The Greenwood String Quartet

Middleground
Shelley Washington was born in 1991 and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. She was raised in a musical family and exposed to contemporary music at an early age. She attended Truman State University with the intention of becoming a band director, completing a Bachelor of Arts in Music and a Master of Arts in Education. In 2015, she moved to New York City and completed a Master of Music in Composition from NYU Steinhardt.

Middleground, Washington's first and most frequently programmed piece, was composed in 2015 for the JACK Quartet. Washington strongly identifies as a Midwesterner and her early works have a distinctly Americana flavor. Middleground starts with sixteenth note ostinati which create forward movement. In an interview with Tyler Kline of the podcast music/Maker, Washington discussed her love of open fifths and how her music has often been compared to that of Aaron Copland. That is clear in Middleground. The ostinati grow from single, repeated notes into double stops of open intervals, with a lyric melody that occasionally pushes through the dense texture. This melody is developed by the instruments midway through the piece. This section is the antidote to the constant movement of the first half of the piece. It feels like a bit of open sky before the listener's attention goes back to the forward movement of the ostinato which eventually disappear into nothing at the end.

The piece was composed after Washington moved from Kansas City to New York. She adds this description to the piece:

The space grounded, the between, the center. The Heartland. The prairie, the grasslands, Konza, Flint Hills, Manhattan, Emporia, Salina. Where we gathered.

Home of the heart, heart of the home.

The years spent in cars, daydreaming, scooping handfuls of wheat, racing out into amber fields, cycling together, water wheel ice cream, fireworks and apples. The stories shared, books read sprawled in the yard, family prayers over anything, late evening walks, quiet nights. Open arms, open hearts, humble and extraordinary.

Together, with our wonder, our joy, we created an incredible painting with abounding colors. The kinds of colors that linger in the mind's eye long after they are out of sight and cradle you long after goodbyes are spoken and car doors closed. The kind that find you counting the days until the next birthday, the next holiday, the next bike ride, the next Camp, the next anything just so
you can see them again. When you close your eyes you feel their warmth. They stay.

The middle ground: my refuge born from the land living in my heart. Where my home is, living and breathing outside of my body, thousands of miles apart. This hallowed ground.

For my family.

String Quartet No. 12, Op. 252, à la mémoire de Gabriel Fauré
Darius Milhaud lived from 1892 until 1974. He began as a violinist and later studied composition at the Paris Conservatory where he met fellow “Les Six” members Arthur Honegger and Germaine Tailleferre. He studied composition with Charles Widor and harmony and counterpoint with André Gedalge.

From 1917 to 1919, he served as secretary to Paul Claudel, the poet and dramatist who was then the French ambassador to Brazil, and with whom Milhaud collaborated for many years, writing music for many of his poems and plays. In Brazil, they collaborated on the ballet
L'Homme et son désir.

There was a great deal of borrowing between the Jazz and Classical genres during Darius Milhaud’s lifetime. In the late 1940s, Milhaud gave composition lessons to Dave Brubeck, famed "Take Five" composer and Jazz pianist. Brubeck said in a 2010 interview with Jazzwax,
"Milhaud was an enormously gifted classical composer and teacher who loved jazz and incorporated it into his work. My older brother Howard was his assistant and had taken all of his classes." Brubeck named his first son Darius in Milhaud’s honor.

According to Joseph Stevenson:

France was virtually all liberated and the war in Europe was clearly nearing its close when Milhaud, living in the San Francisco Bay area, wrote this quartet to commemorate the hundredth anniversary [of] the birth of Gabriel Fauré, one of France's great musicians. The decision to do this was spontaneous on Milhaud's part; there was no commission to do so. (Under wartime conditions there had been no French government so situated as to plan such an observance.) Among Fauré's distinctions in French music history was the maintenance of a Classical aesthetic of balance and elegance during the Romantic and Impressionist eras.

