Maestro Donato Cabrera’s trip down memory lane reveals a bold choice for a young conductor.
Now and Then: Music Director Donato Cabrera at the podium at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek (left) and at the University of Nevada, Reno in the 1990s (right).
Our upcoming PASTORAL BEETHOVEN concerts include a nostalgic selection for California Symphony Music Director Donato Cabrera. It’s a piece by Bedřich Smetana, who composed six symphonic poems titled Má vlast (“my homeland” in Czech), the most famous of which is Vltava (Die Moldau), which was written about a river that flows through Prague.
For Cabrera, Vltava also happens to be the first piece of music he ever conducted for an audience, as a 19-year-old student at the University of Nevada at Reno.
“It was a piece that I had fallen in love with when I was in high school,” says Cabrera. “As a sophomore at college, I was given the opportunity to conduct the university orchestra and I chose to conduct this piece. Looking back, it is far too difficult for a young conductor’s debut effort, but ignorance can be bliss!”
When asked what he recalls from the evening, he says that he doesn’t remember much, but he does remember that he wasn’t at all nervous.
We dug through the archives and found these early pictures of a very assured-looking maestro-in-the-making from his UNR days in the early 1990s.
Music Director Donato Cabrera explains that he paired Smetana and Beethoven’s Symphony №6 (aka the Pastoral) together for the upcoming PASTORAL BEETHOVEN concerts because they both describe outdoor scenes, but from entirely unique perspectives.
“The symphony is like a day in the country, from the exuberance of the early morning sunrise, to the final lullaby at the very end. In Smetana’s piece, it’s almost like it’s from the perspective of the river, starting from the sounds of its source, to reaching its full force at the St. John’s Rapids, finally ending as it joins with the Elbe River in Germany.”
Donato Cabrera conductsPASTORAL BEETHOVENSaturday, January 20 at 8pm & Sunday, January 21 at 4pm at the Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek.
We take a closer look at the wildly ambitious 1808 concert which debuted no less than two symphonies, a piano concerto, and a new choral piece (plus a selection of other favorites) in a frigid, four-hour long musical marathon.
Inside the plush, fancy and ultimately freezing cold Theater-An-Der-Wien (left). Beethoven at the podium (right).
On a freezing cold winter’s night in Vienna, December 22, 1808, one of the most legendary concerts in the history of music took place. In it, Beethoven premiered not just the famous Fifth Symphony (“Dah dah dah daaaaah”) but the Sixth (aka the Pastoral Symphony) plus the Choral Fantasy and a largely improvised piano concerto, performed by the composer himself.
In terms of the variety, quality, and quantity (4+ hours!) of music showcased, it was an epic event, however the concert also achieved a level of infamy due to some significant snags leading up to and during the performance itself.
Beethoven: Composer, Producer & Entrepreneur
Putting on a concert like this was itself a huge undertaking for Beethoven. There was no concert hall in Vienna during Beethoven’s time, so composers would seek out locations like restaurants, ballrooms and theaters to get their music out and heard in public. The December 1808 concert was self-produced by Beethoven and he secured the Theater-an-der-Wien, one of the largest and grandest theaters in Vienna, for the occasion.
Then there was the question of securing musicians to perform. There was no Vienna Philharmonic at this time, and many of the members of the theater’s professional orchestra had a scheduling conflict that prevented them from playing the concert. This meant amateurs were hired in to fill the gaps. Music historian Christopher Gibbs says of the final ensemble, “I think we would view it as one of the worst community orchestras that we might encounter today.”
Banned from Rehearsal
To make matters worse, relations between Beethoven and the orchestra were tense. Under-rehearsed and with the ink barely dry on the Choral Fantasy, things got so bad that the composer was allegedly banned from rehearsal in the days leading up to the concert and only allowed back in the room for the pieces on which he was performing. And then the soloist in the Choral Fantasy quit…
On the night of the concert, the replacement singer who was hired in at the last minute suffered acute stage fright and bungled the aria. In fact, things got so out of whack during the Choral Fantasy that the orchestra broke down and had to stop and restart the piece.
