Sinfonia Spring Concert

The PRINCETON UNIVERSITY SINFONIA is a full symphony orchestra that unites eager, music-loving Princeton University undergraduate and graduate students, as well as community friends, to explore diverse symphonic repertory from four centuries. Its members are passionate musicians with diverse interests and backgrounds who come together for the rich rewards of making music together and for others. Find out more about Sinfonia and ways that you might support our ongoing musical mission at: sinfonia.princeton.edu

Oboist QUINN HAVERSTICK is a junior in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, minoring in Computer Science with a certificate in German Language and Culture. Quinn started on violin at age 11, and picked up the oboe at age 12, taking lessons with Emily DiAngelo, faculty at Cornell University. In middle school, he moved to central Pennsylvania and began studying with Jill Hoffmann, faculty at Dickinson College. In high school, he played in the Harrisburg Symphony Youth Orchestra, participated in many PMEA festivals, and had the opportunity to perform throughout Europe with American Music Abroad. He was introduced to the English horn through his youth orchestra, and fell in love with the instrument during the pandemic. Quinn has been involved with many ensembles in his time at Princeton, including Triangle Club, Princeton University Players, and Camerata. Outside of music, he enjoys the outdoors, dancing, and MOSFETs. While at Princeton, he has worked with Matt Sullivan, Liam Boisset, and currently studies with Yousun Chung.

LEILA HUDSON is a senior studying Electrical & Computer Engineering. She has been playing the harp since she was 8. In high school she was part of the National Youth Orchestra and New York Youth Symphony. At Princeton she is part of the University Orchestra, Sinfonia, Opus Chamber Music Group, and a pop group. Leila is classically trained but has explored latin, jazz, pop, and electronic music during college. Other than playing the harp, in her free time she enjoys running and speedskating. She will be pursuing a PhD in Electrical Engineering at MIT after graduation and looks forward to being part of the music scene in Boston.

TOUSSAINT SANTICOLA JONES is a junior in the music department from Albany, NY. As a self- taught composer, Toussaint’s harmonic and orchestrational research almost always pursues the accurate description of image with sound. He thinks of his music as a chance to share with others those topics about which he is most excited, often relating to his minor in medieval studies. He has found himself, of late, incapable of writing without reference to the works of the painter Leonora Carrington, with whose artistic vision and philosophical writings he has fallen in love since discovering her painting Red Horses of the Sídhe in the Princeton University Art Museum. In addition to his orchestral (and chamber) works, Toussaint plays in the Princeton-founded progressive/pop rock band Strawberry Milk, whose music blends a love of classic American song, prog rock, classic rock, jazz, fusion, and modernist classical music. Toussaint enjoys epic poems, the Irish language, and rain, and his favorite bands are Gentle Giant, Genesis, and Rush.

DR. RUTH OCHS is a passionate and sought-after conductor and educator based in central New Jersey. Since 2002 she has been conducting at Princeton University in various capacities. Soon after beginning graduate studies in the Department of Music at Princeton, she took over directorship of the Princeton University Sinfonia and quickly steered its growth from a chamber orchestra into a full-size symphonic orchestra performing repertory from the baroque to the most recent, including accompanying a fully-staged version Mozart’s Die Gärtnerin aus Liebe in 2019.

Under Dr. Ochs’ leadership, the orchestra regularly premieres new compositions by Princeton University undergraduate composers. Ruth Ochs holds degrees in music, orchestral conducting, and music history, from Harvard University (magna cum laude with highest honors in music), the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton University, respectively.

The Broken Tree, Toussaint Ngozi Santicola Jones ’25

This piece is a musical description of the work Crookey Hall, by Leonora Carrington, which resides in the Princeton University Art Museum holdings. In 1940, the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington was admitted into an asylum in Santander, Spain, following a psychotic break. Her artistic and romantic partner, fellow surrealist Max Ernst, had been twice detained by the Nazis since the start of the Second World War and, unsure of his fate after his second capture, Carrington was sent spiraling. In her account of this experience, the memoir called Down Below, Carrington says of her psychosis: “I realized that my anguish—my mind, if you prefer—was painfully trying to unite itself with my body; my mind could no longer manifest itself without producing an immediate effect on my body—on matter.” She goes on to describe this metaphysical disunity as “vertigo.” Upon entering the asylum in search of help, she was met, rather, with abject torture, being subjected to various forms of physical, mental, and emotional abuse, as well as electroconvulisve therapy. She found a way out, however, both mentally and physically, by drawing, with pencil, her surroundings into order and rationality, and escaping, with the help of her childhood nanny, while in transit between facilities. In 1987, Carrington produced a color lithograph entitled Crookey Hall, a depiction of her childhood home, an English gothic-revival manor of this same name. In the rendering ofthe structure itself, Carrignton alludes to the asylum in Santander. She also includes her nanny, on the far right, as a chipper black dog. In March of 2024, I was admitted to the hospital following a period of anguish that left me in mental and emotional distress. I had sought help, and was encouraged to visit the hospital, for just a single night’s stay—or so I was told. Upon arrival at the hospital, I unknowingly surrendered my right to leave, being understood by the staff to be a danger to myself, rather than a weary spirit in search of a cure for “vertigo.” My already-battered mind was further strained by a night alone in a white room, being awoken at intervals to test my sanity and, thus, debate my request to be let out. At the point at which I felt that I would be overcome by grief and abyssal despair, I was able to speak to a dear friend, a member of this orchestra, who grounded me until my own black dog, my uncle Garan, arrived and stayed with me. He remained in my room longer than was allowed, prayed with me, talked with me about Beowulf, and laughed with me. I wanted to get out because I knew that the only way to overcome my vertigo and to get my feet on the ground was to write this piece, and to hug my friends, and to laugh with them. In writing this work, it felt impertinent to be overly dramatic with my anguish, but it also felt inappropriate not to bring it up. This music could bleed, but it just had to be tempered by Carringtonian wit, and Leonora’s conviction that many things will not turn out alright, but that does not mean that we cannot make great art of them. And just how bad can a world full of great art really be?