Now in his fifties, Milhaud could look forward to the war's final resolution, had a secure academic position and an established reputation as a composer, and enjoyed one of the finest and most rewarding domestic lives any great composer was blessed with. He was entering years of "relative serenity and euphoria," as his biographer Paul Collaer puts it.

The quartet has its musical heart in the slow movement, as is frequently the case with Milhaud. The main melody is a deeply moving one; it is joined by a more rhythmic second theme. The pair of themes are often presented in dialogue.

The opening and closing movements are not insubstantial but are clearly subordinate to the slow movement in importance. The first movement starts with a duo for violin and viola, then moves into a calm and uncomplicated statement. The final movement is a dazzling, livelymovement, contrasting with the preceding slower ones.

String Quartet in F major
Joseph Maurice Ravel lived from 1875 until 1937. He was a younger contemporary of Claude Debussy, who greatly influenced the style of his string quartet. Ravel may be best known for is orchestral work, particularly Boléro, composed in 1928. In his time, Ravel was also known for his orchestral writing which included several transcriptions of piano works, like Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Many of Ravel's own compositions exist as both piano and orchestral works. He saw the value of recordings as a means to bring music to a broader audience. He was a composer who could play piano and conduct, but those were not his strengths. Despite that, he took part in recording several of his own works starting in the 1920s.

In November 1889 Ravel (age 14) was admitted to the Conservatoire de Paris. In 1895 (age 20) Ravel was expelled, then readmitted two years later. He studied composition with the composer and organist Gabriel Fauré. At the age of 28, Ravel completed the piece we're hearing tonight, his only string quartet, and dedicated it to Fauré. The Ravel Quartet in F Major is closer in style to Claude Debussy's quartet of ten years earlier than the quartets of the established French school of César Franck and his followers. Ravel's work is built on more succinct melodies that are fluently interchanged. He also includes more flexible tempos and varieties of instrumental color. That use of color is likely what made him such a successful orchestra composer.

The quartet is in four movements.

I. Allegro moderato – très doux
The movement is in traditional sonata form, based on two contrasting themes. The first, rising and falling through a long arc, is played by all four players at the opening and taken over by the first violin, accompanied by scalar harmonies in the lower instruments. The second theme, more reflective in character, is played by the first violin and viola playing two octaves apart. The development section, straightforward and traditional, is predominantly lyrical, gaining intensity before the recapitulation. In the recapitulation, the return of the second theme is subtly changed, with the upper three parts remaining identical to the exposition, but the cello raised a minor
third, moving the passage from D minor to F major. The pace slows and the movement ends very quietly.

II. Assez vif – très rythmé
As in Debussy's quartet, the scherzo is the second movement and opens with a pizzicato passage. This first theme is in the Aeolian mode, which some writers, including the Ravel scholar Arbie Orenstein, detect the influence of the Javanese gamelan, which had greatly
impressed both Debussy and Ravel when heard in Paris in 1889. Others hear in it echoes of Ravel's Spanish descent.

The central section of the music is a slow, wistful theme led by the cello. Ravel uses cross rhythms, with figures in triple time played at the same time as figures in double time. The key varies from A minor to E minor and G# minor. The movement concludes with a shortened reprise of the opening section.

III. Très lent
Despite the marking "very slow," the third movement has numerous changes of tempo. The viola introduces the first theme, which the first violin then repeats. There are strong thematic links with the first movement, and, in defiance of orthodox rules of harmony, conspicuous use of consecutive fifths. The music is rhapsodic and lyrical; it begins and ends in G♭ major with passages in A minor and D minor.

IV. Vif et agité
The finale reverts to the F major of the first movement. It is loosely in the form of a rondo. The opening bars are stormy, and the movement, though short, has several changes of time signature, 5/8 to 5/4 to 3/4. Short melodic themes are given rapid tremolandi and sustained phrases are played against emphatic arpeggios. There are brief moments of calm sections, including a reference to the first subject of the opening movement. The turbulence of the opening bars of the finale reasserts itself, and the work ends vigorously.