Arvo Pärt, born in 1935 in Paide, Estonia, fifty miles southeast of Tallinn, graduated from the Tallinn Conservatory in 1963 while working as a recording director in the music division of the Estonian Radio. A year before leaving the Conservatory, he won first prize in the All-Union Young Composers’ Competition for a children’s cantata and an oratorio. In 1980, he emigrated to Vienna, where he took Austrian citizenship; he moved to Berlin in 1982 and recently returned to Tallinn. Pärt’s many distinctions include the Artistic Award of the Estonian Society in Stockholm, honorary memberships in the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Belgium’s Royal Academy of Arts, seven Grammy nominations, and recognition as a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la République Française.

In his early works, Pärt explored the influences of the Soviet music of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, the serial principles of Schoenberg, and the techniques of collage and quotation, but in the late 1960s he abandoned creative work for several years to devote himself to the study of such Medieval and Renaissance composers as Machaut, Ockeghem, Obrecht, and Josquin. Guided by the spirit and method of those ancient masters, Pärt developed a distinctive idiom that utilizes quiet dynamics, rhythmic stasis, and open-interval and triadic harmonies to create a thoughtful mood of mystical introspection reflecting the composer’s personal piety. Pärt composed Psalom, his only mature work for string quartet, in 1985, but it was not performed until 1991, when his publisher, Universal Edition, commissioned a piece for string quartet for the upcoming 90th birthday of its long-time leader, Alfred Schlee. Psalom was revised for the celebratory concert and premiered by the Arditti Quartet at the Konzerthaus in Vienna in November 1991.

The Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa, Estonia provided the following information about the work: “Psalom is based on Psalm 112 (113) in Church Slavonic, which, like many other of Pärt’s instrumental pieces, precisely determines the course of music. The nine verses of the Psalm are composed as melodic sentences that are separated from one another by grand pauses, starting silently and fading into silence again. The composer himself described the musical material: ‘The focus is on two elements — stressed and unstressed text syllables. They have been given a musical value. The unstressed syllables have been assigned a one-voice melody line, while the stressed syllables are always marked with [intervals of] a third. These two elements exist regardless of the meaning of the word.’”

Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate (“Taloa Ikbi”), born in 1968 at Norman, Oklahoma, is of Chickasaw and Manx descent and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. (Mr. Tate’s middle name, Impichchaachaaha’, means “high corncrib” and is his inherited traditional Chickasaw “house name.” A corncrib is a small hut elevated off the ground on stilts that is used to store corn and other veg- etables.) His father, Charles (Chickasaw), was a Tribal Judge and a classically trained pianist and baritone who played at home as well as in professional performance; his mother, Patricia, of Manx–Irish descent, was a professor of dance and a choreographer.

Jerod began piano lessons at age eight, announcing to his parents soon thereafter that he was going to be a professional musician. He progressed rapidly as a pianist during his high school years and in 1986 was granted a four-year, full-tuition scholarship to Northwestern University, where he studied with Donald Isaak, participated in master classes with Claude Frank and Eckart Sellheim, and received the Corinne Frada Pick Award as Outstanding Music School Senior. After earning his Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from NWU in 1990, Tate was awarded a full-tuition scholarship to attend the Adamant Music School in Vermont, and was selected to represent the School at its New York City recital series. He went on to complete master’s degrees in piano and composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where his principal teachers were Elizabeth Pastor and Donald Erb.

Tate has worked as a pianist/keyboardist, notably on national tours of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon and as accompanist for the Colorado Ballet, Hartford Ballet and other dance companies, but he has devoted himself primarily to creating a distinctive musical voice for Indigenous Americans within Classical traditions with what a critic for the Washington Post called an “ability to effectively infuse classical music with American Indian nationalism.”

Early in his career, Tate composed the music for a series titled First Americans Journal produced by Native American Television in Minneapolis, and he has since worked tirelessly as an advocate for Indigenous composers and performers — his works, rooted in Indigenous culture and history with many incorporating existing melodies, have been commissioned and performed by leading orchestras, soloists and ensembles across North America; he has long been involved with the Lakota Music Project, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s flagship Bridging Cultures Program; he implemented the First Nations Composers Initiative to commission works from North American Indian composers; he was the founding composition instructor at the Chickasaw Summer Arts Academy in Oklahoma and has taught composition to American Indian students in Minneapolis, Toronto and on many reservations, as well as at the Grand Canyon Music Festival Native American Composer Apprentice Project; he was Guest Composer/Conductor/Pianist for the San Francisco Symphony’s Currents program Thunder Song: American Indian Musical Cultures; his music has been featured on the hit HBO series Westworld.

