Giving Back

La Jolla Symphony & Chorus kicks off its 2019/2020 season in traditional fashion with the annual Young People’s Concert. Conductor Steven Schick notes that this free concert is one means for the Symphony to give back to the community, with the added goal of encouraging an interest in music among children (and perhaps their parents, as well).

Steven Schick serves as host and narrator, guiding the audience through excerpts from Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Florence Price’s Violin Concerto No.1 as well as the complete William Tell Overture by Rossini. Schick places particular emphasis on the orchestra’s organization and how the various sections interact with each other, with each of the musical selections serving as examples – duets in Bartók, the solo violinist in Price, and the four brief but distinctive movements of the Rossini, including the famous finale (aptly described as a “gallop”). Schick also solicits questions from his young audience, the topics ranging from “How many strings does a harp have?” and “What is the loudest instrument?” to “What sparked your [Schick’s] interest in music?” Following this introductory presentation, the three selections are performed in the first regular concert of the season, giving students and parents the opportunity to hear the pieces in their entirety.

In his concert program notes Steven Schick says this about the “uses of music:”

“The usefulness of music gets at its true power: the ability to shape our lives and, in small and large ways, to connect to other people’s lives…Music can be used as a cultural adhesive, binding our experiences one to the other.”

The Young People’s Concert and other classical music performances can be a valuable tool in helping children to begin forming their own tapestries of cultural memories and shared experiences.

Watch — Young People’s Concert 2019 – La Jolla Symphony & Chorus

A Good Tune – SummerFest 2014

8232In past seasons the SummerFest programs aired on UCSD-TV tended to the eclectic, mixing different styles, eras and composers broadly representative of the chamber music genre. This year, we’re focusing on four great masters of the Classical style: Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, and Johannes Brahms.

Some definitions are useful here. We use the term classical music (note the small “c”) colloquially to include all Western “art music” (or “serious music”) from roughly the ninth century to the present, and especially the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. In fact, the loose term classical music encompasses a broad variety of forms, styles, genres, schools, movements, historical periods, and composers. The Classical period (note the capital “C”) highlighted in our programs was predominant from the mid-18th to the mid-19th centuries, and was largely developed in Germany and Austria. It derived from the Baroque period and lead to the Romantic period. The hallmarks of the Classical style include a rejection of the ornamentation of the Baroque in favor of a cleaner, simpler style, one with a lighter texture and concerned with logical development, structural balance, adherence to form, proportion, and “rightness” of phrasing. It was highly organized and melodic music, well suited to the Age of Reason. As is always the case when attempting to strictly define historical periods there was considerable overlap between the different styles, and several well-known composers are considered transitional figures – Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert, for example (though it’s been argued that Beethoven is a genre unto himself).

Each of the four composers whose works are performed in our programs made contributions to the development of Classical style. Haydn is considered the key transitional figure from Baroque to Classical; indeed, more than any other composer he may be said to have invented Classical style, and has been called the “Father of Sonata Form.” Mozart, who was a contemporary of Haydn and greatly admired the older man, worked within Classical forms and brought them to an unsurpassed degree of perfection. Schubert, an admirer of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, brought his own innovations to the style and paved the way for the Romantic era that followed. Brahms was a late Classical composer, a Keeper of the Faith who resisted the siren call of Romanticism, fighting a rearguard action against the onslaught of Richard Wagner and his acolytes.

Alas for Brahms, history was on the side of Wagner. Romanticism was followed by modernism, serialism, minimalism, aleatroricism, primitivism, Neoclassicism, New Romanticism, post-modernism, etc., etc. ad nauseam. For a time Classical style fell out of favor – with composers, that is; it never lost its allure for audiences, and by the 1970s younger composers and performers were re-discovering its charms, once again immersing themselves in study of the period and its leading figures. Perhaps they were looking for order amidst the chaos of seventy-plus years of experimentation; or perhaps the older forms were seen as a tonic against the extremely subjective and drily academic nature of much modern music, and a way to reconnect with audiences.

Or perhaps, as SummerFest Music Director Cho-Liang (Jimmy) Lin notes, it’s as simple as “a good tune is always a good tune – there’s no substitute,” and the Classical masters offered good tunes in abundance.

Watch La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest 2014 Season.

Jazz Camp 2014 – Finale Concert Highlights

8232What is jazz? The late great Stan Getz described jazz thusly:

“It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.”

UC San Diego Jazz Camp exemplifies Getz’s definition. In its twelfth year, Jazz Camp transports its students through a one week, one-of-a-kind journey into the world of jazz. Combining the expertise of more than a dozen nationally- and internationally-known musicians and jazz educators, this extraordinary faculty brings students of jazz together to explore a full spectrum of approaches to jazz improvisation.

At the end of the week, UC San Diego Jazz Camp culminates in a finale concert, featuring student ensembles performing standards and original compositions with the participation and under the direction of faculty members.

Watch the latest season of Jazz Camp and browse past performances.

La Jolla Music Society SummerFest: Musical Crossroads

Enjoy the last moments of Summer with UCSD-TV’s coverage of this year’s La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest!

UCSD-TV has been filming this annual three week festival of chamber music since 1999 and archives of these past performances can be found in our La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest Series.

This year’s SummerFest did not disappoint with world premieres by three Pulitzer Prize-winning American composers: Steven Stucky, David Del Tredici and John Harbison.

Watch “La Jolla Music Society SummerFest: Musical Crossroads” to also see the “Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion” by Hungarian composer Bela Bartok.

Watch other great chamber music concerts in the La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest Series.

It's SummerFest Season!

Summer wouldn’t be the same without La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest!

Every year La Jolla Music Society orchestrates three weeks of chamber music concerts with world famous musicians who not only perform original works but participate in discussions, give lectures and coaching sessions for younger musicians, and attend social events.

UCSD-TV has been capturing these musical moments since the 1999 SummerFest season and all of these performances are archived on our website.

SummerFest, led by violinist Cho-Liang Lin, delves into the story and art behind the musical pieces with pre-concert talks and interviews with the artists.

Get ready for the upcoming season of SummerFest with this past episode, featuring “Wayne Shorter’s Terra Incognita, 2006.” Shorter discusses his inspirations for his famous “Terra Incognita” as well as the Imani Winds quintet describing their experience playing the piece.

See what other musicians have been a part of the chamber music celebration in the SummerFest Series!