Postcards from Home

Details

Continuum Chamber Collective full profile / string duo and quartet / 4 musicians

Other players: Michael Romans, Diane Yang, Ivan Mendoza, Erica Ogihara

Full program notes

The Continuum Chamber Collective is so excited to return for the 3rd annual Art in Conversation concert at James Cohan Gallery. “Postcards from Home” comprises multiple American stories about how migration affects the concept of homecoming through works by Rebecca Clarke, Jessie Montgomery, Jie Yang, and Zhou Long. The Continuum Chamber Collective will play a collection of string duos and finish with Eight Chinese Folk Songs as a quartet. Paired with the gallery’s exhibition, “From One Place to Another”, this concert reflects on how the idea of home has affected the development of American art and culture.

Historical context

All composers on this program have once called New York City home. Yun-Fei Ji’s exhibit is a natural setting for this concert. His art expands on issues of migration and labor practices across the US and China. The Zhou Long quartet and Jie Yang sonata reflect these artworks as both Chinese-Americans were displaced from their families at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Dr. Zhou won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for music and has been jointly Grammy nominated for a piece co-written by him and his wife. Zhou is currently a Distinguished Research Professor of Composition at University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Jessie Montgomery and Rebecca Clarke are two violinist-violist-composers whose voices emerged through major historical events on both ends of the 20th century. Clarke identified as Anglo-American and was visiting the US at the outbreak of World War II. She remained in New York City until she passed away at 93. The Rebecca Clarke Society was founded in 2000 and serves to uncover and perform her unpublished works. Montgomery grew up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to a family of artist-activists during the political movements of the 1980s. She has continued to call NYC home while maintaining residencies with orchestras across the country. Montgomery is this year’s 2024 Grammy Award Winner for Best Classical Composition.

Taken from Yun-Fei Ji’s biography, we perform this program in resonance with his artistic statement: “Each work is an act of resistance, insisting that narratives of displacement and environmental destruction are worth preserving.”