Critical Reception
The local music press at the time hardly knew what to make of the mammoth concert, declaring that “To judge all these pieces after one and only hearing, … so many were performed one after the other, and most of them are so grand and long, is downright impossible.”
The freezing temperatures in the theater cooled the enthusiasm even of Beethoven’s most ardent of supporters, including composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt, sitting with Beethoven’s patron Prince von Lobkowitz, who related: “There we sat, in the most bitter cold, from half past six until half past ten, and confirmed for ourselves the maxim that one may easily have too much of a good thing, still more of a powerful one.”
From a modern vantage point, Beethoven biographer Barry Cooper refers to the concert as the “most remarkable” of Beethoven’s career in terms of its content. California Symphony Music Director Donato Cabrera agrees: “The premiere of Beethoven’s 5th, 6th, and Choral Fantasy on that cold December night wasn’t in any way a disaster. It was an incredible achievement to self-produce an entire concert such as this one.”
The evening was also remarkable in that by 1808 Beethoven, aged 38, was in the grip of deafness. His fiery performance at the piano in that concert would be the last time he would perform as a concerto soloist in public, with subsequent works for piano being composed for others to play. Some seven years later, his hearing was fully gone and he retreated from public life, however he would continue to compose until his death in 1827.
The California Symphony performs PASTORAL BEETHOVEN on January 20 at 8 PM and January 21 at 4 PM in the (fully air-conditioned and heated) Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.
And *this* program is scheduled to last 1 hour and 46 minutes, including a 20-minute intermission.
“How he dealt with this deafness is one of the great stories of humanity, not just of music.” — Music Director Donato Cabrera
The Arcadian of Pastoral State by Thomas Cole (on left). Portrait of Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler (on right).
By California Symphony Music Director Donato Cabrera.
Imagine directing an orchestra you can’t hear. Or playing a soundless piano for a staring audience.
Most know classical composer Ludwig van Beethoven struggled with deafness — but many don’t realize how much of a struggle it was. Beyond composing without hearing a note, Beethoven grappled with living in the 1800s when few understood deafness, hindering his ability to communicate, work as a musician and even find a place to live. How he dealt with this deafness is one of the great stories of humanity, not just of music.
Losing Sound
Beethoven began losing his hearing in his mid-20s, after already building a reputation as a musician and composer. The cause of his deafness remains a mystery, though modern analysis of his DNA revealed health issues including large amounts of lead in his system. At the time, people ate off of lead plates — they just didn’t know back then.
Continuing to compose and conduct, he changed lodgings constantly in Vienna, which could be due to Beethoven’s landlords’ frustration with him pounding on his piano at all hours.
Beethoven even continued performing publicly as a musician, which was necessary for many composers of the age: That’s how they got their pieces out, not just composing but performing. For the longest time he didn’t want to reveal his deafness because he believed, justifiably, that it would ruin his career.
His condition didn’t go unnoticed, however. Composer Louis Sporh reacted to watching Beethoven rehearse on piano in 1814: “…the music was unintelligible unless one could look into the pianoforte part. I was deeply saddened at so hard a fate.”
Removed from Public Life
Once his hearing was fully gone by age 45, Beethoven lost his public life with it. Giving up performing and public appearances, he allowed only select friends to visit him, communicating through written conversations in notebooks. His deafness forced him to become a very private, insular person over the course of time.
Composing in Silence
A common question is how Beethoven continued composing without his hearing, but this likely wasn’t too difficult. Music is a language, with rules. Knowing the rules of how music is made, he could sit at his desk and compose a piece of music without hearing it.
Beethoven’s style changed, however, as he retreated from public life. His once-vivacious piano sonatas began to take on a darker tone.
His famous Sixth Symphony also reflects his different life in deafness. Also known as the Pastoral Symphony, the musical work conveys the peace of the countryside, where Beethoven escaped city life after losing his hearing. In terms of his deafness, this was a very important symphony, reflecting the importance as an individual to keep his sanity by being in the country.
“How delighted I shall be to ramble for a while through bushes, woods, under trees, through grass, and around rocks” — Beethoven in a letter written in May of 1810
This and other pieces from his soundless years reflect his incredible grasp of composition. Beethoven was a master of the language of music, which is about the creation of sound, not about listening.
