Tuesday, September 24, 7:30pm
Kretschmer Recital Hal, Art and Music Center
Aquinas College (map)
Carmen Maret, flute, alto flute, tambin (West-African flute)
Chris Martin, violin, viola
Andrew Bergeron, guitar
Flutist Carmen Maret and guitarist Andrew Bergeron of the duo Folias combine with Grand Rapids Symphony violinist and Aquinas faculty member Christopher Martin for a chamber concert in Kretschmer Recital Hall on Tuesday, September 24 at 7:30pm. The program features Andrew Bergeron’s new work The Border Trilogy for flute and guitar, and Sotres a flute, violin and guitar piece inspired by his travels in northern Spain. Carmen Maret also premiers her trio called Buenos Aries Cab Ride and a work for African flute and guitar based on her experiences in Guinea, West Africa. The program also includes works by Paganini, Piazzolla, Schickele, and Folias arrangements of traditional Argentine tangos.
This concert is free and open to the public!
Program Notes
Scotch Bonnet (2012)
Andrew Bergeron and Carmen Maret
Premiered, Aquinas College
The name Scotch Bonnet is a reference to the variety of chili pepper with the same name and which happens to be five times hotter than the jalapeño. Carmen wanted to write a salsa piece for flute and guitar and when she handed it off to Andrew he integrated formal structures and counterpoint from J.S. Bach’s dance suites. When we play this, we tell people to think what would happen if Bach ate one of these waxy colorful peppers before he wrote music.
Border Trilogy (2012)
Andrew Bergeron
Premiered, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan
The Border Trilogy was written in 2012 and it speaks to many borders: musical borders of flamenco, tango, and classical; geographical borders between the United States, Mexico, and Canada; narrative borders of human versus nature; and in its original version, borders of timbre. The piece was originally written for flute, violin, bass clarinet, trumpet and guitar. In addition, it is inspired by two series of fiction books that deal with themes in the post-apocalyptic/American Western novel, Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, and Stephen King’s Dark Tower Series.
Mariscal Mines started as an improvisation Andrew played at the Mariscal Mine on the Texas-Mexico border. The site is now an abandoned mercury (also known as “quicksilver) mine that was employed mostly by Mexican workers. It can only be reached today by a dusty, four-wheel drive two track that rambles along the Rio Grande. Musically this movement is inspired by flamenco guitar.
The title for the second movement, Gunslinger, is the namesake of Roland Deschain of Gilead, the fictional character and main protagonist in Stephen King’s magnum opus The Dark Tower Series. In this set of 8 books, Roland descends from a long line of “gunslingers” who are the keepers of peace and diplomacy. His journey begins with the quest for “The Man in Black” in an alter-universe likened to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Musically the piece is gentle and is an analogy to a time gone in the west where a solitary spirit wanders the land. The opening and closing lines of the whole Dark Tower Series mirror this sentiment, “The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the Gunslinger followed.” The rhythmic structure is based on a slow Argentine milonga (a country style dance), however one beat is chopped off making the composite 7 instead of 8.
Black Warrior is an abandoned mine in the mountains of the North Cascades located in the Horseshoe Basin, an amazing glacial cirque that is reached by taking a 55 mile boat ride from the mainland, a 9 mile dirt road, and then a 12 mile hiking trail. This mine was abandoned in the 1950s; it was not profitable in such a remote place, and the time frame in which it is was snow free was so small. We spent two weeks in the North Cascades, hosted by a national park ranger named Mark Scherer who gave us a place to write music and a reason to walk over mountains.
Andrew dedicates the piece to Roland Deschain, John Grady Cole, and Mark Scherer.
Mamba Guineé (2013)
Carmen Maret
Premiered, Falling Rock Café, Munising, Michigan
This piece was written after a visit to Guineé, a small country in West Africa where Carmen went with a group of Aquinas College students last spring. She studied the African flute with Mamady Mansare, the principal flutist of Les Ballets Africains, the national dance company of Guineé. He is a descendent of a family style of West African flute making and playing that dates back to the 1300’s. The flute heard here, called the tambin, was made 17 years ago by Mamady Mansare.
The piece is modeled after several West African music features: rhythmic/polyphonic counterpoint, percussive ostinatos that mimic the sound of the balaphon (a wooden keyed percussion instrument similar to the marimba) and melodic storytelling/improvisations of West African griots. Carmen relied on her own transcriptions of recordings by the group Bembeya Jazz to help her understand how she could incorporate traditional West African music with Western classical music. The greatest challenge was combining equal and “non-equal” tunings between the tambin and the guitar.
The name mamba is a reference to the black mamba, West Africa’s longest and most venomous snakes. Carmen saw one in the hills outside Conakry hanging out it the bamboo at one at one of the group lunch stops. The Africans told her it was good luck!
