Program Notes
Earth Song
September 13 and 14, 2025
String Quartet Op 76 #4 (Sunrise)
Composer: Joseph Haydn
Composer and court musician from the 1700's. Did lots to develop classical music as we know it today. Was supposedly a super nice guy.
What's the deal with the name?
Haydn probably didn’t give this quartet the name we use for it now, (although I can’t tell you definitively that he didn’t). But most likely it came from the public somewhere along the way. The name is descriptive of the opening of the first movement, where the first violin rises out of beautiful, glowing opening chords like a ….
Why is Haydn such a big deal?
Lots of reasons, but if we’re talking about string quartets (let's do that because all the reasons would be too many words for right now), he sort of invented them. He didn’t TOTALLY invent them - there was music written for this combination of instruments before him, but all the parts weren’t written equally in those pieces - there was a solo line and accompaniment parts. Haydn made all the parts equally important, and wrote the first string quartet as we know them sometime in the 1750s. He went on to write 68 quartets in his lifetime. They tend to get better as he goes. The Opus 76 set is his last set of quartets, and some people think it’s his best.
The Little Things
Composer: Kian Ravaei
Brilliant twenty-something lover of music of all stripes, proud representative of the Iranian-American community and current doctoral student at Juilliard.
Work: The Little Things
A 7 movement string quartet featuring the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Commissioned in 2023 by the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, and Seattle Chamber Music Society.
Why we love it
This piece is evocative of exactly what it says it is. There are musical spiders, birds, butterflies, snakes, the essence of the sun and moon, and a heartfelt call for compassion for all living things. We love it all, but the spider is particularly awesome.
What does Kian say about it?
Something very well written. He says...
​
All seven titles which comprise The Little Things come from Emily Dickinson, who never fails to direct our attention toward nature’s easily overlooked wonders. Movements II, III, IV, and VI evoke various animal life, while I and V portray the sun and moon respectively. The order of the movements suggests the cyclic journey of all living things from morning to night and back to a new morning.
​
​
Pale Blue Dot
What the heck is this?
In 1990, the Voyager 1 space probe turned its cameras around and took an image of Earth from about 4 billion miles away. Astronomer Carl Sagan, who was instrumental in making this image a reality, wrote a powerful text that we wanted to present at this concert. The music accompanying Carl's voice was written for these performances.
"Took an image?" Just like that?
No, it was actually really complicated to get the image, and it took about ten years to make it happen. Because of the proximity to the sun and long exposure times, it was dangerous for Voyager 1's instruments. NASA ultimately decided it was worth the risk, and a series of exposures were taken and combined. Then there was lots of complicated computer work done to make the image look as it does now.
Who is this Carl Sagan?
Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was an American astronomer, author, and science-explainer. He did lots of research into the possibility of life existing somewhere other than Earth. He was instrumental in the creation of the first physical messages that we have sent into space (the Golden Records on Voyager and the Plaques on Pioneer), and was a science celebrity. His television series for PBS, Cosmos, was really successful. Sagan wrote lots of books, some about science and space, and some were novels mostly about aliens. I was given one of the science-y space ones by my parents one year for Christmas when I was a kid. I totally loved it, but mostly I looked at the pictures.
Plan and Elevation
Composer: Caroline Shaw
Composer, violinist, vocalist, all around musician extraordinaire. Winner of Grammys, Pulitzer Prizes and mother of dragons (no not really). (But maybe).
Work: Plan & Elevation: The Grounds of Dumbarton Oaks
A string quartet made up of musical descriptions of different aspects of the beautiful gardens and grounds of the Dumbarton Oaks estate. Commissioned by Dumbarton Oaks, and premiered by the Dover Quartet in the music room of Dumbarton Oaks on November 1, 2015.
Why is it on this program?
Okay, so we messed with it a bit. For the purposes of today's concerts, we expanded the intention of this quartet to include the whole of our planet rather than the grounds of one estate. We hope that Caroline won't mind. We assume that she won't - she seems to be pretty cool and chill.
What does Caroline say?
I have always loved drawing the architecture around me when traveling, and some of my favorite lessons in musical composition have occurred by chance in my drawing practice over the years. While writing a string quartet to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, I returned to these essential ideas of space and proportion — to the challenges of trying to represent them on paper. The title, Plan & Elevation, refers to two standard ways of representing architecture — essentially an orthographic, or “bird’s eye,” perspective (“plan”), and a side view which features more ornamental detail (“elevation”). This binary is also a gentle metaphor for one’s path in any endeavor — often the actual journey and results are quite different (and perhaps more elevated) than the original plan.
I was fortunate to have been the inaugural music fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 2014-15. Plan & Elevation examines different parts of the estate’s beautiful grounds and my personal experience in those particular spaces. Each movement is based on a simple ground bass line which supports a different musical concept or character. “The Ellipse” considers the notion of infinite repetition (I won’t deny a tiny Kierkegaard influence here). One can walk around and around the stone path, beneath the trimmed hornbeams, as I often did as a way to clear my mind while writing. The second movement, “The Cutting Garden,” is a fun fragmentation of various string quartets (primarily Ravel, Mozart K. 387, and my own Entr’acte, Valencia, and Punctum), referencing the variety of flowers grown there before they meet their inevitable end as cuttings for display. “The Herbaceous Border” is spare and strict at first, like the cold geometry of French formal gardens with their clear orthogonals (when viewed from the highest point), before building to the opposite of order: chaos. The fourth movement, “The Orangery,” is evokes the slim, fractured shadows in that room as the light tries to peek through the leaves of the aging fig vine. We end with my favorite spot in the garden, “The Beech Tree.” It is strong, simple, ancient, elegant, and quiet; it needs no introduction.