Program Notes

This program is about inflection points, singular moments that change the trajectory of a life, and is designed to parallel the imagined lives of Tracey Meyer’s Archway Gallery exhibition What Shapes Us.

Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte is a meditation on one of these inflection points – a surprising chord change in a Haydn string quartet she loves. Shaw’s mastery of and love for the historic genre of the string quartet are clear, but she also paints with a personal and vivid palette of colors, including ghostly ‘air sounds,’ sighing slides, and snappy pizzicato.

Caleb Burhans’s Contritus is a study in near-imperceptible change, in the way that you wake up one day and realize you’re a different person than you were a year ago. The piece’s shimmering textures belie the minute details shifting below the surface, but those minutiae promise inevitable consequences, as the music transforms from something both icy cold and inhumanly beautiful to a warm, comforting embrace.

Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 is comprised of six pieces taken from his score for the 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese writer who came of age during World War II, and the societal pressures of wartime Japan led him from an abusive and closeted childhood to becoming a far-right reactionary who believed post-war Japan was too soft, rejecting traditional values in favor of a more global democracy. Eventually, Mishima led a militia group in attempting a coup d’état to restore the power of the emperor, which failed at the first hurdle and ended in ritual suicide. Glass represents the many layers of this complicated, contradictory life with undulating textures arranged with his signature clockwork precision. The pieces in the quartet are taken from the scenes in which Mishima is remembering his childhood, and the small moments that perhaps could have led him down a different, more hopeful path.

Taken together, these pieces examine different ways that points of inflection can shape an entire life or narrative. In the Burhans, it’s from within; in the Glass, it’s from the external material conditions of society; in the Shaw, it’s in the more abstracted, elemental medium of music itself.

If you are in Houston, please consider taking some time in the next few days to visit Montrose’s Archway Gallery and see Tracey Meyer’s exhibit, open until December 3rd – photographs do not do her work justice. Many thanks are owed to Tracey and John Slaby for their generosity, kindness, and inspiration, without which this program could not have happened.

— written by Sebastian Stefanovic