Decoda
Reverberations
Performers
Decoda
with Special Guest
Ringdown (Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee Parpan)
Program
COPLAND Midday Thoughts for Solo Piano
HANNAH KENDALL Vera
EISLER Septet No. 1, Op. 92a (Variations on American Children's Songs)
BILLY BRAGG "Eisler on the Go" (arr. Claire Bryant)
RINGDOWN Every Stone in Cambridge Reminds Me of You (World Premiere, commissioned by Carnegie Hall)
COPLAND Appalachian Spring Suite for 13 Instruments
Event Duration
The printed program will last approximately 90 minutes, including one 20-minute intermission.Salon Encores
Join us for a free drink at a post-concert reception in Weill Recital Hall’s Jacobs Room.
Learn More
At a Glance
Reverberations is an exploration of the profound relationship between inspiration and imagination, presenting a series of musical escapades that reveal an interconnected web of influence. Central to the program is the work of Aaron Copland, whose Appalachian Spring and Midday Thoughts both celebrate their 80th anniversaries this year, and whose music sought to carve a place for American music on the concert stage. Copland uses American folk music as source material from which to craft a sonic language, borrowing from, amplifying, distorting, and subverting in the process. Tonight’s special guest collaborators—Ringdown—undertake a resonant composition process with their performance alongside Decoda, building a new multilayered work that refracts elements of Copland’s musical perspective. Hannah Kendall’s brilliant early work Vera suggests a kinship with folk music that is built from a rigorous musical architecture, with a nod to 20th-century iconoclast Arnold Schoenberg. Hanns Eisler, an Expressionist who studied the works of the great Romantics with Schoenberg, uses American children’s songs as a vehicle of inspiration in his charming Septet No. 1. Finally, Decodan Claire Bryant borrows from folk legends Woody Guthrie and Billy Bragg in her resetting of “Eisler on the Go.” An unfinished Guthrie song completed more than 30 years later by another politically active singer-songwriter, this dark ballad depicts Eisler’s exile from America as a result of the anti-communist craze of the 1940s and ’50s. Reverberations celebrates the life cycle of creativity—from inspiration to imagination, from ideas to action—through the art of making music.
—Clara Lyon