On September 30-October 5 the Momenta Quartet presents the eighth edition of their annual Momenta Festival. Over four nights, each member curates a diverse chamber music program blending the old and new. In this insider interview, we spoke with each member of the quartet about highlights of the upcoming festival and what gets them excited about each of their programs.
“Looking Back” Curated by Michael Haas
September 30, 2023
Michael, your program is a collection of works that was inspired by the past. How does each piece achieve this?
The idea for this program came about last season when Momenta joined forces with composer Han Lash for a residency at the Eastman School of Music’s Institute for Music Leadership.
When we performed Han Lash’s Suite Remembered and Imagined last year, I was struck by how Lash uses their own 21st-century musical language to modernize a Baroque dance suite. I immediately saw a connection with a piece already in Momenta’s repertoire, More Venerable Canons by Matthew Greenbaum. In that piece, I have always seen parallels between its structure and that of suites by J. S. Bach.
Living composers are not the only ones who look back in time for inspiration! Haydn’s string quartet Op. 20 No. 5, while groundbreaking, concludes with a grand fugue, a style of writing that was no longer fashionable in Haydn’s lifetime.
The program concludes with Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet, a composition which resulted from a burst of inspiration after he studied scores of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
“Earth and Ether” Curated by Emilie-Anne Gendron
October 1, 2023
Emilie, your program features the world premiere of a piece by Elizabeth Brown. Did you commission the work? How did this come about, and what would you like audiences to know about it in advance of the October 1 concert?
The formidably gifted and versatile composer-performer Elizabeth Brown is a longtime friend of Momenta, not to mention a Momenta Festival alumna as both a composer and performer. She is a professional flutist as well as a master of the shakuhachi, theremin, and dan bau; she teaches shakuhachi at Columbia University and Bard College, where she also teaches theremin.
I am excited to be giving the world premiere of her new solo violin work, "Firmament", on October 1. The piece came about a year ago when Elizabeth offered to write me a piece, as she had been mulling over several ideas by that point. Of course I was delighted and honored to be the recipient, and I knew just the right festival for the premiere.
Brown's musical inspiration often comes from literary sources, and this piece draws on two dystopian modern novels: The Wall (1963), by Austrian author Marlen Haushofer, in which a woman awakens while journeying in the wilderness to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall; and Good Morning, Midnight (2016) by American writer Lily Brooks-Dalton, tracing in parallel the paths of an Arctic researcher and an astronaut, for both of whom external communication has been cut off. Brown envisions the violin’s voice as the protagonist navigating these new, suspended realities--aware of both its solitude as well as the firmament eternally surrounding our world.
Not only is the piece beautifully written for the violin, but it shows the composer's mastery of every nuance of texture, mood, and atmosphere. I’d like to add that the composer and critic Kyle Gann described Elizabeth's music as “elegant, quiet, thoughtful, well-crafted...and as bizarre as hell." I can think of no better fit for a Momenta program!
Tell us about the other works on your program.
I titled my program "Earth and Ether", and the other pieces also explore, in their own ways, the joy and pain of the human experience while also contemplating what lies around us and beyond. In addition to Brown’s premiere, I'll be giving the New York premiere of a fiery solo violin work, "Another Prayer" (2012), by the British composer Julian Anderson, inspired by the colors and timbres of Eastern European folk music. The remainder of the program features the entire Momenta Quartet. Jeffrey Mumford's newest quartet, the vividly imagined ...amid still and floating depths (2019) was composed for a consortium of quartets including Momenta; and the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo's String Quartet No. 2 "à Debussy" (1926). It’s an epic journey!
“Momenta à la Mode” Curated by Stephanie Griffin
October 4 2023
Why did you decide to base an entire program on the concept of scales? How does the music of Julián Carrillo fit into that theme?
The impetus behind my Momenta Festival concert was to build a program around Robert Morris’ monumental Carnatic String Quartet (2020), which is based on all 72 melakarta scales in the Carnatic musical tradition of Southern India. Momenta premiered it last year, and this will be its first performance in New York City. I decided to present it in the context of other works in which scales are not simply building blocks, but are truly thematic.
Interestingly, Morris warns against any attempt of the performers to make the piece sound "Indian," although he acknowledges that some sections definitely have a more "Eastern" sound and feel. The greatness of his music comes from the level of imagination he applies to making original and unexpected music within these modes and his ability to spin them into a cohesive whole.
No program centered around scales would be complete without the music of Julián Carrillo (1875 - 1965), the Mexican composer, conductor, violinist, music theorist, and microtonal music pioneer. His music figures prominently in Momenta's repertoire as we recently embarked on the project to record all 13 of his string quartets for Naxos!
I presented an all-Carrillo program on last year's Momenta Festival, about which I wrote, “Carrillo’s most distinguishing characteristic is his absolute obsession with scales. They are not just sets of pitches from which to build melodies; they are the melodies themselves!” This is especially true of his String Quartet No. 12, in which he builds an entire four-movement piece from a single six-note scale, which is literally the main melody of this monothematic work. It is a testament to Carrillo's great skill and imagination that he can evoke such a rich variety of colors and emotions through such simple means.
This past summer, the Momenta Quartet was in residence at the Avaloch Farm Music Institute alongside my friends Arun Ramamurthy and Trina Basu, two Carnatic and avant-jazz violinists. They were working on a new piece based on raga Hemavathi, which is the 58th melakarta scale and forms the basis of a section of Robert Morris' string quartet. I hadn’t originally planned to present Morris' quartet in a specifically Indian context, it’s a special treat to join Arun and Trina in the world premiere of a new trio version of their piece on my Momenta Festival program!
"Szene am Bach" Curated by Alex Shiozaki
October 5, 2023
Alex, your program centers around nature. How does Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 18, No. 6 fit into the evening?
I had to give credit to Beethoven for providing me with the title to my evening: Szene am Bach, or “Scene by the Brook”. This phrase comes from the Sixth Symphony, where it is the title to the second movement. I already had two pieces in mind that painted the scene: Ileana Perez Velazquez's River of Life, and Somei Satoh's A White Heron. Also enjoying the “Bach” “bruch” play on words, I chose a violin solo that quotes a Bach partita: Eugène Ysaÿe's Sonata No. 2.
Thus Beethoven’s Op. 18 No. 6 Quartet was last to the party, added on to the program to pay homage to the composer who graced us with this title. That said, it fits the bill. The exuberant first movement captures a scene full of life, and the many grace notes could be interpreted as the chirping of all sorts of birds. The tranquil second movement is closest in character to the symphonic Pastoral slow movement whose title we borrowed. The third movement is a scherzo with a real-world pulse, giving the illusion of steadiness while constantly skipping a beat from excitement--or panic! And the finale of the quartet--as well as of the evening and the entire Momenta Festival itself--begins with the famed “La Malinconia” (melancholy): a slow introduction that teases you with both sweetly consonant horn fifths and unexpected twists and turns of harmony. This brook moves both fast and slow, populated with small rapids and tranquil pools, with nature flitting and diving over and through its Classical waters.
