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Release Date: September 25, 2020
Catalog #: NV6309
Format: Digital & Physical
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Centennial

AMPLIFYING THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN HISTORY, MUSIC, AND SOCIAL ISSUES

Shelley Washington composer
Gemma Peacocke composer
Amanda Feery composer
Fanny Mendelssohn composer

José Antonio Zayas Cabán saxophone

New from Navona Records is saxophonist José Antonio Zayas Cabán’s CENTENNIAL, an album of cutting-edge solo and chamber music reflecting on the shortcomings of the 19th Amendment during its 100-year anniversary. Rather than celebrating, this album urges listeners to recognize the significant work that remains in achieving global equality.

Zayas Cabán, the central collaborator and performer on Centennial, merges the musical and the political. As a native Puerto Rican and 2020–2021 McKnight Fellow, he works to develop musical projects and collaborations that confront current events and social issues.

As historian Katheryn Lawson and contributors to this album describe, Shelley Washington’s BIG Talk opens from a place of exasperation and power, speaking out against the wide spectrum of rape culture. The “unrelenting, churning duo” between baritone saxophones urges listeners to “stop perpetuating rape culture by any and every means necessary.” Gemma Peacocke’s Skin takes a New Zealander’s view on the ways the U.S. was built and is constantly remade from the illogics of race. Author of the CENTENNIAL opening essay, Lawson states, “anxieties about sexuality between races, between and among genders, are endemic to this system.” This piece for alto saxophone and electronics “[wends] between the intricate layers of privilege, power, and shame associated with race and sex, down into the dark roots of the country’s history.”

Amanda Feery’s Gone to Earth responds to the present moment through the lens of Mary Webb’s novel of the same name. The phrase “gone to earth” refers to foxes hiding in a hunt, an apt metaphor for the ways women are “hunted” in patriarchal societies. Feery was “stunned that [the novel] was written in 1917, and angry that the notion of the predatory hunt and desire to control women is still very much a threat to women’s lives today.” Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel has long been a source of inspiration for those in search of female musicians and composers. A musical prodigy who struggled against patriarchal expectations, she premiered the Piano Trio in D minor in one of her Sunday afternoon musical gatherings, a socially acceptable way for a woman to perform at that time.

By featuring four powerful composers, CENTENNIAL urges listeners to reflect on the false promises of the past and the present. And to fight for better.

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"CENTENNIAL unites the experiences of women, on and off the music scene, in the 19th and 21st centuries"

Sonograma

Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
01 Big Talk Shelley Washington Shelley Washington, baritone saxophone; José Antonio Zayas Cabán, baritone saxophone 10:45
02 Skin (Version for Alto Saxophone & Electronics) Gemma Peacocke Gemma Peacocke, electronics; José Antonio Zayas Cabán, alto saxophone 7:02
03 Gone to Earth (Arr. for Soprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone & Piano) Amanda Feery Casey Rafn, piano; Ryan Smith, tenor saxophone; José Antonio Zayas Cabán, soprano saxophone 7:17
04 Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 11 (Arr. for Soprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone & Piano): I. Allegro molto vivace Fanny Mendelssohn Joel Gordon, tenor saxophone; Casey Rafn, piano; José Antonio Zayas Cabán, soprano saxophone 11:26
05 Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 11 (Arr. for Soprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone & Piano): II. Andante espressivo Fanny Mendelssohn Joel Gordon, tenor saxophone; Casey Rafn, piano; José Antonio Zayas Cabán, soprano saxophone 5:37
06 Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 11 (Arr. for Soprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone & Piano): III. Lied. Allegretto Fanny Mendelssohn Joel Gordon, tenor saxophone; Casey Rafn, piano; José Antonio Zayas Cabán, soprano saxophone 1:31
07 Piano Trio in D Minor, Op. 11 (Arr. for Soprano Saxophone, Tenor Saxophone & Piano): IV. Allegretto moderato Fanny Mendelssohn Joel Gordon, tenor saxophone; Casey Rafn, piano; José Antonio Zayas Cabán, soprano saxophone 5:41

All pieces recorded in the Recital Hall at the Voxman School of Music, University of Iowa in Iowa City IA

Recording years: BIG TALK (2017), Trio, Op. 11 (2018), SKIN (2019), GONE TO EARTH (2019)

Recording Engineer James Edel
Special Thanks Mitchell Toebben
Liner Notes Katheryn Lawson
Dedication Rosa Castro Muñiz

Cover image: Banner State Woman’s National Baptist Convention, ca. 1905-15, Library of Congress.

