{"id":979,"date":"2016-10-17T04:18:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T04:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/waltersaul.com\/?p=979"},"modified":"2016-10-17T04:18:31","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T04:18:31","slug":"reflections-on-the-national-conference-of-christian-fellowship-of-art-music-composers-cfamc-october-6-8-2016-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/2016\/10\/17\/reflections-on-the-national-conference-of-christian-fellowship-of-art-music-composers-cfamc-october-6-8-2016-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on the National Conference Of Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers (CFAMC), October 6-8, 2016, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have arrived very early at the Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport in Jackson, Mississippi, for my flights home to Fresno, California. No hurry to get through security; there is nobody in line and my flight will not board for 2\u00bd hours. I take my time walking up and down the main concourse and discover the Medgar Wiley Evers Pavilion. Stepping into this historical exhibit, I read about the overlooked thicket of civil rights history here in the 1960\u2019s and the remarkable transformation of Medgar Evers from a shy and powerless high school dropout who served our military as a teenager to one of the giants of the civil rights movement that continues to transform Mississippi and our nation, even the world, some 53 years after this young activist was gunned down in his own driveway in 1963, just months before President John Kennedy\u2019s assassination and five years before the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King. There\u2019s a part of me that wants to turn right around and visit many other monuments of Evers here in Jackson to learn yet more of this historic, yet current struggle, a legacy that the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers (CFAMC) national conference has also celebrated in some of the new works presented over these last three days, especially in two new works by Jesse Ayers, The Passion of John Brown<\/em> and the mini-opera Beneath Suspicion.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thursday, October 6, 2016, late afternoon<\/strong><\/p>\n

I will comment later on these two works, but let\u2019s start from the beginning, on Thursday, October 6. The opening event, at 5:00 pm in the Belhaven University Center for the Arts Concert Hall, featured the Belhaven String Quartet reading works by CFAMC members Matthew Ramage, Tony K. T. Leung, and Jerry Casey. Ramage\u2019s String Quartet No. 1\u2019s<\/em> first movement, \u201cReflection,\u201d raises the curtain with a quiet, yet engaging, ostinato of quartal chords (based on fourths rather than the traditional thirds of triads), out of which emerges a passionate and disjunct melody in the first violin. This vaporizes into isolated notes reminiscent of the pointillism of Anton Webern, effectively anticipating the pizzicatos of the second theme. After some rich tone clusters in the lower registers, the melody returns in the viola doubled two octaves higher with bright harmonics beautifully performed by the first violinist \u2013 quite the transformation. We all longed to hear the faster second movement, \u201cReaction,\u201d so effectively set up by the meditative \u201cReflection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tony Leung\u2019s evocative Voices from Angel Island<\/em> has seven sections within its single movement: \u201cwith hopelessness,\u201d \u201cwith anticipation,\u201d \u201cwith a heavy heart,\u201d \u201cwith gladness when receiving mail,\u201d \u201cwith sadness and anger,\u201d \u201cwith solemn pride,\u201d and \u201cwith bittersweet joy.\u201d The opening dirge and outcry reminds me of the \u201cHow long?\u201d pleading of the saved souls of Revelation 6:10. This work deals forthrightly with another dimension of civil rights: those of immigrants mistreated and detained by the USA and Canada. Alas, it was difficult to follow the progress of this work because the faster sections were not markedly faster than the slower sections in this reading.<\/p>\n

Jerry Casey\u2019s Conflict and Reconciliation<\/em> seems to comment on Voices from Angel Island<\/em> with its harsh dissonances featuring strident tritones. We have become comfortable with her gentler and kinder old-fashioned 19th<\/sup> century tonalities emphasizing augmented 6th<\/sup> chords and other traditional chromatic alterations, so this astringent atonality was quite a surprise. The upper strings and double bass clash boldly and repeatedly with one another, leaving the cello to be the peacemaker. Reconciliation comes as the warring voices grumblingly fall into unisons.<\/p>\n

Look for part II, Thursday, October 6, 2016, evening, in a future blog post soon. I performed my Tapisseries, <\/em>short piano vignettes inspired by my sister-in-law Ann Harwell\u2019s fabric art on the Saturday afternoon concert, and will discuss that later still.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have arrived very early at the Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport in Jackson, Mississippi, for my flights home to Fresno, California. No hurry to get through security; there is nobody in line and my flight will not board for 2\u00bd hours. I take my time walking up and down the main concourse and discover… Read More »Reflections on the National Conference Of Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers (CFAMC), October 6-8, 2016, Part I<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=979"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":981,"href":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions\/981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/waltersaul.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}