The Sylvan Winds will premiere my first-ever wind quintet “Calling” (2025)!
Tuesday, March 11, 8pm
Zürcher Gallery
33 Bleecker Street
NY, NY 10012
Program:
Damien Geter (B. 1980) I Said What I Said (2021)
Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin (B. 1978) Rockaway Baby (2016)
Stephanie Griffin (B. 1973)** Calling for wind quintet (2025)**
(WORLD PREMIERE, commissioned by Sylvan Winds, with funding from NYSCA)
Reena ESMAIL (B. 1983) The Light is The Same (2017)
Lembit Beecher (B. 1980) Music for Bayside (2013)
TICKETS
Tickets can be purchased at the door.
$25 for General Admission. $20 for Seniors & Students. (CASH ONLY)
OR
Click here to buy tickets directly on Sylvan Winds’ website.
All proceeds go to the artists.
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The piece is dedicated to two wonderful people – The Sylvan Winds’ founding flutist, Svjetlana Kabalin, and Cyndy Hayward, who founded and is the force behind Willapa Bay AiR, where I had the time, space and tranquility to write the piece in August 2025.
And here is my program note for the piece:
What fascinates me most about the wind quintet is the sheer variety of characters and colors of the five instruments. It’s like five individuals all speaking different languages but somehow understanding one another and enjoying a lively conversation. My original concept for this piece was to celebrate the differences between each instrument as a metaphor for the unique cultural background of each player. When I learned that the Sylvan Winds’ founding flutist Svjetlana Kabalin was planning her retirement after over 40 years with the ensemble, it was clear to me that her Serbo-Croatian heritage should come to the fore. I love Balkan music and was immediately inspired by several field recordings from the record “Serbia: An Anthology of Serbian Folk Music” on VDE-Gallo Records. I reference two of the pieces on this record in the outer sections of Calling, alongside some of my own pseudo-Serbian musings.
Before I even started composing, I knew that I wanted the Sylvan Winds’ Israeli hornist Zohar Schondorf to set the tone for the whole quintet with a solo akin to the calls of the shofar, an ancient Biblical ram’s horn instrument played at synagogue services for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It was easy to juxtapose the shofar calls with the Serbian elements I had chosen and developed. Beyond that, I planned to fold in some Fado for Portuguese clarinetist Nunu Antunes, and some Scandinavian and Sicilian folk music for oboist Kathy Halvorson and bassoonist Gina Cuffari, respectively. When the time came to execute this plan, however, I started having doubts. Although I quickly found source material that I loved, there was the problem of how to fit it all together.
Then I chanced upon some YouTube videos about ancient Scandinavian cattle herding calls or Kulning, traditionally practiced by women. The sound is penetrating, often quite high-pitched, elaborately ornamented, and features big triadic leaps. This was the through-line I had been seeking, and it also inspired the title for my piece. Like traditional shofar music, Kulning is a call. You could be calling the cows, or you could be calling God!
I eventually chose a Fado song called Reza and housed it in a Scherzo section in the middle of the quintet. Sicily was the final frontier. I listened to so many weird and wonderful field recordings, but nothing seemed quite right. Again, the Internet came to the rescue when I chanced upon Alberto Favara’s scholarly article “Rhythm in Life and in Popular Art in Sicily” in Translingual Discourse in Ethnomusicology, Volume 1 (2015). Much of the essay was about “Lullabying the Bullocks,” the Sicilian ritual of chanting all day long, sometimes for up to a week, to calm down the wild bullocks enough to yoke them to the plough. The bassoon introduces this traditional lullaby melody in the “trio” section of the Scherzo.
So, in the end, I suppose I wrote a wind quintet about cows! But it’s also a reflection about how one can, if one really tries, find common ground between the most disparate musical elements. If this is possible in music, then perhaps –
Perhaps it could be possible in all our lives. Perhaps even on the world stage?