Writing

Gabriella Smith’s music takes us outside the concert hall and into the natural world. Through evocative soundscapes inspired directly by her own experiences in wild places, she invites listeners to join her in discovering what she calls “the joys of climate action” while connecting deeply with our planet and its inhabitants.

Right from the start, we hear the influence of Schumann’s fugenpassion. The violin spins a dark, chromatic melody that the bass of the piano echoes in counterpoint, building to a forceful dotted rhythm played by all three instruments.

Taylor describes his music as “creating abstract musical analogies for social-political happenings both present and past.” In previous orchestral pieces, he has used the saxophone to represent othered voices and questioned orchestral hierarchy by reconfiguring the orchestra into smaller ensembles.

Just when he has mesmerized us with this harmonic wandering, he stops the piece’s progress all together with a slower tempo marking and a grand pause. This sudden stopping becomes its own motif in a way.

In 1862, Johannes Brahms’s friend Adolf Schubring wrote these prophetic words in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik: “[Brahms] understands how to be Classic and Romantic, ideal and real—and after all, I believe he is appointed to blend both these eternal oppositions in art.”

When pianists think of mindless finger exercises, they often think of Carl Czerny. Though he is perhaps fairly maligned as a torturer of piano students, Czerny was also one of the most influential piano pedagogues of all time and a prolific composer of nearly 1,000 works in almost every genre.

In the last full year of his life, at the young age of 30 and suffering from syphilis, Franz Schubert wrote a torrent of transcendental works. We can guess at its impetus: a heightened sense of mortality, both from his own progressing illness and from the death in 1827 of his greatest musical hero, Ludwig van Beethoven.

“Everything around me makes it impossible for me to work and I am frightened of becoming completely apathetic.” So wrote Sergei Rachmaninoff to his lifelong mentor Alexander Siloti in the fall of 1917 as revolution shook Russia. Guns fired in the streets outside his Moscow apartment and Rachmaninoff found himself incapable of creating new music.