This article originally appeared on the Las Vegas Smith Center’s blog.
The California Symphony and Music Director Donato Cabrera’s first program of the New Year kicks off with two performances of PASTORAL BEETHOVEN at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek on Saturday January 20th at 8pm and Sunday January 21st at 4pm.
Music Director Donato Cabrera reflects on Mahler, whose Symphony №4 is featured in our season opener, LYRICAL DREAMS, on Sunday, September 24.
When listening to a composition by Gustav Mahler, try to think about time and place. As in, the precise time and place Mahler aimed to convey in the music.
Mahler was trying to create an entire environment, whether it’s going back to his childhood in Bohemia or dealing with the knowledge of his own mortality. His music is an entire universe. It’s a philosophy, it’s geography, it’s smelling the blossoms in the air. Through his music, he’s really trying to touch all the senses.
The Austrian composer, born 1860, applied unique methods to his music. These included infusing his compositions with the melodies of street musicians and sounds depicting everyday noises, all with the aim of creating a snapshot of life. It had really never been explored to this degree by other composers, and it’s for this very reason that his music wasn’t popular in Vienna during his lifetime.
Mahler’s Symphony №4 is a prime example of the composer’s style. The symphony, written as an exploration of the world through a child’s eyes, includes sounds borrowed from Mahler’s own rural childhood, such as sleigh bells that were commonly strung on horses. The symphony’s second movement goes a step further, with a solo violin recreating a common fairy tale of the time, in which a sinister pied piper lures children out of a village.
It’s a direct reference to what was a very real concern for children, noting the many dangers for children in an era when outdoor lighting at night was uncommon. This was the typical message: Don’t talk to strangers. Bad things will happen if you follow a stranger out of the village.
Another strong theme can be observed in many of Mahler’s compositions: death. This includes his “Kindertotenlieder” (“Songs on the Death of Children”), comprised of songs based on poems about the grieving process. Some even link elements of his symphonies to deaths and illness experienced in his own family. This merely reflects the era Mahler lived in when the average lifespan was short and most families expected to lose multiple children to illness. It’s sort of like the Blues. It’s only through accepting hardship and looking it straight in the face that one finds solace and beauty in it.
Mahler’s music has had tremendous influence with composers throughout the 20th century emulating his musical style and focus. Mahler’s style can still be seen in European music composed today. The prevalence of his music stems back to the relatability of his compositions, which held greater appeal to audiences as society opened up to understanding human emotion and experience at the turn of the century.
Why it’s become so popular and why it captures the hearts of so many people is really that it’s a great reflection of the 20th century and who we are as modern individuals. That’s why his music became so ubiquitous.
LYRICAL DREAMS is at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek on Sunday September 24 at 4pm and includes:
Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915
Stookey YTTE (Yield To Total Elation)
Mahler Symphony №4
Tickets are available at 925.943.SHOW and LesherCenter.com. Prices start at just $33 per concert.
ABOUT CALIFORNIA SYMPHONY
The California Symphony, now in its fifth season under the leadership of Music Director Donato Cabrera, is a world-class, professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, in the heart of the San Francisco East Bay since 1990. Our vibrant concert series is renowned for featuring classics alongside American repertoire and works by living composers. The Orchestra is comprised of musicians who have performed with the orchestras of the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others, and many of its musicians have been performing with the California Symphony for nearly all its existence.
Outside of the concert hall, the symphony actively supports music education for social change through its El Sistema-inspired Sound Minds program at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, CA. The initiative brings intensive music instruction and academic enrichment to Contra Costa County schoolchildren for free, in an area where 94% of students qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program.
We also host the highly competitive Young American Composer-in-Residence program, which this year welcomes its first female composer, Katherine Balch.
—By Jennifer Cho, California Symphony Concertmaster.
Arnold Böcklin’s self portrait inspired the chilling, creepy violin solo in the second movement of Mahler Symphony №4
According to Gustav Mahler’s wife Alma, the second movement in his Symphony №4, which features a uniquely challenging violin solo, was inspired by a self portrait of Arnold Böcklin. Behind the artist, the grim reaper — a symbol of death for many centuries — is portrayed playing the violin.