In 2022, Jerod Tate was inducted into the Chickasaw Hall of Fame and also received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Cleveland Institute of Music; he had served as a Cultural Ambassador for the U. S. Department of State a year earlier. Among Tate’s other honors are appointment as Creativity Ambassador for the State of Oklahoma and an Emmy Award for his work on the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority documentary The Science of Composing. Tate has taught at Oklahoma City University and in spring 2023 serves as Composer-in-Residence at the University of Oklahoma.

Tate composed Pisachi for the ETHEL string quartet for their multi-media performance at the 2013 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Of it, he wrote, “Pisachi (a Chickasaw word meaning ‘reveal,’ pronounced pee-sah-chee) is composed in six epitomes (sections) and was originally commissioned to be performed within a slide-show exhibit for ETHEL’s touring project entitled Documerica. For this project, Pisachi was assigned to accompany images of the American Indian Southwest. The title and the short epitomes are a play on words that allude to the fact that the presentation was made of snapshots (epitomes) of larger landscapes.

“Pisachi draws specifically from Hopi and Pueblo Indian music, rhythms and form. The opening viola solo is a paraphrase of a Pueblo Buffalo Dance and becomes material throughout the work. Later, the work refers to Hopi Buffalo Dance and Hopi Elk Dance music. It is my intent to honor my Southwest Indian cousins through this music.”

Akua Dixon has enjoyed a long and varied career as a composer, classical cellist, conductor, educator, arranger and jazz artist. Dixon was born in 1948 into a music-loving family in New York City and grew up singing in her Baptist church. She took up cello in the fourth grade and was soon playing duets with her older sister Gayle on violin, and “as teenagers,” Akua recalled, “got together with friends on weekends and instead of going out to the park we’d play string quartets. By junior high we were playing little gigs.” Akua was accepted at the prestigious New York High School of the Performing Arts, when she started freelancing seriously, and went on to study at the Manhattan School of Music.

While she was immersing herself in classical traditions at Manhattan, she was learning popular African-American styles playing in the pit band at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater, where she backed such stars as Rev. James Cleveland, Barry White, James Brown and Dionne Warwick; during the summers she worked at the Westbury Music Fair, where she was hired when Sammy Davis, Jr. insisted that the orchestra for his appearance include Black musicians. Dixon soon broke into Broadway pit bands, playing a series of long-running shows such as Liza Minnelli’s Liza with a Z, La Cage aux Folles, Cats, Doonesbury, Barnum, Nine and Dream Girls, and also worked at the Copacabana, Waldorf-Astoria and other venues backing such famed performers as Diana Ross and Tony Bennett.

During those busy early years of her career, Dixon also played for the Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre as well as the Symphony of the New World, established in New York City in 1965 as the first racially integrated orchestra in the United States. Her career was abruptly turned toward jazz when the Symphony performed a work by Duke Ellington (who had supported the creation of ensemble) that made her realize she hadn’t “studied the music of my own heritage. I started immersing myself in jazz and spirituals, and became determined to learn the secrets of improvising.”

Dixon has since established herself as one of the leading string artists of her generation, performing with such jazz giants as Max Roach, Wynton Marsalis, Don Cherry, Lionel Hampton, Buster Williams, Carmen McRae, Dizzy Gillespie and Tom Harrell, writing string arrangements for several albums (including The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, the eponymous debut CD of that artist, which won five Grammy Awards, and A Rose Is Still A Rose by Aretha Franklin, nominated for a Grammy), performing with and producing several albums featuring other jazz string artists (including her sister Gayle), and touring internationally with her own groups.

Akua Dixon has served as a Musical Ambassador to New York City for Carnegie Hall Education and performed for both their Neighborhood Concert Series and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jazz in the Schools tours, and lectured and given educational concerts and workshops throughout the New York metropolitan area. Among her honors are two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for composition and performance, the 1998 African American Classical Music Award from Spellman College, a Rockefeller Grant for The Opera of Marie Laveau (which had a workshop and reading in New York in 1989), and First Place for Cello in the 2015 DownBeat Readers Poll.

Dixon composed We the People on commission for CityMusic Cleveland’s “Justice, Equality and Hope” 2021-2022 season; it is being premiered at this concert. The composer has supplied the following information about the work, written by Andromeda Turre Klein:

“We the People is a musical conversation inspired by the Preamble to the United States Constitution and the ongoing fight for equity in America today. The four movements — Perfect Union, Justice, Blessings of Liberty, and Domestic Tranquility — convey these key points from the perspective of an African-American woman.

