“Day of the Dead” is one of Mexico ’s oldest and most traditional festivals, wonderfully colorful, lively and macabre. SRS Chamber Players honor renowned Mexican composers Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas. Trio Nuevo Amanecer enhances the evening with their harmonic vocals and stirring melodies.

 

The program begins with an audio/visual presentation by Linda Lemus about the meaning and significance of Día de los Muertos and includes images of artifacts and celebrations from throughout Latin America .

 

Artwork, sculpture and written memories of loved ones created by students from Sonoma Country Day School will surround a decorated Day of the Dead ofrenda (altar) in the lobby. Listening for a Change will screen their oral history project featuring interviews of Mexican-American residents by students of Luther Burbank School

 

An extraordinary chamber music series that commemorates Mexico's "Day of the Dead;" the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II; and Jewish composers who perished in the Holocaust.

 

The Festival of Remembrance is a collaborative community event that encourages audiences and performers to examine their understanding of these significant historical events in light of the evocative music presented on stage.

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez jointly created a modern Mexican music from two very different points of view. Chávez liked to evoke the essentially lost music of Mexico's pre-Columbian past, the ancient, even prehistoric world of the Mexican landscape and people. Revueltas lived very much in the present and drew upon the music heard in the plazas of the cities. He eagerly absorbed folk and popular traditions, the music of the streets, the sounds of the twentieth century, both in terms of musical language and the sheer speed and volume. The tunes in his works, though seldom literal quotations, bear a popular imprint; they are enriched with bold, high-contrast instrumentation and dissonant harmonies or doublings (often in parallel sevenths).

Chávez was polished, professional. Revueltas avoids smooth, carefully crafted transitions, too, as contrary to the style of the plaza; rather, a sudden pause and a lurch into a new beginning takes listener and player from one theme to another. It cannot be a surprise that he was particularly inspired by Stravinsky (who, of course, had done much the same thing with Russian folk elements in his most influential works). The suggestion of popular source material, the sometimes deliberate roughness of his music, its refusal to create graceful links and plush sonorities, has reminded some listeners, especially in the United States, of Charles Ives. But Revueltas remained always fundamentally Mexican.

Chávez, by then conductor of the Mexico Symphony Orchestra, called Revueltas back to Mexico City in 1929, to take the post of assistant conductor. For a few years, they jointly promoted the cause of modern Mexican music, but relations between them became strained and led to a break about 1935. No doubt there are several reasons for this development. Revueltas was a political and social radical, while Chávez increasingly represented the establishment. This gives rise to the common, if somewhat facile, juxtaposition viewing Revueltas as a man of the people and Chávez the bourgeois and authoritarian figure. On top of this, Revueltas was a very difficult man to deal with on a social level, however courageously he clung to his artistic ideals. The alcoholism that killed him was almost certainly brought on by a manic-depressive syndrome against which he struggled without avail. Yet of the two conductors, Revueltas—the second in command—was more popular with the players in the Mexico Symphony Orchestra.

Following Revueltas’ death, much of his music passed for a time into oblivion. Chávez , on the other hand, continued to compose (he lived almost twice as long as Revueltas), and he made a close friend of Aaron Copland, who loved to vacation in Mexico and who invited him (and a group of other composers from Central and South America) to study at Tanglewood in 1946, giving them an entrée into the musical world of the United States.

For too long we north of the border have paid little attention to the varied, brilliant, flourishing culture of an entire continent to our south, and even to our closest neighbor. Chávez and Revueltas reveal two fascinating and contrasting aspects of its musical life.

CARLOS CHÁVEZ
String Quartet No. 3
Trained primarily as a pianist, but also a significant conductor who was active in both Mexico and the United States, Chávez worked especially in the larger forms (including six symphonies) and in writing for the stage. In fact, his String Quartet No. 3 appeared first in a quite different guise as part of a score commissioned in 1943 by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation as a ballet for Martha Graham with the title Daughter of Colchis. The “daughter of Colchis,” of course, is the sorceress Medea, who fell in love with Jason when he sailed to her land to steal the Golden Fleece. Her passion for him induced her to help him rob her own father of the land’s most valuable and renowned object. Later, in a rage at Jason’s agreeing to marry another woman Medea murdered their children. (This version of her story, perhaps the best-known of many, seems to have been invented by Euripides for one of his most famous tragedies.) The subject matter appealed to Graham, who frequently investigated mythological imagery, and extremes of human emotion, in her dances.

Chávez’s score for the ballet was composed for two quartets, one of strings, one of winds. By the time the ballet appeared in 1946, Graham had completely changed the scenario of the original plan and changed the title to Dark Meadow. (Though she liked mythological ideas, she often chose to present them in the abstract, as love, hate, jealousy, and revenge.) When he had finished with the score, Chávez converted it into two other pieces, an orchestral Suite and the present string quartet.

The quartet is laid out in three movements, in a familiar fast-slow-fast pattern. An assertive opening phrase reappears in various instruments, often with a light pulsing rhythmic accompaniment. The middle of the movement builds to an intense rhythmic outburst with rows of fast triplets bursting forth, and finally returning to the material of the opening, but rather more intensely.

The slow movement begins with poignant, sustained material, drawing on a viola theme from the beginning of the quartet. Another theme, derived from another part of the ballet, moves in an ascending spiral.

The finale is almost as long as the other two movements combined. Chávez called it a fugato because of the extensive development of the principal theme, using contrapuntal devices such as augmentation (putting the theme in longer note values), diminution (the opposite, using shorter note values), and fragmentation. These techniques serve to intensify that musical expression as Chávez approaches the strong unison conclusion.

SILVESTRE REVUELTAS
String Quartet No. 4, Música de Feria
Born on the last day of 1899 (and six months after Chávez), Silvestre Revueltas was a child of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. His life’s work was revolutionary—so much so that it tended to be overlooked, particularly after his tragic death, which came far too soon, at the age of forty. This was longer than the lives of Schubert or Mozart, but, like Mussorgsky, alcoholism cut him off in his prime, when he when he and his compatriot Carlos Chávez were jointly creating a modern Mexican music from two very different points of view.

Revueltas aimed at first for a career as a violinist. After studies in Mexico City from 1913 to 1916, he went to St. Edward College in San Antonio, Texas (1916-1918), followed by two years at the Chicago Musical College, where he studied composition with Felix Borowski. When he returned to Mexico in 1929, he began to compose with extraordinary speed, turning out his life’s work in the decade that remained to him. The “new” Revueltas really appeared in his four string quartets, all composed between June 1930 and March 1932. The fourth string quartet, completed on March 25, 1932, is extraordinarily compact and mature. It unfolds in a single movement which, however, moves through a series of changing tempi: Allegro--Vivo--Lento--Allegro--Presto. The manuscript bears the heading Música de Feria, an ambiguous title that might mean “Weekday music” or “Music for a day off.” With a rich variety of sonorities--sometimes approaching the quasi-orchestral, with hints of the trumpets and percussion that are so typical of his larger work—Revueltas shapes the piece with brilliant fast themes and wonderfully lyric slow themes, unfolding with all sorts of special colors from the string quartet.

A sudden outburst of rushing dissonance opens the piece, turning soon into a rhythmic march that underlies a good part of the movement. A passage featuring the two violins playing in parallel high above the “percussion” instruments implied by viola and cello, evokes characteristic Mexican melodic features without specific quotation. This suddenly collapses into the quiet lyricism of the Lento in which low and high instruments take turns in a pensive song, then join in duet. The march character returns still more energetically, though lyrical melodies appear over the march rhythm, too. The contained energy finally bursts out in the Presto that drives on to the conclusion.