It’s very interesting to play this work after performing Saint Saen’s Danse Macabre last season and representing the devil. I never thought I would be portraying the devil or death so often! But I love any opportunity to be a little bit evil at work…
There are some unique challenges to preparing this solo, which requires the violin to be tuned up a whole note from normal. My mental check list as I prep for the piece looks something like this:
Acquire second violin.
Break in new strings, before transferring them to second violin and tuning them up an entire whole step.
Cross fingers that weather won’t be too wonky, adding extra stress on an extremely taut instrument.
Have plenty of back up strings on hand, especially the thinnest E string which is tuned up to an F.
Prepare second shoulder rest, and some sort of violin stand to rest the second instrument.
Learn solo based on muscle memory and fingerings rather than by ear. Having perfect pitch presents an extra challenge since the notes I see will not be the notes I hear.
This solo requires an unusual amount of preparation. But the effect is chilling, creepy, and certainly one of a kind.
California Symphony Concertmaster Jennifer Cho plays the violin solo in the Mahler Symphony №4 at our season opener LYRICAL DREAMS, Sunday, September 24 at 4pm, at Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek.
Music Director Donato Cabrera gives a pre-concert talk, free to ticket holders, offering insights about the music, beginning one hour before the performance at 3 pm. Cabrera will be joined on stage by soprano Maria Valdes, Bay Area Composer Nathaniel Stookey, and Grammy-award nominated sound engineer and inventor Oliver DiCicco.
TICKETS:
Tickets are $42 to $72 and $20 for students and are available by calling 925.943.SHOW and online at californiasymphony.org.
Season ticket packages are also on sale for as little as $99 — just $33 per concert — including the new Saturday night series.
The California Symphony, now in its fifth season under the leadership of Music Director Donato Cabrera, is a world-class, professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, in the heart of the San Francisco East Bay since 1990. Our vibrant concert series is renowned for featuring classics alongside American repertoire and works by living composers. The Orchestra is comprised of musicians who have performed with the orchestras of the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others, and many of its musicians have been performing with the California Symphony for nearly all its existence.
Outside of the concert hall, the symphony actively supports music education for social change through its El Sistema-inspired Sound Minds program at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, CA. The initiative brings intensive music instruction and academic enrichment to Contra Costa County schoolchildren for free, in an area where 94% of students qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program.
We also host the highly competitive Young American Composer-in-Residence program, which this year welcomes its first female composer, Katherine Balch.
San Francisco Opera first violinist Jennifer Cho is confirmed as Concertmaster for the California Symphony after four years with the orchestra, including a year as Acting Concertmaster during the 2016–17 season.
Cho debuts as Concertmaster with the California Symphony at our season opener LYRICAL DREAMS, Sunday, September 24 at 4pm, at Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek.
Music Director Donato Cabrera gives a pre-concert talk, free to ticket holders, offering insights about the music, beginning one hour before the performance at 3 pm. Cabrera will be joined on stage by soprano Maria Valdes, Bay Area Composer Nathaniel Stookey, and Grammy-award nominated sound engineer and inventor Oliver DiCicco.
TICKETS:
Tickets are $42 to $72 and $20 for students and are available by calling 925.943.SHOW and online at californiasymphony.org.
Season ticket packages are also on sale for as little as $99 — just $33 per concert — including the new Saturday night series.
The California Symphony, now in its fifth season under the leadership of Music Director Donato Cabrera, is a world-class, professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, in the heart of the San Francisco East Bay since 1990. Our vibrant concert series is renowned for featuring classics alongside American repertoire and works by living composers. The Orchestra is comprised of musicians who have performed with the orchestras of the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others, and many of its musicians have been performing with the California Symphony for nearly all its existence.
Outside of the concert hall, the symphony actively supports music education for social change through its El Sistema-inspired Sound Minds program at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, CA. The initiative brings intensive music instruction and academic enrichment to Contra Costa County schoolchildren for free, in an area where 94% of students qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program.
