Sinfonia Spring Concert

Upon seeing Leonora Carrington’s painting Red Horses of the Sídhe, I instantly wanted to describe it with sound. After sketching some ideas for the opening of a work based on this surrealist painting, I decided to reach out to Professor Ochs about undertaking this piece as a collaboration with Sinfonia. The first movement, Peat, attempts to capture the lush darkness of which Carrington deftly wove the brooding sky above, and the engulfing bog below. This movement is based on a piano improvisation that I did last fall, so you will hear my efforts to orchestrate with “the pedal down,” and I hope you will perceive the moment where that wisp of an other-worldly castle erupts from the rumbling portents. The second movement, Togail Bruidne Dá Derga (The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel), is named after the source material for Carrington’s painting. It is the tale of Conaire, the High King of Ireland, who is beset and slain for breaking his geasa, or taboos. I found this tale fascinating in the convolutions of its ancientness, and you will hear the blurring of the line between the natural and supernatural that characterizes the work. The title comes from the way in which Conaire becomes king—fulfilling a prophecy by walking naked upon the road to Tara —and also refers to the writer’s block that I suffered while working on this piece, leaving me with ten days to write it, and utterly humbling me as an artist. I am incredibly grateful to Professor Ochs for her trust in me to create a work worthy of her ensemble, to whom I owe undying gratitude for their dedication to its conveyance.

Friedrich Kuhlau was a German-Danish composer of the late Classical and early Romantic period. Despite not playing the flute, he wrote many of his compositions for the instrument, and was even nicknamed the “Beethoven of the flute.” Kuhlau’s Grand Quartet in E minor explores a wide variety of rich textures and techniques, which give place to contrasts and musical characters delightful for flutists and audiences alike. However, it is the piece’s melodic and harmonic freshness and rhythmic interest that have earned for it the reputation of being the best flute quartet written up to the twentieth century.

To expand our appreciation of Amy Beach’s contributions to American music, we must remember the world and social norms into which she was born 150 years ago. Raised in a well-off New England family with colonial roots, Beach had access to opportunity. Still what she might accomplish was limited by gender-based expectations in Victorian society. Wanting to study music composition, she could not attend conservatory or university classes, nor could she travel abroad to study in Europe, as many of her male contemporaries did. Rather than sit idly and accept the norms, she pursued all she could on her own. Besides some private study, Beach translated orchestration texts and attended Boston-area concerts with scores to Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Wagner in hand.

During his storied time in the US, Antonin Dvorak published his suggestion that American composers might turn to African-American and Native-American idioms as inspiration. Amy Beach gently disagreed with Dvorak and turned to Irish and Scotch folksong, then experiencing a revival in New England. Within a month of the premiere of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Beach began her Gaelic Symphony in January 1894. For material, Amy Beach turned to an 1850s collection of melodies in a Dublin magazine. Gaelic and Irish folk songs appear in the Symphony’s first, second, and third movements. These melodies stand out for their rhythmic lilt and sparkle, and Beach enhanced them with bagpipe-like drone accompaniments. She presents the main theme for the second movement, “Goirti Ornadh,” or “The Little Field of Barley,” at first as a moving oboe solo, yet for the middle, faster- section, she transforms it into a sprightly symphonic scherzo. Despite the Gaelic title and allusions, Beach did more than tap into an Irish revivalism with her symphony. For the outer movements, she drew upon her own music. She derived the turbulent energy along with the main theme of the first movement (first heard in the trumpet and the horn) from her own song, “Dark is the Night.” In the end, Beach not only synthesized a new folk idiom into American music—a trend that her contemporary (male) composers would emulate, she created a work that synthesized her own accomplishments and the long-standing tradition of European symphonic composition. With the premiere of her Gaelic Symphony in October 1896, she broke down a significant gender barrier and inspired generations of women composers.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY SINFONIA

VIOLIN 1

Cody Mui, concertmaster
Kyle Foster
Ryan Lee
Charlotte Defriez
Elaine Yao
Greta Li
Rebekah Choi
Sabrina Van
Kevin Zhang
Amelia Brown
Sasha Villefranche
Emily Gai
Jenna Park
Isabella Kahn

VIOLIN 2

Emilie Chau, principal
Emilio Chan
Lauren Dreier
Katriina Ukkonen
Naomi Frim-Abrams
Warren Yuan
Karen Yang
Micah Petit-Bois
Mia Sampson
Romit Kundagrami
Ghazal Madaeni
Ignacio Arias Philippi
Mary Cate Hyde
Arno Vanthieghem