A Little Welcome Serenade (1975)
Peter Schickele
Born 1935
Peter Schickele is a household name in American music best known for his work as a musical satirist who performs under the alter ego P.D.Q. Bach, the “youngest and the oddest of the twenty-odd children” of Johann Sebastian Bach. While his integration of humor in classical music (of which he has won Grammy awards for) may overshadow his reputation as a “serious” composer, we present you this piece, a set of five short vignettes for flute and violin, none of which contains any of his invented instruments such as the “dill piccolo” (which plays all the sour notes), or the “pastaphone” (an uncooked tube of manicotti played as a horn).
Violin and Guitar Sonata No. 3, Op.3
Niccolò Paganini
Born October 27, 1782, Genoa, Italy
Died May 27, 1840, Nice, France
Paganini was a virtuoso performer and composer who developed his own language and technique for the violin. His most well-known work, 24 Caprices, is a standard part of the violin repertoire. With its extreme double stops, position changes, and string shifts, he dedicated these pieces “To the Artists.” Not unlike many independent musicians today, he struggled to make it as a freelance composer performer boosting his reputation by composing and playing mostly his own stuff combined with theme and variations pieces and reworking pieces that were popular during his time.
The violin and guitar sonata heard here is from a period around 1805 where we had steady work in the Baciocchi court, which was overseen by Napoleon Bonapart’s younger sister Elisa Baciocchi. Paganini lasted only a short time in the court before going off to perform all over Europe. He gained success as a virtuoso then, but was also a notorious gambler and womanizer. Over time the stress of travel, his history of various illnesses and his obsession with gambling led to an early decay, and to his eventual death that went unnoticed. Like many great artists he died broke.
The sonata heard here was however published in 1821 within a set of 12 violin and guitar sonatas, a volume that became Paganini’s only published work during his lifetime.
Sotres (2013)
Tres Canciones
Andrew Bergeron
Premiered, Eastern Upper Peninsula Arts Council, DeTour Village, Michigan
Andrew drafted Sotres in the small mountain village community of Sotres in northern Asturias, Spain. The village is in the Picos de Europa National Park, the famous mountains just off the Atlantic Ocean where cows, goats, and sheep are left to graze, and by European law must stay in the park to produce the famous cabrales blue cheese that comes from this region. In our little house we rented, we were surrounded by jagged peaks and beautiful pastures filled with animals. The weather in Sotres is unpredictable and up at that high of an elevation we were fogged in or rained in for most of the time. This weather allowed Andrew time to conceive and compose the idea for this piece; three instruments, each with their own melody, emerge out of the mountains and present their “songs” to each other in the valley. Eventually they learn to play each other’s songs by a process of pairing off and then later combining their songs in the trio. Each song musically morphs into the next without a stop, making for a short moment of blurring before the next idea is made clear.
Buenos Aires Cab Ride (2013)
Carmen Maret
World Premier
Cab rides in Buenos Aires are notorious, whether from the threat of being robbed or tricked by the driver, or just from the endless barrios (neighborhood) that seems to go on forever. We took our first cab rides in Buenos Aires in the summer of 2012 and each ride felt as if we went around the same spot a few times, and in hindsight, maybe we did.
With this piece, Carmen wanted to write something motivically based, something that combined the feeling of repetition and familiarity even as the tonal centers of the piece change around and around. This is nothing new of course. She had been studying the “Razumovsky” or Middle String Quartets of Beethoven and stole most of the rhythmic and harmonic tricks for Buenos Aires Cab Ride from these three string quartets of Op. 59. There is some use of jazz guitar voicing in the guitar part and some 6/8 versus 3/4 hemiola feel in the main groove that accompanies the melody. This combination of concept and music is a nice mirror for Buenos Aires itself, a city steeped in South American politics, yet encapsulated in European architecture and cultural life.
Nueve de Julio
Corazon de Oro
Verano Porteño
These set of tangos represent three aspects of Argentine tango music: the “straight ahead” tango, the tango vals, and the quintet music of Astor Piazzolla. Nueve de Julio is an “old guard” tango piece written at the turn of the 20th century. Its name refers to the 9th of July, Argentina’s independence day. Corazon de Oro was written by Francisco Canaro, whose orchestra was one of the most recorded in the history of tango. With an estimated 4,000 recorded songs, during his 50 year tango career he spent 10 of it in Europe starting in Paris in 1925 where tango was very popular and then returning back to Buenos Aires where his orchestra remained a staple on the Argentine radio though the 1940s and 1950s.
Verano Porteño (Porteño Summer) is from Astor Piazzolla’s set of four concert pieces inspired by the seasons of Buenos Aires. A porteño is the name for someone from the city of Buenos Aires, the port city, of which Astor Piazzolla is probably the most well known musician.
Program Notes by Bergeron/Maret © 2013