We also host the highly competitive Young American Composer-in-Residence program, which this year welcomes its first female composer, Katherine Balch.
James Agee’s family home in Knoxville, TN, c.1915.
The waning days of summer have us waxing nostalgic in the run up to our season opener, LYRICAL DREAMS — Sunday, September 24th at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek. All three pieces on the program — Barber Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Stookey YTTE (Yield To Total Elation) and Mahler Symphony №4 — are linked in that they were either inspired by dreams or they use dreams as subject matter. What may be less obvious is the link that two of the pieces share specifically to the year 1915.
The connection is clear for Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, based on a dreamy meditation on family life by 1940s film critic and screenplay writer James Agee. Written more than twenty years later as a free-form writing experiment and with little subsequent revision, Agee describes the sights and sounds of small town Knoxville, TN, as a 5-year-old child, lying on quilts with his family outside their home in 1915. He hears the clip-clopping of a horse and buggy; the grinding, metallic sounds of a tram; the locusts in the field; the low voices of adults in conversation. The timing is especially poignant as we know that Agee’s father was killed in an auto-accident the following year.
Drawings from A.G. Rizzoli’s Yield To Total Elation collection, featuring friends and family as fantastic buildings in a grand, imaginary “expeau.”
Over on the West Coast, 1915 was the year of the great San Francisco Expo, which brought a vision of a fantastic, optimistic future to a young city that had been ravaged by fire and earthquakes less than a decade earlier. The experience of visiting the World Fair clearly made a big impression on Mill Valley native, A.G. Rizzoli (1896~1981). Some twenty years later, Rizzoli would draw the Yield To Total Elation set of architectural drawings, in which he portrayed friends and family as grand buildings in an imaginary “expeau.” This would in turn inspire Bay Area composer Nathaniel Stookey to create his 2016 piece, YTTE (Yield to Total Elation), whichmakes its West Coast full orchestra version premiere in our season opener in Walnut Creek on Sunday, September 24, 2017.
Connections to the Past
Learning about these connections inspired us to look back to what else would have been happening in the Bay Area in 1915, in a year that was so memorable to these two artists from a century ago.
1915 in San Francisco
The Tower of Jewels attraction at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco
One can only imagine Bay Area residents’ wonder and excitement at some of the sights and sounds of the World Fair, which included:
· A car assembly line —Henry Ford brought his revolutionary production line to the Expo, turning out a new car every 10 minutes which was then driven away to a local distributor for resale.
· Flying machines — In 1915, most Americans had still never seen an airplane. Thanks to brothers and aviation pioneers Allan and Malcolm Loughead (who later changed their last name to “Lockheed”), visitors were able to take brief flights out over the bay, to get a perspective on their city previously only enjoyed by the birds. Stunt pilot Lincoln Beachey entertained crowds with death spirals and loops over the Bay until his plane fatally crashed in March. His replacement, Art Smith, also had a taste for the dramatic, performing nighttime flights with phosphorous flares attached to his plane’s wings, which left trails that lit up the sky.
· The Palace of Fine Arts — housed more than 11,000 pieces of art during the Expo. While all the other buildings were torn down after the fair concluded in December that year, the Palace of Fine Arts was saved and rebuilt in the 1960s after the mother of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst intervened to restore it.
The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
· The Tower of Jewels in the Jewel City — the centerpiece of the Expo and surely the building that must have most excited would-be architectural draftsman and artist, A.G. Rizolli. The 43-story tall Tower of Jewels was the tallest structure in San Francisco at the time. Adorned with more than 100,000 pieces of polished crystal and colored glass that glimmered in the sunlight, it must have been quite the sight for visitors and residents.
1915 in the East Bay
Meanwhile across the bay…
Walnut Creek, population 500, became the 8th city to be incorporated in Contra Costa County in 1914. The library would be built in 1916, thanks to a grant from the Carnegie Library Foundation, and a sewer was installed on Main Street two years later. Residents would have to wait until 1921 before downtown was paved.
Walnut Creek Library in 1916.
