Ensemble Modern I

Transcending tonality, highly expressive yet with a clear structure: Ruth Crawford Seeger, who lived in Berlin at the beginning of the 1930s with the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship, was a distinctive and pioneering figure in American modernism. She composed highly original works such as the “Three Songs” to poems by Carl Sandburg, a cycle that often adopted surreal features in which two independent sound groups meet: a “concertino” and an “ostinato” of thirteen players to be seated as far away from the soloists as possible. In the first of the three concerts that the Ensemble Modern devotes to Ruth Crawford Seeger’s oeuvre, the programme also includes her two ricercari “Sacco, Vanzetti” and “Chinaman, Laundryman”, whose half-sung, half-spoken texts tell of the hardship of exploited immigrants and the controversial Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1921, in which two Italian Americans were condemned to death in questionable circumstances.  By contrast, humour and narrative economy similar to that of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” can be found in the suite for children “The Adventurer of Tom Thumb”, whose lyrics were written by the composer herself based on the Brothers Grimm. The evening is introduced by the electronic composition “Music of the Spheres” written in 1938 by the New York composer Johanna Beyer: a stream of sound composed for “electrical instruments” and triangle that was far ahead of its time. There is also a chance to hear the fantastic sound worlds of Katherine Balch’s “waste knot” and Tania León’s song cycle “Singin’ Sepia”.