Janet Jacobson

An annual tradition for the festival, the Local Composers Concert displays the wide variety of musical styles and ideas present in just the tri-state area (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York). The following picture features Janet Jacobson and Han-Wei Lu performing the intricately microtonal “Five Vignettes” by Julia Werntz. A process of dividing the traditional Western scale, Julia describes her use of microtonality:

My method was just to seize the “new” pitches from in-between the “old” pitches of 12-note equal-temperament—60 new pitches in total—and to sing the intervals again and again until I had internalized a new microtonal, equal-tempered chromatic scale consisting of 72 pitches. Then I began developing a melodic technique, relying on certain aspects of my traditional musical training, while at the same time looking out for the peculiar new demands of the new intervals themselves, such as rhythm.

More info on Julia Werntz and her music can be found here.

Jim Liddle narrates Inés Thiebaut’s work Forget Nothing and Forgive Me Anyway while accompanied by Janet Jacobson on violin. Inés writes the following:

This is the second major collaboration with poet and dear friend Molly Bain. She wrote this poem on commission, and my only instructions to her were: “just make it abstract, don’t tell a story…” But Molly always writes stories, for she is a storyteller, even when they are not linear. Her words are the sole inspiration for the music, which is just a sound representation of them. In conversation, the voice and the violin follow each other while narrating the sense of aloneness, the notions of past and future, and how sometimes the simple things in life are not that simple…

Tag: Janet Jacobson

Picture of the Day – July 18, 2012

Picture of the Day – July 9, 2012