Broadway Tunnel
Think your commute is bad? According to the Lafayette Historical Society, this predecessor to the Caldecott Tunnel was the first tunnel to Oakland through the hills. The tunnel was so narrow that vehicles had to drive down the center of the road to avoid hitting the sides. It was also dark, so drivers would light up newspapers when entering as a signal to those at the other end to wait. In 1915, the tunnel ceiling was raised three feet so autos and trucks could fit.
New Words in 1915
Sadly, Expo stunt pilot Lincoln Beach would not have lived long enough to learn that the word “aerobatics” made it into the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 1915. Other new words from the year that hint at the seisimic social and technological changes taking place include: big deal, car wash, coatrack, coolant, Federal Reserve System, and yo-yo.
Some of the words that made it into the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 1915.
The Power of the Past
In conclusion, it’s dizzying to reflect on how much life has changed in the century since 1915 — for many people, that’s just 2 or 3 generations ago. What will the Bay Area look like in 2115? And will the people of that time look back on our time and wonder at our primitive lives?
James Agee and A.G. Rizzoli were two artists who respectively wrote and drew from memories from a common point in time. For Agee, Knoxville in the summer of 1915 was an idyllic time of family life remembered a short time before the devastating death of his father. For Rizzoli, the 1915 Expo was a feast for his design sensibilities, which he channeled some twenty years later into his YTTE drawings. In another sad parallel, Agee and Rizzoli both lost their fathers in 1916 — Rizzoli’s father to suicide — and through their works, both artists honored and remembered their families. Composers Samuel Barber and Nathaniel Stookey were subsequently inspired to interpret and translate these works of art into a new form — to give them new dimension through the medium of classical music. Literally, to amplify them.
The power of nostalgia and memory as a creative impetus for art is undeniable, as is its ability to resonate with composers and audiences through the years. It still has the ability to move us a century later.
Soprano Maria Valdes sings Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, with text by James Agee, with the California Symphony at our season opener in Walnut Creek on Sunday, September 24, 2017. (She performs it here in November of 2016 with the Kaleidescope Chamber Orchestra.)
LYRICAL DREAMS is at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek on Sunday September 24 at 4pm and includes:
Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915
Stookey YTTE (Yield To Total Elation)
Mahler Symphony №4
Tickets are available at 925.943.SHOW and CaliforniaSymphony.org. Prices start at just $33 per concert.
ABOUT CALIFORNIA SYMPHONY
The California Symphony, now in its fifth season under the leadership of Music Director Donato Cabrera, is a world-class, professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, in the heart of the San Francisco East Bay since 1990. Our vibrant concert series is renowned for featuring classics alongside American repertoire and works by living composers. The Orchestra is comprised of musicians who have performed with the orchestras of the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others, and many of its musicians have been performing with the California Symphony for nearly all its existence.
Outside of the concert hall, the symphony actively supports music education for social change through its El Sistema-inspired Sound Minds program at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, CA. The initiative brings intensive music instruction and academic enrichment to Contra Costa County schoolchildren for free, in an area where 94% of students qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program.
We also host the highly competitive Young American Composer-in-Residence program, which this year welcomes its first female composer, Katherine Balch.
The weirdly named star of our 2017–18 Season Opener’s YTTE (Yield To Total Elation) by Nathaniel Stookey is a one-of-kind, electro-acoustic instrument created by San Francisco-based Grammy-nominated audio engineer and kinetic sculptor, Oliver DiCicco has designed, with whimsical names like “Crawdad” and “Olivetti.”
The OOVE, created by Oliver DiCicco and played at our Season Opener by composer Nathaniel Stookey in YTTE (Yield To Total Elation).
As for the OOVE, when composer Nathaniel Stookey first came across the instrument, he imagined the name came from the Latin for egg, ovum, “because it sounds sort of primoridal. And it ended up being the egg of the piece in a way — the thing that everything else grows out of.”
But no, DiCicco informed him: It’s because side-on, it looks like a HOOVER upright vacuum cleaner.
Composer Nathaniel Stookey — who also plays the instrument at our Season Opener — explains that the sound is generated not by plucking or bowing. “It’s not really even really touched. You approach it with an electromagnet, and as the magnet gets closer to the field created by the nodes (towards the bottom of the instrument), it sets the string vibrating.” Pitch is shifted using small sliders on the four strings. As the magnet gets closer to and further from the instrument, the sound becomes louder or softer.