Executive Producer Bob Lord

Executive A&R Sam Renshaw
A&R Director Brandon MacNeil
A&R Jacob Smith

VP, Audio Production Jeff LeRoy
Audio Director Lucas Paquette

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Patrick Niland, Sara Warner

Artist Information

Gemma Peacocke

Composer

Composer Gemma Peacocke grew up in Hamilton, New Zealand, and she moved to the United States in 2014. She writes a broad range of music including art-pop songs, EDM-inspired tracks and orchestral music. She has a particular love of interdisciplinary work and often collaborates with artists, writers, and theatre designers.

Learn More

José Antonio Zayas Cabán

Saxophonist

A Grammy-nominated artist and McKnight Fellow, José A. Zayas Cabán has presented performances and taught master classes throughout Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. A native Puerto Rican (born and raised in Mayagüez PR) and musician activist, José now resides in Minneapolis MN and is building an artistic career focused on developing projects, albums, and collaborations that address, respond, and raise awareness about current events and social issues.

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Shelley Washington

Shelley Washington

Baritone Saxophone

SHELLEY WASHINGTON writes music to fulfill one calling: to move. Described as having the ability to “expertly mine the deep wells of private emotion,” (Steven Jude Tietjen, Opera News) she uses driving, rhythmic riffs paired with indelible melodies to create a sound dialogue for the public and personal discourse.

Washington performs regularly as a vocalist and baritone saxophonist, and loves making sound — anything from Baroque to Screamo. She is based in the New York City area, and is currently studying at Princeton University in pursuit of the Ph.D. in Music Composition. She is a founding member of the Kinds of Kings composer collective.

shelleywashington.com

Amanda Feery

Amanda Feery

Composer

AMANDA FEERY is an Irish composer working with acoustic, electronic and improvised music. Much of her inspiration comes from literature, folk musics, cultural criticism, and the natural world.

She has written for chamber and vocal ensembles, film, theatre, and multimedia. Graduating from Trinity College Dublin with a BA in Music in 2006, she continued her studies with an M.Phil in Music and Media Technologies. She recently completed a PhD in Composition at Princeton University.

Amanda has collaborated with leading ensembles and artists in Ireland and overseas, including the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, Crash Ensemble, Chamber Choir Ireland, Alarm Will Sound, Third Coast Percussion, Ensemble Mise-en, Gallicantus, Quince Vocal Ensemble, Amatis Trio, RTÉ ConTempo Quartet, Dublin Guitar Quartet, Paul Roe, Michelle O’Rourke, and Lina Andonovska. Her work has featured at New Music Dublin, Cork International Choral Festival, First Fortnight Festival and Dublin Fringe Festival, among others, and she has been composer-in-residence at Mizzou International Composers Festival, Bang on a Can Summer Festival, SOUNDscape, Ostrava Days, and Centre Culturel Irlandais.

Recent projects include This is the House of with Alarm Will Sound, exploring the discord between the church as an architectural space and an institution of abuse; Give Us The Night with Third Coast Percussion, an ode to Dublin city's rapidly disappearing clubs and night spaces; and Stray Sods, with cellist Amanda Gookin's Forward Music Project, a project commissioning multimedia works that encourage social change and empowerment for womxn. Future projects include a film score for Tadhg O’Sullivan’s upcoming feature film, To the Moon, and an opera to be premiered in 2021 with Irish National Opera.

www.amanda-feery.com

photo: Jamie O’Rourke

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel

Composer

(1805, Hamburg [Germany] – 1847, Berlin, Prussia) was a German pianist and composer, the eldest sister and confidante of the composer Felix Mendelssohn.