-Toussaint Santicola Jones

Dances for Harp and String Orchestra, Claude Debussy

Dances for Harp and String Orchestra is a work by Claude Debussy, composed in 1904. It comprises two sections, Danse sacrée and Danse profane. During his time, Debussy was established as one of France’s leading composers. The piece was commissioned for a chromatic harp, which features two rows of strings so that each of the twelve semitones of the chromatic scale has its own strings. Now this piece is played on the pedal harp, where accidentals are played via pedals. Dance sacrée is expressed with somber melodies that evoke a church-like chant. It is characterized by a mood of lightness, and joy. Dance profane is a slow swirling waltz with a strong beat. The melody follows this pulse, swelling from time to time, full of liveliness.

-Leila Hudson

Concertino for English Horn and Orchestra, Gaetano Donizetti

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) is famous for his contributions as an opera composer and his bel canto style of melodic writing. A precocious music student in his hometown of Bergamo, Italy, he further studied in Bologna. There he composed his Concertino for English horn in 1816 for a fellow student and friend, Giovanni Carolfi. The scope of the work – an introduction, theme, and variations, followed by an Allegro – highlights the wide- spread use of theme and variations as vehicles for instrumental virtuosity. We can hear the musical space Donizetti left for the soloist to add ornamentation and character to the music, with the score acting as a blueprint for musical expression. This piece is one of the relatively few instrumental pieces that Donizetti wrote, though the operatic influences are clear throughout the music. As one of the earliest solo pieces for English horn, Donizetti’s Concertino was composed in 1816, when he was just 19 years old. At the time, the English horn was new in the music scene, with its first appearance in about 1720 and few pieces written for it before the mid-19th century. I was first introduced to this piece during the pandemic, when I was at home with an English horn and a lot of time on my hands, and I’m super excited to be performing it with the orchestral accompaniment!

Symphony No. 9,“From the New World,” Antonín Dvořák

We frequently speak of Dvořák’s final symphony, his Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, as being the “New World Symphony,” instead of its slightly longer but actual subtitle, “From the New World.” We do not even think of it as Dvořák’s “Ninth,” simply the “New World.” The point here is not to fuss about proper nicknames, but to try to find more layers of meaning, and that preposition “from” in the symphony’s subtitle encourages us to consider the unique union of historical circumstances that energized Dvořák. It was all an important episode in Dvorak’s career and for the development of American music.Indeed, this great symphony in E minor would be Dvořák’s first major composition completed once he arrived in New York City in late September 1892. He churned it out over several months in 1893, and it was premiered by the New York Philharmonic on December 5 and 6, 1893. Dvořák lived and worked in the US for over two years, far away from his native Bohemia, hired as the next director of the National Conservatory of Music in Manhattan. In addition to teaching and conducting, part of Dvořák’s work, in fact part of his job contract, was to actively explore what a distinctively “American” sound might be in his own music. The patron who generously supported this enormous project was Jeannette Thurber (1850-1946). Wife of a grocery store magnate, Thurber hoped her National Conservatory might become the go-to training ground for US-born musicians, so they would not have to travel to Europe for study. She offered scholarships and opened access to musical training to a broader cross-section of society. Even with some of the flaws and inevitable challenges of the project, it was a noble endeavor and a meaningful episode in the history of music in the US.

Dvořák would quickly absorb inspiration and musical ideas for the symphony from various sources taking in much fresh perspective from books, poems, and sheet-music collections, including the music of Stephen Foster and the nascent syncopated rhythms of ragtime. Thurber suggested an opera based on Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, and while that opera project fell through, storylines from the epic poem have been linked with the deep emotion and funeral scene of the symphony’s second movement, and the festive nature of the dance-based third movement. Dvořák also attended a Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and formed a strong friendship with one of his students, Harry Burleigh, who shared the African-American song tradition with Dvořák. Burleigh would become a leading composer and arranger of art song and spirituals. The moving English horn melody of the “Largo” movement is sometimes thought to have first been a spiritual. It was Dvořák’s own creation, and another student, William Arms Fisher, provided words and published it as the spiritual “Goin’ Home” in the 1920s.

Dvořák’s impressions of the various musical movements within the United States filtered through his already mature sense for the traditions and potential of instrumental formats. From a practical standpoint, structural features of the symphony align closely with symphonic convention. Its first movement has a mystery-filled slow introduction, as we might expect. When we arrive to the third movement scherzo, it has two contrasting trio sections and plenty of repeating sections, familiar symphonic features since the early nineteenth century. How Dvorak filled the recognizable symphonic mold with urgency, bringing back musical themes in later movements, tightly tying the four-movement structure into a single flow of momentum. Even as the first movement seems saturated with the long-short-short-long figure that boldly rises and descends, it gains further intensity beyond that movement when it arises before the return of the “Largo” theme in the second movement, at the conclusion of the scherzo, and at the thrilling conclusion of the Finale. Even as several of the movements might stand alone, this cyclic coherence of the full symphony is uniquely powerful. Even if it seems obvious, Dvorak bridged the old and new worlds of music in the late nineteenth century in a way that still might be special for us to appreciate today.

-Ruth Ochs