HER MELODY: CELEBRATING WOMEN IN MUSIC
Permian Basin String Quartet
Saturday, January 25 | 5:00PM
Rea-Greathouse Recital Hall @ Wagner Noël PAC

String Quartet #1 in G Major (1929)
Florence Price (1887-1953)
     Allegro
     Andante Moderato

Florence Price was a prolific American composer, best known for her vocal and piano works, but whose compositional output spans the repertoire from solo to orchestral literature. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Price’s musical talent was recognized from a young age, and she attended the prestigious New England Conservatory at 14. She eventually settled in Chicago, where she developed serious collaborations with other Black musicians and artists, including, notably, famed vocalist Marian Anderson. Price is recognized as the first Black woman composer to have a work performed by a major American orchestra, when she won a prize for her Symphony in E Minor and was awarded a performance by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1932.

Though Price gained some national recognition in her lifetime, she faced significant barriers due to her race and gender. For several decades after her death, her music did not receive the attention it deserved for such a gifted composer. In 2009, a collection of her unpublished – and nearly lost – works was found in a house in St. Anne, Illinois, a home that Price had inhabited for several summers in the early 20th century but has since been abandoned. This discovery led to a renewed interest in the performance of and scholarship around Price’s work, and in the past decade her music has begun to be more widely performed around the US and beyond, finally beginning to receive the recognition it so clearly deserves.

Price’s String Quartet in G Major balances a Romantic sensibility with elements inspired by folk music, spirituals, and the blues. The first movement is reminiscent of late Romantic string quartets by composers like Grieg and Borodin. The first theme is sweeping and hopeful, followed by a magical transition to the waltzing second theme first presented in the viola. The second movement takes a more songlike approach, presenting a lushly harmonized folk-inspired melody that begins and ends the movement. The two iterations of this beautiful melody are divided by a contrasting section with a lively lightness reminiscent of ballet music.

- Emlyn Johnson for Pro Musica

String Quartet in E-flat Major (1834)
Fanny Hensel (1805-1847)
     Adagio ma non troppo
     Allegretto
     Romanza
     Allegro molto vivace

Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in E flat major was written in 1834 but based on an unfinished piano sonata she wrote five years before. This extraordinary, rhapsodic work is her only mature string quartet, and, among those currently known to us, is one of the first surviving string quartets written by a woman. Mendelssohn herself reflected wonderingly how she, ‘not an eccentric or overly sentimental person’, had come to write such music; for her this arose from having encountered the ‘exceedingly moving and emotional’ style of Beethoven when she was a child.

Like Clara Schumann, she expressed doubt in her abilities to handle large-scale forms, arguing that she ‘lacked the ability to sustain ideas properly and give them the needed consistency’. Certainly, her forms are unconventional, but the piece works brilliantly in performance. It opens with an extended sombre ‘adagio ma non troppo’, including a lengthy minor-key fugal passage. The spikily playful ‘allegretto’ that follows also leans constantly into the minor key in an extended scherzo-and-trio form. (These two movements were reworked versions of the opening movements of her piano sonata.) Together they lead to the expressive heart of the quartet: the elusive, searching ‘Romanze’, in which Mendelssohn constructs a dreamlike world of German Romanticism in music of astonishing harmonic originality. Some light emerges in the closing ‘allegro molto vivace’, which is initially a playful romp. However, the darker, troubled undertones of the previous movements are not abandoned until the end, when the cobwebs are blown away by the sheer energy of the four players.

The work was performed only once, in private. Her brother disapproved strongly of it, especially of what he perceived as an undisciplined approach to form; possibly as a result, she never wrote another quartet. Equally importantly, however, she did not alter what she had written. Fanny Mendelssohn’s music requires a different performance approach from that of her brother; this performance explores a rawer, more impassioned sound which reveals her distinctness from the public-facing elegance of her brother’s musical world.
-Natasha Loges, 2020

INTERMISSION

String Quartet #3 in A minor, Opus 41 (1842)
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
     Andante espressivo - Allegro molto moderato
     Assai agitato
     Adagio molto
     Finale: Allegro molto vivace

In February of 1842, at age 31, Robert Schumann accompanied his new wife Clara, an eminent concert pianist, on a concert tour to the German cities of Bremen, Oldeburg, and Hamburg. In March, Robert returned alone to their home in Leipzig to fulfill his duties as a critic for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Known more widely as a “scribbler” for the music periodical than as a composer, his catalogue of compositions then consisted almost entirely of piano miniatures and song cycles for voice and piano. It was only in the previous year, 1841, when he composed his “Spring” Symphony, that he first ventured into a large form, a move which he hoped would help him begin to reach a large audience.

Alone in Leipzig, Schumann was visited by what he called “quartet-ish thoughts” and embarked on a study of the string quartets of Mozart and Beethoven. Upon Clara’s return from concerts in Copenhagen, Robert began composing the three string quartets that make up his Op. 41.

In No. 3, the influence of both Mozart and Beethoven is felt immediately, not only in the introduction’s tonal ambiguity, with its unsettling chromatic harmony, but in Schumann’s very brief establishment of the “tonic” (home) key before swiftly journeying into other keys. The two-note descending motive in the first violin, which opens the work, signals the beginning of each of the major sections of the sonata-form movement.

In the second movement Schumann uses a rhythmic technique that gives it the agitato quality in its title: what the listener perceives as downbeats are actually upbeats. Gradually the rhythm reorients itself just in time for a “metric modulation” from three notes per pulse (3/8 time) to a new section in duple 2/4 time. Here the listener is treated to the kind of imitative counterpoint one might hear in a Baroque suite by Bach or Purcell, as Schumann builds a structure of symmetrical ascending and descending phrases infused with unstable harmony.

For the often-brooding Adagio, a repeating ostinato rhythm in the second violin emerges out of a lyrical texture and becomes a kind of heartbeat for the movement.

This same ostinato becomes the generating rhythm for the Finale, whose mercurial sense of pulse is, as in the second movement, the result of accented upbeats. (Despite the vastly different context, the opening chord of the finale is identical to the first chord of the entire work.) A more relaxed middle section, labeled “quasi trio,” leads to a return of the movement’s opening material, which drives the quartet to its rousing finish.

CONCERT PROUDLY SPONSORED BY:
Maridell Fryar

FRIENDS OF PERMIAN BASIN STRING QUARTET:
William Christopher Brown
Denise & Thomas W. Elrod
Maridell Fryar
Ann & Ken Hankins, Jr.
Connie May
Ann Parish
Elizabeth Prentice
Cinthia Salinas
Rachel & Ethan Wills