Fanny was regarded as equally or more talented than her brother, and the two children were given the same music teachers. Felix readily admitted that his sister played the piano better than he did, and Fanny remained his chief musical adviser until he left home. Fanny wrote about 500 musical compositions in all, including about 120 pieces for piano, many lieder (art songs), and chamber music, cantatas, and oratorios. Six of her songs were published under Felix’s name in his two sets of Twelve Songs (Opuses 8 and 9), while the few works published under her own name include several collections of short piano pieces, some lieder, and a piano trio. Most of her remaining works exist only in manuscript.

Joel Gordon

Joel Gordon

Saxophone

Born in Iowa, grown in Missouri, and sprouting through the Midwest, Joel Gordon is a cultivating saxophonist and music educator. As a musician and teacher, Gordon strives to balance life on “both sides of the fence,” playing in concert classical and jazz contemporary circles.

Gordon regularly performs and records with {Trés}, a group diligent in bringing baroque and classical works into contemporary saxophone repertoire. The ensemble performed at the 40th Annual International Saxophone Symposium in Washington D.C. and the inaugural American Single Reed Summit. Gordon can also be seen leading his jazz group, Joel Gordon’s Happy Habitat throughout the Midwest. The group has featured some of the top young saxophonists in the country including Stephen Martin and Adam Larson.

As an educator, Gordon helped establish educational programs including the Northland Student Jam Session and Kansas City Area Youth Jazz. As a private studio teacher, Gordon’s saxophone students have earned accolades both in the Missouri All-State Concert Band and the Missouri All-State Jazz Band. His private students have also been accepted into and attended nationally-distinguished opportunities including the NAfME All-National Honor Concert Band, Interlochen Saxophone Institute, Honors Performance Series at Carnegie Hall, and NYU’s Broadway Winds Summer Program. Gordon served for three years as the Director of Bands at Platte City Middle School and an assisting teacher with marching bands, concert ensembles, and jazz groups at Platte County High School.

photo: Jessica Siletzky

Casey Rafn

Casey Rafn

Piano

CASEY RAFN is active as a freelance pianist in the United States and abroad. As a collaborative pianist, he has performed at venues in Canada, Latin America, New York, and across the United States.

He can often be found in concert with members of the Minnesota Orchestra or the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. As a solo pianist he has taken top prizes at the International Liszt-Garrison competition in Baltimore, as well as state competitions in Minnesota and Iowa. He is a member of the saxophone-piano trio {Trés}, and enjoys playing for multiple arts organizations in his home of Minneapolis MN.

photo: Peter Yankowsky

Ryan Smith

Ryan Smith

Tenor Saxophone

Multiple woodwind specialist Ryan Smith is drawn to music from many different genres, regularly performing in Iowa and throughout the Midwest with symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles, jazz combos, musical theater pit orchestras, and rock bands.

Internationally, he has toured in São Paulo, Rome, and Milan with the Américo Project and performed in Hong Kong and China with the Iowa Saxophone Ensemble. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Iowa and teaches saxophone at St. Ambrose University and Cornell College.

photo: David Van Allen

Notes

The 100-year anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment feels like some kind of cause for celebration. But here, in this space, with these words and the sounds you’ll hear, we are not celebrating. This is a time to reflect on the false promises of the past and the present. And to fight for better. The 1920 amendment to the U.S. Constitution proclaimed that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” White women enjoyed these rights long before women of color. The so-called rights of Black suffrage provided by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (1868 and 1869) were regularly undercut by state and local practices like poll taxes, literary tests, and the grandfather clause. After 1924, when the U.S. severely limited migration through the quota system (the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act), citizenship was filtered through whiteness. In the historic case Ozawa v. United States (1922), Japanese were legally categorized as non-white, as other. Queer bodies were stopped at the nation’s many borders and outposts for fear of these persons “likely” becoming a “public charge.” Poll taxes and other forms of suppression were outlawed in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which also created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Indigenous tribes and nations continue to experience the ebb and flow of federal recognition, itself a contentious form of legitimacy. No. This is not a time for celebration.