VIOLA

Abigail Rabieh, principal
Adrian Thananopavarn
Angelina Lumour-Mensah
Tore Nesset
Sophia Colmenares
Maddie Esposito
Divya Raghunathan

VIOLONCELLO

Noelle Kim, principal
Mariana Altomare
Sarah Zhang
Oscair Page
Angela Park
Max Rosen
Sophia Chang
Kate Weseley-Jones
Christina Bradley
Angela Challman
Ari Freedman
Chirag Kumar

BASS

Nicholas Quirk, principal
Cara Turnbull
Jack Hill

FLUTE/PICCOLO

Sara Akiba
Gina Arnau Torner
Jana Buchtova
Joyce Chan
Sharv Dave
Annette Lee
Louis Viglietta
Chenhan Zhang
Christina Zhang

OBOE/ENGLISH HORN

Quinn Haverstick
Olivia Hoppe-Spink
Santhosh Nadarajah
Katya Williams

CLARINET/
BASS CLARINET

Molly Cutler
Derek Edwards
Jenny Fan
Mark Farino
Jacob Jackson
Ethan Spain
Fiona Logan-Sankey
Claire Schultz
Mason Thieu

SAXOPHONES

Jacob Jackson
Alessandro Troncoso

BASSOON

Conner Kim
Natalie Oh

HORN

Soncera Ball
Spencer Bauman
Jacob Beyer
Selena Hostetler
Daniel Liu

TRUMPET

Helen Cueyoung Lee
Donovan Pearce
Hannah Ulman
Randy Wilson

TROMBONE

Jupiter Ding
Jack Isaac
Artha Abeysinghe

TUBA

Wesley Sanders

HARP

Leila Hudson

PIANO

Sebastian Castro

GUITAR

Toussaint Santicola Jones

TIMPANI/PERCUSSION

Robert Mieth
Luca Morante
Barak Nehoran
Eve Rosenthal

MANAGER

Ceon Sun

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 and always compounding rewards of making music together and for others.

TOUSSAINT SANTICOLA JONES is a sophomore in the Princeton University Department of Music from Albany, NY. A self-taught composer, Toussaint pursues, with his music, the representation of images, histories, birds, and landscapes, seeking an accuracy beyond the capacity of words. Toussaint’s music is inspired by the history of global indigeneity, particularly in Ireland and Scandinavia, and the syncretisms and warfare between paganism and Christianity found therein. Toussaint enjoys progressive rock, and is staging his intervention to its canon with the Princeton-based band Strawberry Milk. He plays electric bass, guitar, saxophone, and piano, and writes for musical theater, orchestra, and chamber ensembles, as well as genre-defying, rock-adjacent music. Toussaint enjoys fantasy and sci-fi novels, hiking, and vicious thunderstorms.

DR. RUTH OCHS has been conducting at Princeton University since 2002. 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. Today, the orchestra regularly features student soloists and premieres new compositions by Princeton University undergraduate composers. She also serves as Associate Conductor of the Princeton University Orchestra, and has led the ensemble in a variety of performances, including on
its tour of Spain in 2019. Off the podium, her work in the classroom and introducing concert programs puts into action her belief that performers and audiences alike benefit from a closer understanding of the materials and makers of a musical composition.

Passionate about nourishing and inspiring community and youth musicians, Dr. Ochs also shares her time with local musical initiatives in central New Jersey. She is now in her fifteenth season as conductor and music director of the Westminster Community Orchestra, with whom she has led successful opera gala performances, collaborates with youth ensembles from the Westminster Conservatory of Music, and organizes popular Halloween and holiday concerts. Musical outreach lies close to her heart, and she has taken small ensembles of Princeton University musicians to perform in Mercer County elementary schools. For several years she led Sinfonia students in mentoring local middle school instrumentalists participating in the Princeton University Pace Center’s Community House After School Academy.

Ruth Ochs holds degrees in music, orchestral conducting, and music history from Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton University, respectively. As a Fulbright Scholar, she studied musicology at Humboldt Universität in Berlin, Germany, and, as a student of the Polish language, she studied at the Uniwersytet Jagielloński in Kraków, Poland. She holds the rank of senior lecturer in Princeton University’s Department of Music.