Chamber Music Festival Sets Tone for Academic Conference

If there is a night that music aficionados and student performers look forward to at Holy Cross, it must be the Chamber Music Festival.

The event, in conjunction with the Annual Academic Conference, is an annual showcase of student performances featuring music composed for small ensembles. It’s a rather significant event, showcasing the best performers who have coached with faculty the entire year and, for some seniors, up to their entire four years.

One of the most important elements of chamber music is the musical and social pleasure for musicians of playing together either in private, in a domestic setting, or in public in an intimate concert hall before a small audience, says Sarah Grunstein, assistant professor of music. Performers in the music department ensembles range from freshmen to graduating seniors, and coach with faculty for the entire year.

This year’s festival will be held on the opening day of the conference, April 25 at 8 p.m. in Brooks Concert Hall. The festival, free and open to the public, spans works dating from 1151 to the 20th century. “We begin with the morality play Ordo Virtutem by the medieval visionary Hildegard. Hildegard is one of the most fascinating women in the history of music,” says Grunstein.

The performance will feature not only characters such as “Humility” and “The Devil,” but accompaniment by drone sounds performed on cello, and three temple bells. Such accompaniments were not written into the text. “However, in every period of music history we have to explore what the notation means,” says Grunstein. “Such performance practice was known to have been a part of the music-making. The combination of sounds of our three sopranos, the cello, and the bells is exquisite, and inspires our historical imagination.”

The festival includes Monteverdi madrigals, outstanding in their beauty and dissonance; Baroque duos, a Mozart divertimento for strings performed by Brooks Scholar David Ogulnick ’10, Harun Rafi ’10, and lecturer Peter Sulski; the Holy Cross Madrigal Singers; and Bartok Mikrokosmos for two pianos performed by Jessica Cullen ’10 and Sam Partyka ’10.

“The Mikrokosmos are spectacular,” says Grunstein. “Bartok was a phenomenal pianist with steel fingers, a sharp sense of articulation and rhythm, and a fascination for Slavic folk music. Put these ingredients together and these microcosms are crafted masterpieces.”

The Debussy String Quartet and Sonata profile the performance work and research project of Fenwick Scholar Catherine Hughes’07. Here she collaborates with her Vuillaume Quartet and pianist Rob Denien ’08.

“The students have worked extremely hard,” says Grunstein. The performers have worked with many faculty members in the music department, including Jennifer Ashe, Joel Cohen, Eric Culver, Grunstein and Sulski.

“Music is about discipline, beauty, craft, self-expression, and collaboration — collaboration with audience, collaboration with fellow-musicians,” she says. “Our Chamber Music Festival is a culmination of these ideas. Our students have worked together, studied together. Professors have worked and created together. It’s quite thrilling to work with Holy Cross students in their understanding of history, the compositional process, and in their performance craft and self-expression. Their strong and spirited enthusiasm, along with their sophisticated music-making brings pride to our department, and to the College.”