Music Director Donato Cabrera likens the instrument to early 20th century experiments in sound like the Theremin — which will forever be associated with the theme from iconic 60’s TV series, Star Trek, “Approaching an electromagnetic field, in the disturbance of something entering the field, sound is created. It’s the same concept.”
Only the OOVE generates a richly layered texture of sounds rather than a single pitch.
“This instrument has that idea of yielding to total elation,” continues Cabrera, “because it’s all sound at once. It’s not so much an instrument like you might think of today, like a violin or a French horn or a piano that creates discreet, individual pitches. It creates this ambiance from which sound can emerge, and that yielding to this total soundscape is what is so inspiring in this piece.”
“Playing the OOVE is an amazing experience for me,” says Stookey, “because its sound is both giving rise to the music of the orchestra and allowing me to respond to that music in real time, in a way that is different with each performance. It can be pretty intense for all concerned, especially towards the end, where the score offers only four words of advice:
The California Symphony, now in its fifth season under the leadership of Music Director Donato Cabrera, is a world-class, professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, in the heart of the San Francisco East Bay since 1990. Our vibrant concert series is renowned for featuring classics alongside American repertoire and works by living composers. The Orchestra is comprised of musicians who have performed with the orchestras of the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others, and many of its musicians have been performing with the California Symphony for nearly all its existence.
Outside of the concert hall, the symphony actively supports music education for social change through its El Sistema-inspired program at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, CA, which brings intensive music instruction and academic enrichment to Contra Costa County schoolchildren for free, in an area where 94% of students qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program.
We also host the highly competitive Young American Composer-in-Residence program, which this year welcomes its first female composer, Katherine Balch.
Margaret Martin with her brother Gregory, after opening night of the Lamplighters’ “Yeomen of the Guard” in the Lesher Center this summer.
We were delighted to learn that the winner of our Symphony Surround auction package to meet incoming composer-in-residence Katherine Balch, is an aspiring composer in her own right!
Margaret’s mom spotted the auction package — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shadow Katherine as she prepares to deliver like a broken clock, her first commission for the California Symphony — and instantly knew it would be a wonderful 16th birthday gift for her daughter.
Music has always been a passion for Margaret, who is entering her junior year at SF University High School this year. She has sung with the San Francisco Girls Chorus for 10 years, and she is a member of the Lamplighters Music Theater company. Her interest in composing was piqued by a music class she took at school last year. After learning about fugues, she thought to herself, “Why not write one?” And so she did. Composing has been a focus for the Berkeley native since then.
Here’s her composition breathe, which premiered at the San Francisco Conservatory on July 14 this year. The piece is part of a planned series that explores the theme of mental health, including depression and anxiety. Margaret explains that the lower case title relates to the “small voice” her mother says she gets when she gets stressed out.
(Also of note, the video features California Symphony principal oboist, Laura Reynolds, who coordinates the SFCM’s summer camp which Margaret attended.)
So from all of us at the California Symphony, Happy 16th Birthday, Margaret! So much achieved already, and so much more to come, we’re sure!
We can’t wait to see you again when you get to meet Katherine Balch in January. We are certain you’ll have a lot to talk about.
The California Symphony, now in its fifth season under the leadership of Music Director Donato Cabrera, is a world-class, professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, in the heart of the San Francisco East Bay since 1990. Our vibrant concert series is renowned for featuring classics alongside American repertoire and works by living composers. The Orchestra is comprised of musicians who have performed with the orchestras of the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, and others, and many of its musicians have been performing with the California Symphony for nearly all its existence.
Outside of the concert hall, the symphony actively supports music education for social change through its El Sistema-inspired Sound Minds program at Downer Elementary School in San Pablo, CA. The initiative brings intensive music instruction and academic enrichment to Contra Costa County schoolchildren for free, in an area where 94% of students qualify for the federal free or reduced price lunch program.
We also host the highly competitive Young American Composer-in-Residence program, which this year welcomes its first female composer, Katherine Balch.
Temporary Site 