy, lilting” (Pioneer Press), and “quirky and fun” (Bad Entertainment- Twin Cities). An emerging orchestral voice, Loiacono has received commissions and performances from such nationally esteemed ensembles as the Detroit Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Sacramento Philharmonic, Lexington Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra. She frequently collaborates with the Albany Symphony, partnering with them to create new concerti for Sandbox Percussion (2022) and pianist Vicky Chow (2018). Dr. Loiacono also served as the Albany Symphony’s Mellon Composer-Educator-in-Residence for the 2017-18 season.
Loiacono is a prolific creator of chamber and vocal music, with performances by ensembles and performers including clarinetist Anthony McGill; pianist Xak Bjerken; cellist Peter Stumpf; New Morse Code; Latitude 49; the New York Virtuosi Singers; Music from Copland House; Transit New Music Ensemble; and the JACK, FLUX, Friction, Argus and Altius String Quartets. Current project include a new piano trio for the Merz Trio, to premiere in spring 2023, and Primum Non Nocere, an ongoing multimedia collaboration with piano duo HereNowHear.
Loiacono has received awards from ASCAP's Morton Gould Awards, New York Youth Symphony’s First Music Commissioning Program, the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute, and others. In 2015, she was a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, where her “Stout With Another Man’s Song” was performed by the New Fromm Players. In 2017, she received the ASCAP Foundation Fellowship for Composition at the Aspen Music Festival & School.
Loiacono served as Executive Director of the internationally-acclaimed MATA Festival from 2019-2021, and is a co-founder of New York’s Kettle Corn New Music concert series. A native of Long Island, New York, she holds degrees from Cornell University (D.M.A.) and Yale University (M.M./B.A.). She has held teaching positions at Colgate University, SUNY Purchase, and the Kaufman Music Center, and currently serves as Assistant Professor at Syracuse University’s Setnor School of Music.