I list these dates, yes, as a history lesson, but also to force us to see, hear, and feel the ways that these histories endure in the present. The bell of inequality, of the U.S.’s settler colonialism, was rung long ago. And it has yet to go silent. This project came to fruition in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. This historical and epidemiological moment revealed the harsh truths that many already knew. Asians and Pacific Islanders (American and not) faced new (but unoriginal) waves of racism, as China shouldered the blame for the virus. Disease supposedly doesn’t discriminate, but the health system does. Deaths among African Americans, Indigenous nations, Latinos, and migrants soar above white deaths. As Shay-Akil McLean—a Black transman and PhD candidate in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology—so aptly articulated in 2017, “settler colonialism is the pre-existing condition.” White men wield assault rifles in their own stilted “civil rights” protest because they expect so-called expendable populations to deliver their God-given right to haircuts. No. This is not a time for celebration.

– Katheryn Lawson

BIG Talk opens this audio experience from a place of exasperation and power. Washington, who grew up in Kansas City MO and holds degrees from Truman State University and NYU Steinhardt, approaches her music and her life with a zeal for “shaking the cages, raging against the machine, and supporting others.” The current Princeton Ph.D. student and co-founder of the composer collective Kinds of Kings, wrote this piece “as a personal response to the repulsive prevalence of rape culture that can be observed in catcalling and sexual harassment that women and femmes experience and endure on a daily basis.” This is a piece that speaks to the wide variety of abuses that all women and female-presenting persons face. What Washington terms an “unrelenting, churning duo” urges listeners to “stop perpetuating rape culture by any and every means necessary.”

This baritone saxophone duet opens with an awakening, the two players exchanging trills like birds, perhaps, in the dawn chorus. The piece quickly escalates to a series of driving, contrapuntal figures, the two saxophones occasionally syncing up and then separating. BIG Talk is characterized by these constant, dissonant motives, forcing the music forward with techniques like triple and flutter tonguing. Unexpected silences splice these duetting/dueling moments apart, the breaks more jarring than comforting. At 2:25, the piece slows to a more contemplative pace, the two exchanging long tones. With a few trills, the piece returns (3:55) to its constant churning. In the middle and toward the end of the piece (5:04 and 9:26), a single saxophone plays a repeated pitch, like an echo falling away into silence. To me, it sounds like a call amid the chaos. When the piece fades and ends, after the awakening, the churning, the contemplation, the shuddering silences, and the single call for attention, I am transported into the headspace of “any and every means necessary.”

This country was built and is constantly remade from the illogics of skin tone—of difference, of the meaning of particular skin tones, of how those who “pass” for other groups become unreadable and illegible. U.S. land was made from the genocide and theft of Indigenous nations and lands. It was designed to service white land-owning and people-owning elite. Anxieties about “mixing,” about the ways sexuality plays out between people, between races, between and among genders, are endemic to this system. Born and raised in New Zealand and currently residing in Brooklyn, composer Gemma Peacocke arrived in the U.S. curious about its racial logics “and the relationship between violence and sexuality.” The co-founder (with Washington) of Kinds of Kings and Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University merges past and present bodies and ideas “wending between the intricate layers of privilege, power, and shame associated with race and sex, down into the dark roots of the country’s history.” And yet, skin is also a point of connection, “a place of weathering, of impact, of touch.”

Skin is composed for alto saxophone and electronics and explores a variety of techniques and textures, as a cognate, to performer José Antonio Zayas Cabán, to “different shades of skin color.” It sounds like an exploration, an aural mapping of this unfamiliar, colored, textured world. The piece opens atmospherically, with static, rhythmic, trilling electronics reminiscent of scratches, as the saxophone joins with long tones. At 1:31, Zayas Cabán plays the piece’s main motive (repeated again at 4:37, 5:01, and 5:21) slowly, but with energy, as if trying it out for the first time against the slower-moving “background” of electronics. Extended techniques like bending pitches by quarter tone abound. At 3:02, the piece slides into the long, low, reedy tones of an electronically-modified saxophone. The saxophone explores new modal territory, playing around the harmonic minor scale. After the electronics play a long, descending pitch, the piece returns (4:25) to the rhythmic percussion and opening motive, faster, more confident. In addition to quarter tone pitch-bending, the saxophone makes use of other extended techniques, like flutter tonguing (5:16). After a long, ascending tone (5:59), an analog to the previous descending tone, the piece ends suddenly, with a quarter-tone pitch bend.

