The Orchestra Book Club concert of “Music of Boston’s Past, Present, and Future” takes place at the Center for the Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Ave, Somerville on Sunday at 3:00. Details of the concert featuring works of Chadwick, Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee and Yvette Janine Jackson are described HERE. More detail on Chadwick’s Aphrodite in the BMInt feature HERE.
The other day I had the chance to Zoom with Reuben Stern, who, in 2022, had founded the ensemble as a reading orchestra .
LC: I wanted to ask how the idea for this concert came about, with these three pieces?
RS: Absolutely! So the impetus for this concert was your suggestion of bringing Dianne Goolkasian Rahbee’s Piano Sonata to life in the new orchestration by David Rahbee [her son and a conductor].
With the Orchestra Book Club, I focus on programs that have a cohesive theme, a narrative, that will be interesting to discuss and talk about during and after the concert – and definitely music that people may not have heard before, to uplift under-represented voices.
When you approached me, with the Rahbee Sonata, it was very clear that you cared a lot about the composer’s Somerville and Boston-Area heritage, which I thought was really wonderful. So it popped into my mind that it would be really cool to explore more music of the Boston area, in different eras of orchestral music.
I wracked my brain a bit. A very close friend of mine, a conductor up in Buffalo, is an enormous Chadwick fan, suggested the tone poem, Aphrodite. I had never heard it before, but very quickly, perhaps as is fitting, given the subject matter, I fell in love.
Right! A gorgeous work!
Yes! Chadwick was known for his orchestration. He taught at the New England Conservatory, Florence Price was his student, so a lot of her orchestrational chops come from studying with him.
It’s so captivating, I thought that people would really enjoy this, even though they probably never heard of it before, right? And then a title popped into my head. I had the idea of calling the program “music of Boston’s past, present and future.” And my mind went to a professor of mine from Harvard, Janine Yvette Jackson, who does a lot of work with electronics and work that is specifically science fiction and Afro-futurist focused. They have a piece, a commission with the American Composers Orchestra a couple years ago called “Hello, tomorrow!” And what a perfect title to represent the future, and the future of music written in Boston!
So I feel very proud of this trio of pieces.
Dianne Rahbee’s piano Sonata is an incredible Sonata as a piano work ….[one of many recordings is HERE]
Yes, and David Rahbee’s orchestration is quite masterful. I was so pleased when we rehearsed it yesterday It works very well. There’s something almost like Webern-esque about it in certain places. David’s orchestration really uses the Klangfarbenmelodie technique in an effective way. And it’s rhythmically really exciting. The last movement [Toccata] is all mixed meter, back and forth, back and forth. It’s more 14/8 bars than I’ve ever seen in my life!
So it’s fun; also beyond fun, very emotionally impactful.
I love the clockwork of the tiny second movement, but then it also kind of melts, so it’s not entirely mechanical.
Yes, that’s one of the things that’s very cool, it feels organic in how it transitions between the more motoric, rhythmical sections and the lyrical ones.
And so the three pieces complement each other very, very well. The Chadwick is romantic, lush, classic turn-of-the-century, large, orchestral. and the Jackson is a work for orchestra and tape, so, pre-recorded electronics. And when we’re playing at the Center for Arts at the Armory, we’re going to use their whole speaker system for that. I’m very excited to hear it.
The Chadwick also has some off-stage brass, a militaristic portion, where two trumpets go in one direction and two trumpets go off in another. It’s antiphonal off stage-trumpets.
What’s the role of a concert with an orchestra like the OBC that’s mostly a reading orchestra?
The two roles, concert vs. reading are complementary – in my mind, they share equal weight,
Because preparing for concerts is so much more work, so even though we only have two concerts a year and eight readings, it balances out. I’ve always thought of OBC as an orchestra for the various groups of people who can engage with an orchestra. The readings are for the musicians. Nobody is turned away from the readings. We do really crazy cool repertoire that people just want to play. And then the concerts, I think of, as for the audience. Like a gift that we’re giving, an offering to the audience, in that all concerts that we do are always and will always be free. Will we request a donation for those who are able to donate to help keep us running? But there’s going to be no financial barrier to entry for people who want to experience these concerts, and there’s a low barrier in terms of musical knowledge in advance. I talk to the audience, and we play excerpts to familiarize people with the works. So that, for example, if you’ve never been to an orchestral concert before and you’re daunted by listening through a 30-minute-long uninterrupted tone poem, which some of us musicians take for granted, I try to help them and tell them what to focus on. So we’re sharing things that are interesting for everybody and are approachable for everybody as well. That’s also why I program fairly short concerts. This concert has 50 minutes of music, so that there’s time to discuss things.
I have a really strong desire to do something for composers as well, the remaining group engaged in the orchestral project. I have an idea to have a composer mentorship project. So we would have a call for scores for Boston Area composers. Ideally, we’d end up having people from many different age ranges and many different experience levels as well. Everybody who submits gets feedback on their work. Then we select between four to six fellows to get an honorarium, and instruction from some well-known Boston Area composers. And give them the opportunity to workshop and revise some of their work and then perform it all at one of our OBC readings. I think that would really complete the triumvirate of activities that we do with OBC. That’s something I want to do in the future.