Golden Age of the Violin

Abstract

Enclosed are the programs and program notes from my three Doctoral recitals. The first program represents the performance last summer given by the Aspen Conducting Academy, where I was featured as the soloist playing Berg Concerto. The full program included other works, but I reduced it here for simplicity and relevance. This concert had been originally planned for 2021’s summer program, a year after I placed in the DeLay competition there. Because of Covid’s interference, I had two years to study Berg’s violin concerto before the concert. This concerto is so thick, with so many quotes and references and uses of his 12-tone row, I needed those two years to understand even a piece of what Berg created. After diving so deeply into Berg’s music, I fell in love with his deeply personal expressions of beauty. It is no wonder many violinists consider this the greatest violin concerto: it speaks to audience members and fellow musicians alike with depth and heartfelt sorrow. The second program, in Stamps Auditorium this past January, is a subset of my favorite time period in music, what I have considered to be the “Golden Age of the Violin”. My Golden Age, as I considered it, included Kreisler, Ysaye, and Joachim at the start, and included such great composers and violinists as Bartok, Prokofiev, Heifetz, and Menuhin. The violinist-composer is the ultimate symbol of this craft that I especially prize: the performer as chief artist, initiating a dialogue with the audience, using the language of the composer. I thought this craft was gradually lost over the last few decades, as our violinists ceased being composers and our composers seemed less interested in conversing with an audience. The third program represents an expansion of my previously limited perspective. I had thought the celebration of the performer’s creativity, and their connection to the audience, was limited to this “Golden Age” from the late 1800s to mid 1900s. When I assembled this program, and recognized the geniuses of communication around me in Joseph Gascho and Michael Daugherty, I realized the art of musical dialogue is thriving today. Professor Gascho showed me that Baroque repertoire is meant to be performed off-the-cuff, with little improvisations

iii everywhere and musicians feeding off each other’s ideas. We also had fun talking about the goals of intonation, and my familiar Expressive Intonation was put on the back-burner in favor of Quarter-Comma Meantone, an excellent exercise for my ear and a study of the musical moment. Working with the composer Michael Daugherty this past year has been a beautiful experience. He employed me in woodshedding his violin parts for upcoming new works, and I got to witness his flexibility in changing anything that he felt didn’t work, even if he had spent several hours writing it. Professor Daugherty is an audience-centered composer, writing music that is meant to be savored and enjoyed by concertgoers. This process has led me to conclude that the “Golden Age of the Violin” stretches back much further than I had thought, and this celebration of dialogue in music continues today in the hearts of composers, performers, and improvisers.