April 17, 2025
7:00pm MDT
Muse Performance Space
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A masterworks concert in which The Playground String Quartet explores humanity’s relationship with the Earth and Sky through some of America’s front-running national composers - Caroline Shaw, John Luther Adams, Raven Chacon, Terry Riley, and Gabriela Smith.

6:30 pm doors, 7:00 pm show.

Sarah Whitnah, Violin
Robyn Julyan, Violin
Allyson Stibbards, Viola
David Short, Cello

Program

The Wind in High Places by John Luther Adams (2011)

I. Above Sunset Pass
III. Looking Toward Hope

“I’ve long been enamored with the ethereal tones of Aeolian harps—instruments that draw their music directly from the wind. The Wind in High Places treats the string quartet as a large, sixteen-stringed harp.

All the sounds in the piece are produced as natural harmonics or on open strings. Over the course of almost twenty minutes, the fingers of the musicians never touch the fingerboards of the instruments.

If I could’ve found a way to make this music without them touching the instruments at all, I would have.”

Plan & Elevation by Caroline Shaw (2015)

IV. The Orangery
V. The Beech Tree

“I have always loved drawing the architecture around me when traveling, and some of my favorite lessons in musical composition have occurred by chance in my drawing practice over the years. While writing a string quartet to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, I returned to these essential ideas of space and proportion — to the challenges of trying to represent them on paper. The title, Plan & Elevation, refers to two standard ways of representing architecture — essentially an orthographic, or “bird’s eye,” perspective (“plan”), and a side view which features more ornamental detail (“elevation”). This binary is also a gentle metaphor for one’s path in any endeavor — often the actual journey and results are quite different (and perhaps more elevated) than the original plan. 

I was fortunate to have been the inaugural music fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2014-15. Plan & Elevation examines different parts of the estate’s beautiful grounds and my personal experience in those particular spaces. Each movement is based on a simple ground bass line which supports a different musical concept or character. … The fourth movement, “The Orangery,” is evokes the slim, fractured shadows in that room as the light tries to peek through the leaves of the aging fig vine. We end with my favorite spot in the garden, “The Beech Tree.” It is strong, simple, ancient, elegant, and quiet; it needs no introduction.”

The Journey of the Horizontal People by Raven Chacon (2016)

“The Journey of the Horizontal People is a future creation story telling of a group of people traveling from west to east, across the written page, contrary to the movement of the sun, but involuntarily and unconsciously allegiant to the trappings of time. With their bows, these wanderers sought out others like them, knowing that they could survive by finding these other clans who resided in the east, others who shared their linear cosmologies. It is told that throughout the journey, in their own passage of time, this group became the very people they were seeking.”

Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector by Terry Riley (1980)

“This work first came about as a minor key extension of Rainbow in Curved Air (1968), and some of the material appeared in a 1973 recording I made as a soundtrack for Lex Yeux Fermés, by the French filmmaker Joël Santoni. The ancestor to this version for string quartet, with this title, was composed in 1975, and premiered in a series of concerts I gave at RIAS in Berlin the next year. The title occurred to me one morning over breakfast during a conversation with Delphine Santoni, Joël's seven-year old daughter: we talked about how there might be a collector who came around every day and gathered up all the dreams so that they could be redistributed the next day.

In 1980, when David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet asked me to compose some music for what was then a very young group, I chose this work as a starting point. It had been over ten years since I had written any music on paper, as I was occupying myself at that time with keyboard improvisation and the study of North Indian raga. But I felt the atmosphere of this work would be very appropriate for strings. I was convinced that the modular construction of the music would allow the quartet members freedom to use their performance skills to enhance its basic melodic and rhythmic framework, and to give it a shape that would reflect their insights regarding its musical content and feeling. The way I envision it, the work should always be able to be reformed or reconstructed. Even though there's a written score, it is very much like what you'd have with a jazz head arrangement.”

Carrot Revolution by Gabriela Smith (2015)

“I wrote Carrot Revolution in 2015 for my friends the Aizuri Quartet. It was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia for their exhibition The Order of Things, in which they commissioned three visual artists and myself to respond to Dr. Barnes’ distinctive “ensembles,” the unique ways in which he arranged his acquired paintings along with metal objects, furniture, and pottery, juxtaposing them in ways that bring out their similarities and differences in shape, color, and texture. While walking around the Barnes, looking for inspiration for this string quartet, I suddenly remembered a Cézanne quote I’d heard years ago (though which I later learned was misattributed to him): “The day will come when a single, freshly observed carrot will start a revolution.” And I knew immediately that my piece would be called Carrot Revolution. I envisioned the piece as a celebration of that spirit of fresh observation and of new ways of looking at old things, such as the string quartet – a 250-year-old genre – as well as some of my even older musical influences (Bach, Perotin, Gregorian chant, Georgian folk songs, and Celtic fiddle tunes). The piece is a patchwork of my wildly contrasting influences and full of weird, unexpected juxtapositions and intersecting planes of sound, inspired by the way Barnes’ ensembles show old works in new contexts and draw connections between things we don’t think of as being related.”

Dark Skies by Abby Kellems (2023)

“Dark Skies was written for Weathering Steel, the Plein Air Sound Collective's debut album of site specific music, and recorded in May 2023 at the Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado. The Tank is an empty steel water cistern with extraordinary acoustic properties, including a natural decay reverb of up to forty seconds.

Rangely is remote, and the careful protection of its skies from light pollution has made it a haven for stargazing. Dark Skies celebrates the quiet brilliance of the night sky and those who strive to preserve it. It's a love letter to stargazing amongst friends, and protecting things that are special.”