Six of One 

APRIL 15, 2024

Jaime Laredo, violin

Cathy Meng Robinson, violin

Nokuthula Ngwenyama, viola

Milena Pájaro-van de Stadt, viola

Keith Robinson, cello

Sharon Robinson, cello

Six extraordinary string players assemble to perform a program of remarkable sextets. A festive work by Nokuthula Ngwenyama, Schoenberg’s beautiful and poignant tone poem, and the folk-inspired music of Dvořák will be featured on this dynamic season finale.

Program Notes

Nokuthula Ngwenyama (b. 1976) 
Sexagesimal Celebration 

I became fascinated with sexagesimal systems [a numerical system with 60 as its base] when studying history and historiography of the Ancient Near East with Peter Machinist at Harvard Divinity School and numerology in the Book of Matthew with François Bovon. 

The number 60 is important. It’s evenly divided by 12, works well to make time. Early cuneiform from the Levant (modern-day Iraq) show logs of property and transactions, legal code (Hammurabi’s), and praise poetry. The angular recording of life unifies us by demonstrating that our concerns have not changed much since 3,500 BCE. 

Base 60 easily pervades patterns of sound, rhythm, and intervals. One through six are explored melodically and harmonically, allowing ideas based on any of them to easily fit into a string sextet. Melodies are inspired by the carved jaggedness of script along with the landscape throughout Arizona, such as the windswept fields on the Biggs’ farm looking toward the Verde River. The string triplings that break into richer harmonies were inspired by our Brahms sextet recording sessions with Adam Abeshouse during the summer of 2019 at the Guilford Studio in Brattleboro, Vermont. 

Notes by Nokuthula Ngwenyama 

Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951) 
Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) 

To modern listeners, the name Schoenberg immediately evokes thoughts of the heavily atonal music that defined his later career. As a founder of the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg helped push the boundaries of classical composition in the twentieth century in a way that has forever changed the field. Given this historical context, the lush late-Romanticism of Verklärte Nacht may sound surprisingly tame. Yet at its 1902 premiere, the work received hisses and horrified gasps from the audience. The choice of subject matter certainly fueled this controversy – Richard Dehmel’s poem was shockingly erotic by turn-of-the-century standards – but the text was not the only aspect that pushed boundaries. Musically, this was Romanticism pushed to its breaking point – the concept of a tone-poem set for a small string ensemble and rife with Wagnerian harmonies.  

Played without break, the music mirrors the five sections of the poem: an introduction sets the scene in the shadowy forest; the woman’s depressed trudge and anguished confession; the man’s deep-toned, comforting forgiveness; the enraptured love duet; and the ethereal apotheosis representing the “transfigured night” itself. As the piece unfolds, the scene and music pass from dark to light, from guilt to forgiveness. Throughout this process, Schoenberg continuously transforms themes and motifs to render an intensely expressive musical depiction of the powerful human drama of Dehmel’s poem. 

Following is a translation of Dehmel’s poem Verklärte Nacht by Stanley Appelbaum. 

Two people walk through a bare, cold grove; 
The moon races along with them, they look into it. 
The moon races over tall oaks, 
No cloud obscures the light from the sky, 
Into which the black points of the boughs reach. 
A woman’s voice speaks: 
I’m carrying a child, and not yours, 
I walk in sin beside you. 
I have committed a great offense against myself. 
I no longer believed I could be happy 
And yet I had a strong yearning 
For something to fill my life, for the joys of 
Motherhood 
And for duty; so I committed an effrontery, 
So, shuddering, I allowed my sex 
To be embraced by a strange man, 
And, on top of that, I blessed myself for it. 
Now life has taken its revenge: 
Now I have met you, oh, you. 
She walks with a clumsy gait, 
She looks up; the moon is racing along. 
Her dark gaze is drowned in light. 
A man’s voice speaks: 
May the child you conceived 
Be no burden to your soul; 
Just see how brightly the universe is gleaming! 
There’s a glow around everything; 
You are floating with me on a cold ocean, 
But a special warmth flickers 
From you into me, from me into you. 
It will transfigure the strange man’s child. 
You will bear the child for me, as if it were mine; 
You have brought the glow into me, 
You have made me like a child myself. 
He grasps her around her ample hips. 
Their breath kisses in the breeze. 
Two people walk through the lofty, bright night. 

Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904) 
String Sextet in A Major, Op. 48 

Dvořák composed his Op. 48 string sextet – his only foray into the genre – during a two-week period in 1878. The work came during a pivotal time for the young composer’s life and career. He had just been awarded his third Austrian State Prize for his set of Moravian Duets. Crucially, one of the judges for the prize was Johannes Brahms, who committed to popularizing Dvořák’s  music beyond his native region; commissioning a set of Slavonic Dances for international publication, and introducing Dvořák to renowned violinist Joseph Joachim. Joachim premiered the sextet at a private event in his own home, then added it to his touring repertoire, helping popularize the work and helping fuel Dvořák’s rising fame throughout Europe. 

Dvořák uses the more robust instrumentation of the string sextet to great effect in the opening movement, weaving a texture that at times evokes the sound of a pipe organ. Here, Dvořák also plays with traditional formal structure by lightly subverting the standard organization of the movement by tightly interweaving the two main themes rather than stating them through extended sections.  

In the second and third movements, Dvořák sets a pair of Czech folk dances. The dumka, a dance originating in Ukraine, was embraced by Slavonic composers as a traditional “classical” dance movement characterized by a ruminative character interspersed with more cheerful sections. In place of the traditional scherzo, Dvořák employs a furiant – an energetic Bohemian folk dance built on alternating triple and duple meters. Dvořák strays from tradition slightly by building his furiant strictly in triple meter but manages to retain much of the character of the traditional dance. 

The finale is a theme and variations based on the opening viola solo. Graceful but sultry, the movement is built on modal harmonies that straddle the line between B minor and A major. As the movement winds through its multiple variations, Dvořák evokes a range of tonal characters – meandering, sparkling, gloomy, and menacing – before finally driving to a stretto final variation that gradually builds to a final statement that lies squarely in the major key. This arrival then marks a continually escalating series of exchanges between the instruments that pushes the envelope of both tempo and technique before reaching an emphatic, stamping conclusion.