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"Quiet City" is a collaboration between Winston-Salem Symphony, Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance, and John Jordan Films. Dancers Gavin Stewart and Vanessa Owen move through the film while never touching. Screen capture from Aaron Copland: "Quiet City" courtesy of Winston-Salem Symphony's YouTube page.

With music venues and auditoriums closed for the foreseeable future, many artists have turned to virtual performances. But that makes collaboration tough. In the spirit of working together, the Winston-Salem Symphony created Etherbound, a new series of online performances.

It’s launching with a video response to the COVID-19 pandemic called Quiet City, which brings together the worlds of film, dance, and music.

Composer Aaron Copland originally wrote "Quiet City" for a play in the 1930s. The show was a flop, but Copland reworked the original score as a standalone piece of music.

Winston-Salem Symphony Music Director Tim Redmond has a decades-spanning history with "Quiet City." Years ago he played it as an oboist, and it was the first piece he conducted while at university.

“There’s something about Copland’s music that's just so gorgeously, beautifully appealing,” says Redmond. “I find it endlessly wonderful just to delve into that sound world. It’s a sort of nostalgia for a time that never was.”

As the film begins, you see small sections of the orchestra, wearing face coverings and spaced apart, playing on the stage of The Ramkat, a downtown Winston-Salem music venue that has been closed for months. The lights and the vibe are familiar, but it's different, lonelier, and the music hall is empty.

Amanda LaBrecque is a featured soloist in the symphony, playing the English horn.

“It’s one of those pieces where it's really easy to get into your own head and get into your own personal, inner-emotions. I think the beginning was probably one of my favorites, just because it is so stark. I mean, you’re just completely alone, as far as the English horn just coming out of a string chord essentially; it’s just so naked,” she says.

Musicians in a symphony are used to working together, feeding off each other’s performance, and tuning to each other. But to follow social distancing rules, the players were kept separated until it was time to perform.

LaBrecque says she waited backstage in the green room while she heard her colleagues playing, and it was strangely nerve-wracking and reminiscent of an orchestra audition.

“Which actually was really kind of hard to get out of my own head and be like, ‘ok this isn’t an audition, I have nothing to be nervous about, I don’t know why my adrenaline is starting to pump,’ you know?” says LaBrecque.

The music was being recorded in a truck outside of the venue and streamed to Tim Redmond in London, where he conducted the symphony via video conferencing.

“Anything collaborative like this has to have flex,” he says. “There’s got to be flow in how the thing is put together. That was key to this whole project. And one of the fascinating things about this is it highlights that in each of our disciplines, we have a slightly different approach to how we view the art that we make.”

The visual storyline of the work comes via a pair of dancers. They move through some iconic locations in Winston-Salem, mirroring and reacting to each other’s movements, but never touching — almost like magnets of the same polarity, pushing together but always apart. This concept points to our inability to make physical contact with those outside of our most intimate circles during the coronavirus pandemic.

The dancers, Gavin Stewart and Vanessa Owen, a married couple from Terpsicorps Theatre of Dance, improvised their movements. Heather Maloy is the company’s artistic director.

“They are remarkable improvisational artists,” Maloy says. “We liked this idea of having the two of them be close to each other with this connection, but lacking the ability to be able to touch, like so many of us. So that final moment where they touch was so beautiful.”

Indeed, at the culmination of Quiet City, the dancers hands touch, ever so briefly, but the effect is electric. That moment was captured by John Jordan, who shot 17 hours of dance and music footage for a film that clocks in at just under ten minutes.

“My biggest challenge was filming all those different sections of the music in a way that was as cinematic as possible. I wanted it to be immersive, I wanted it to feel like you were in the room with those people, experiencing that as it was happening. I wanted to bring them to life,” Jordan says.

According to Music Director Tim Redmond, when the early cuts of the project were shared with others, people had an emotional reaction to the work.

“Everybody who looked at it said they were blinking back tears at what it represented,” he says. “And that’s one of the things that art can do. Without the need for words, it reassures us, it challenges us, it soothes us, somehow it comforts us.”

For the most up-to-date information on coronavirus in North Carolina, visit our Live Updates blog here. WFDD wants to hear your stories — connect with us and let us know what you’re experiencing.

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symphony #quiet city #etherbound #arts #winston salem #dance #film #terpsicorps #aaron copland #performance #covid-19 #coronavirusnc

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Longtime friends and colleagues composer Samuel Adler (left) and Professor of Composition and Composer-in-Residence at Wake Forest University Dan Locklair. (Photo Credit: David Hagy)

World-renowned composer and educator Samuel Adler will be in the Triad this weekend. He’ll be discussing his new book, Building Bridges With Music – a collection of personal stories about his life, work and mentors.

Adler’s music embraces a wide variety of contemporary styles, and it’s been performed by many of the finest orchestras in the world. His teaching career at music conservatories including Eastman and Juilliard spans six decades, and his textbook, The Study of Orchestration, has influenced generations of composers.

But Adler came from humble beginnings. The son of a cantor, he spent his early childhood growing up in a segregated Jewish neighborhood in Nazi Germany. He began studying violin at age seven, and his enthusiasm for music continued to grow after he and his family emigrated to the United States in 1939.

Samuel Adler recently shared some of his biggest influences with WFDD’s David Ford.

Interview Highlights On his early childhood memories in Mannheim, Germany:

My father was the chief cantor of the central synagogue, so our life revolved around religious celebration, however, we were segregated because Jews could no longer go to restaurants, the movie[s] or any other public place. So, everything was kind of limited as far as my childhood is concerned.

On his early introduction to music:

[Playing violin] occupied a lot of my time because I loved to practice. And the teacher I had…came every day—because he lost his job because he was also Jewish—to practice with me or give me a lesson, because my mother fed him, he was so poor.

On hearing the world premiere performance of Barók’s Concerto for Orchestra:

My father took me to the first performance…which was Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony. And on a Friday afternoon we drove to Boston and went to the concert. Of course, I was very excited about it and went to get [an] autograph of Bartók’s...and I went backstage, and Bartók was sitting there, all into himself—he was very ill at that time.

Koussevitzky came back from the stage quite energized—there were about 25 reporters there—and he pointed to Bartók and said, “Boys, there sits the greatest composer in the world.” And Bartók looked up and quietly said, “Last week, you said it was Prokofiev.” Well, last week he did the first performance in Boston of Prokofiev’s 5th Symphony and therefore Prokofiev was the greatest composer. Every week he did a new work which was so exciting, and I’m afraid is not the custom today anymore.

On his long association with groundbreaking American composer and teacher Aaron Copland:

He at first refused to have me as a student because he felt I was so tradition-bound, and influenced by [Paul] Hindemith—with whom I was studying before I went to Copland—that he said, ‘Look, you have such a good technique, I’m not interested in that kind of music.’ It was very difficult to have a breakthrough with him because he was very critical—which, by the way, I now appreciate more than ever—because he wanted me to change and look into myself more, rather than into having a great technique in counterpoint or harmony.

It took ten years after I studied with him that he gave me a letter of recommendation! Finally he said, “Sam, you’re really a composer now. After hearing your first and second symphony, and your first opera, I really think that you’re going to make it.”

Samuel Adler’s talk, Building Bridges With Music, is open to the public and begins Friday night on the Wake Forest University campus.

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samuel adler #composer #educator #wake forest university #aaron copland #bela bartok #mannheim #music #arts

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