PROJECT ARCHIVES

Alma de España (The Soul of Spain)

Three Concerts | 2018-2021

The music of Spanish-speaking regions has long been underperformed, partially due to a misrepresentation by inaccurate stereotypes of Spanish and Latin cultures, but also due to an inside reluctance to share this body of music with the world. Within its rich palette of sound, Spanish music is full of complexities and different styles; each province has a special musical flavor unique to its geography. Music of South America displays a wide variety of influences, reflecting its colonial history and the musical traditions of its immigrants, especially from Portugal and Spain. Many more sources of inspiration exist, however, including native and folk elements of South America, classical European traditions, African musical treasures brought over from more than 150 years of slave trading, and even American jazz by the early twentieth century.

With such a rich history of global influences, what has prevented this massive body of repertoire from entering the musical mainstream across the world? For one, printing presses in Spain have operated on highly inefficient levels, publishing music at inconsistent paces and often allowing works to go out of print. It has also been noted that a historically isolationist mentality among Spanish musical and literary scholars has prevented the global dissemination of their research and music, adding a self-inflicted wound to the list of reasons for their art being less commonly known to curious outsiders. In short, a general resistance to innovation and globalization has kept the music of Spain and Latin America in the shadows throughout the twentieth century.

Despite these historical barriers, the many facets and influences of Spanish-language song make it a treasure trove worthy of any program. Beginning in 2018, CSI did its part to help bring this massive body of repertoire into the spotlight, embarking upon an ambitious three-season exploration of the greatest songs from Spain and Latin America.

Prayer Interrupted: Music in a World Turned Upside Down

Performed in a Single Concert | January 26, 2020

In a first-time collaboration between CSI and Cincinnati's Holocaust and Humanity Center, Prayer Interrupted dove into the lives of Jews in and around the Holocaust. Songs by Jewish composers were punctuated by liturgical music found in Cincinnati Hebrew Union College's famed Birnbaum collection of music manuscripts, and narration transported the audience directly into the world in which these songs were created.

This revolutionary concert commemorated the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, and also marked the one year anniversary of the Holocaust and Humanity Center's opening in the Cincinnati Museum Center.

Henri Duparc: The Complete Songs

Performed in a Single Concert | September 21, 2019

Despite his seemingly meager output of only seventeen songs, Henri Duparc remains among the top composers of the French repertoire, known for his beautiful melodies and melodic and harmonic subtleties. His intricate piano accompaniments boast complexity and often dense, orchestral-like textures. Known for his severe self-criticism, he constantly revised and polished existing works, even destroying some or refusing to let them be published.

Duparc studied with César Franck at the Jesuit College of Vaugirard, later developing a sensitivity to the poetic text combined with melodic inspiration and a harmonic style akin to Richard Wagner’s, who he met at Weimar in 1869. His collection of songs, written between 1868 and 1884, included eight with orchestral accompaniment. In these songs, Duparc enlarged the French song into a scena, or opera-like scene, and brought to it a poetic sense of musical prosody and a symphonic conception of form.

Duparc set the poems of living composers at the time - all from the Parnassian school, a group of French poets who took inspiration from the ideals of the French Pléiade poets of the sixteenth century. The Parnassians were more concerned with perfection of form than with feeling or emotion, and so their poetry is elegant but highly impersonal in style. Among these poets set by Duparc were Lahor, Sully-Prudhomme, Baudelaire, Silvestre, and de Lisle.

In 1885, a mental illness, diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, caused him abruptly to cease composing at age 37. He devoted himself to his family and his other passions, drawing and painting. But increasing vision loss after the turn of the century eventually led to total blindness. He destroyed most of his music, leaving fewer than 40 works to posterity.

To open its 2019-2020 season, CSI showcased Duparc’s entire song collection in a single evening, providing a visceral experience in tracing this unique composer’s style over the course of his relatively short compositional period.

Survey of Les Six

Three Concerts | 2017

"The War to End All Wars" was over. Although the artillery was silenced, the war would continue on the artistic front. Nowhere was this more evident than in Paris, where exciting, adventurous, and simply amusing ideas were the fashion. On the forefront of this artistic revolution was a group of six young composers that met regularly to share opinions and, of course, their own music. They were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre.

On Saturday, April 5, 1919, a concert was held in the Salle Huyghens which featured recent works by these five men and one woman. Afterwards, the group, along with several others, retired to Milhaud's home. Among those present was the French critic Henri Collet; it was he who coined the collective name by which these composers would become best known: Les Six Français, or Les Six for short.

Les Six's primary advocate and guiding spirit was the composer and eccentric personality Erik Satie. In his music, Satie attempted to create a unique vision removed from all Germanic influences, antithetical to the grandeur and solemnity of Richard Wagner, and devoid of the voluptuousness of Richard Strauss. His dislikes included the impressionist-inspired music of the two greatest French composers of the era, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Satie's anti-German and anti-impressionist tendencies loosely informed the tastes of Les Six, although certain individuals within the group had sympathetic opinions toward the aforementioned styles.

More importantly was the artistic circle surrounding Les Six during the time of their output. Poets such as Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon, as well as artists like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia influenced and worked with the composers on various projects, including the creation of sets for many productions of new works.

The music of Les Six scandalized and delighted Paris at the time, serving as a sonic portrait depicting an era that was one of the most vibrant in the cultural history of Paris. In 2017, CSI undertook a three-concert survey of these composers' art song output to honor the 125th birth anniversaries of three of the six: Honegger, Milhaud, and Tailleferre.