“Composed using the whole-tone scale [i.e., a six-note scale of equally distant intervals that blurs the sense of a clear tonality], it offers a harmonic perspective that is often unfamiliar and sometimes uncomfortable. Akua Dixon invites listeners to sit with the discomfort and discord and consider a different reality. Juxtaposing complex African-based rhythms with traditional European instruments, the composition reflects a true American experience: the blending of cultures.

“Perfect Union. The composition starts with a dialogue between instruments to signify the difficult but necessary conversations needed to bring unity to our nation. Emotions run high during notated solos in which contrasting perspectives express ideas and feelings.

“Justice. Composed with a dreamlike feeling, this movement is an elusive fantasy, since justice is still a dream for Black Americans today. The opening theme is written to include a breath of respectful silence for those lost to police brutality and wrongful incarceration.

“Blessings of Liberty. As justice is a fantasy, this movement is a joyful celebration speaking to the hope of what is possible in America. For centuries, African-Americans have worked to liberate themselves from a myriad of oppressions. Blessings of Liberty journeys through that process via the history of Black music in America. Starting with elements from the African musical tradition of ‘Call and Response,’ its 12-bar form is reminiscent of the Blues. It evolves into a rousing ensemble chorus that stems from a writing technique in Jazz.

“Domestic Tranquility. The work culminates with an almost macabre statement, twisting and evolving as our nation continues to do. Settling into the rhythmic pulse of the bass, this segment is reminiscent of the composer’s heritage and the impetus of the chain gangs of yore. It ends with an unanswered recapitulation of the main theme as Black American citizens are still asking ‘when?’ while waiting for basic equal rights.

“Speaking to the theme of ‘Justice, Equality and Hope’ of the CityMusic Cleveland’s 2021-2022 season, Akua Dixon asks all participants in this work — performers, presenters, audience members — to continue this conversation.”

Ravel was admitted as a student to the Paris Conservatoire in 1889, the year in which the World Exposition introduced the Javanese gamelan orchestra and Russian music to Paris (and left the Eiffel Tower as an imposing souvenir), but his academic career proved to be somewhat less than meteoric. While gaining a reputation for such pieces as the Pavane for a Dead Princess and Jeux d’Eau during the next sixteen years, he slipped in and out of the Conservatoire, auditing classes with Gabriel Fauré and other teachers, and competing, never successfully, for the Prix de Rome.

Despite his tenuous official association with the Conservatoire, Ravel retained an almost awed respect for Fauré, whom he regarded as his principal teacher and an important influence and inspiration for his music. At the end of 1902, after his second attempt to win the Prix de Rome had proven unsuccessful, Ravel felt it necessary, as had Claude Debussy a decade before, to subject the modernity of his musical speech to the rigorous discipline of one of the most demanding of all Classical genres, the string quartet.

“My Quartet represents a conception of musical construction, imperfectly realized no doubt, but set out much more precisely than in my earlier compositions,” Ravel said. He completed the first movement of the work in time to submit it to a competition at the Conservatoire in January 1903, but the reactionary judges, having become well entrenched in the attitude that caused them to frustrate Ravel’s every attempt to win the Prix de Rome, found this glowing specimen of musical color and light “laborious” and “lacking simplicity.” Ravel left the Conservatoire for the last time and never again set foot in one of its classrooms.

More angry than discouraged, Ravel continued work on the Quartet, and completed the score in April 1903. Though Fauré, whose advice and friendship Ravel continued to value despite his disappointments at the Conservatoire (he contributed a Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré to a tribute edition of the Revue Musicale in 1922), found the finale “stunted, badly unbalanced, in fact a failure” and suggested its thorough revision, both Debussy and Vincent d’Indy praised the new piece. “In the name of the gods of music, and in mine, do not touch a single note of what you have written in your Quartet,” Debussy admonished; “it is a piece worthy of any composer’s work at the end of a long career,” d’Indy told the 28-year-old musician.

Ravel agreed with his colleagues, and allowed the Heymann Quartet to premiere the work in its original form on March 5, 1904 in the auditorium of the Schola Cantorum, the institution d’Indy had founded in 1896 to offer an alternative to the Conservatoire for advanced musical instruction. Though its acceptance was not at first unanimous, the Quartet was the composition that solidified Ravel’s reputation as a leading creative figure, “one of the masters of tomorrow,” as Jean Marnold prophesied in a review in the Mercure de France.

The Quartet opens with a sonata-form Allegro whose precise Classical structure is made to accommodate effortlessly the piquant modality of its themes. The second movement is a modern scherzo, with snapping pizzicati and superimposed meters; the center of the movement is occupied by a wistful melody in slow tempo initiated by the cello. The third movement is in the character of an improvisation for quartet. The powerful, metrically irregular motive that launches the finale is brought back as the movement proceeds.