Amanda Feery’s piece responds to the present moment through the lens of a past artistic work, Mary Webb’s 1917 novel Gone to Earth. The book follows Hazel Woodus, a young woman attuned to the nature, seasons, and animals of the Shropshire countryside, who is subjected to the infatuated pursuit of two men. The phrase “gone to earth” refers to the ways foxes in a fox hunt hide from their predators, an apt metaphor for the ways women are said to be “hunted” in romantic relationships in patriarchal societies. The Irish composer, who completed her Ph.D. in music composition at Princeton in 2019, was “stunned that [Gone to Earth] was written in 1917, and angry that the notion of the predatory hunt and desire to control women is still very much a threat to women’s lives today.”

Originally composed for piano, violin, and cello, this arrangement for {Trés} features piano, soprano saxophone, and tenor saxophone. Working with the themes from the novel, Gone to Earth is a long, atmospheric build depicting a constant chase that finally leads to a sense of calm and sanctuary. As Zayas Cabán described it, performing the piece was like interacting “with the scenery as it was set in the book.” It opens with what sounds like percussion, but is in fact prepared piano, an extended technique in which the strings of the piano are obstructed by objects—in this case, mounting putty. This is followed by a continuous, propulsive high-pitched piano motive that continues throughout the piece, giving it an atmospheric, almost fairy-like quality, reminiscent of Hazel Woodus’s harmony with the (super)natural world. The saxophones enter with crescendoing long tones, and the piece builds anxiety as the chase continues. Following a long crescendo, with low chords in the piano, the piece slows down and stops. The saxophones enter (3:26), alone, chorale-like. The piano re-enters (3:52), with trills (4:16), building to the final moment of dissonance, before resting.

Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel has long been a source of inspiration among musicians and music historians in search of women musicians, and particularly women composers. Music history—and orchestral programs—have long been dominated by the music of male composers. Recent seasons by such ensembles as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra boasted zero women composers. And in an era of #MeToo, musicians are using the power of social media to speak up. Although musicologists have studied and promoted women composers like Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Florence Price, and Ruth Crawford Seeger, the wider world of music performance still lags behind, a trend this album seeks to remedy.

Hensel composed this four-movement trio in the last year of her life. She performed it just over a month before her death, on April 11 of 1847, at one of the Sunday musical gatherings she held in her home, the Sonntagsmusiken. As a musical prodigy who struggled against patriarchal expectations, Hensel created these musical gatherings as a socially acceptable way to gather together and perform music. It was published three years after her death by Breitkopf and Härtel, her brother Felix’s publisher.

The Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 11 was originally composed for piano, violin, and cello; here it has been transcribed for piano, soprano saxophone, and tenor saxophone. The first movement, Allegro molto vivace, opens with a churning piano beneath a flowing melody in the saxophones. As is common with the chamber music genre, the instruments exchange, share, and hand off themes, as if in conversation. The second theme (1:47) later returns in the final movement, linking the piece together like a bookend. In the second movement, Andante espressivo, the piano begins, hymn-like, before the saxophones enter with a lyrical theme. Throughout the movement, the instruments trade arpeggios and staccato figures, set against lyrical motives. The short, pleasant melodies of the third movement, Lied: Allegretto, draws on Hensel’s virtuosity with German art songs. Lieder (the plural form of the singular Lied) were common German songs for voice and piano, but nineteenth-century composers like Hensel and Franz Schubert elevated the genre. The final movement, Allegretto moderato, commences with a Bach-like prelude, followed by a melody recalling Hungarian music. The second, rhythmic theme is then superseded by the second theme from the Allegro molto vivace (2:53), a triumphant return. The piece ends, crescendoing, with great energy.