SummerFest 2023: Visions and Decisions Festival Pass

This year marks our 11th SummerFest music festival! Our 2023 SummeFest — Visions and Decisions — focuses on the interaction of musical imagination and technique.

“You’re almost asleep, but not quite; your mind begins to wander; it drifts not away from your thoughts, but deeper into them; a vision appears in your mind – a dream of musical images, energy, and emotion – it feels like there’s an urgent message in this music that you must decode; the vision is new, yet strangely familiar; it’s yours for the taking. You grab the dream and shake yourself awake. You’ve got it. You hold the music in your mind’s ear while its rhythmic energy resonates in your body. Now you must decide what to do with it. This will take some work, but it’s exhilarating work – scripting invisible events, shaping sounds into expressive patterns, depicting echoes: it’s called composing.”

——from Visions and Decisions: Imagination and Technique in Music Composition, a new book (Buy Here) by Bruce Adolphe

All music starts as a musical vision and then the hard work begins. Off the Hook Arts artistic director, Bruce Adolphe will discuss the compositional process and the music at our concerts this summer, as well as his new book on June 23rd.

Concerts

June 21, 7 PM – Where Thought Touches the Blood — Dramatic Musical Visions

• Doors: 6:30 PM
• Concert: 7 PM

• Leoš Janàček: Sonata for Violin and Piano
• Caroline Shaw: In manus tuas
• Beethoven: Piano Trio Opus 70, No. 2

Featuring:

• Violin: Kyu-Young Kim
• Cello: Joshua Halpern
• Piano: Marija Stroke

June 25, 7 PM – Musical Tales — with Composer-Narrator Bruce Adolphe

• Doors: 6:30 PM
• Concert: 7 PM

• The Nightingale for violin and narrator, music by Bruce Adolphe with an updated comical-digital version of the tale by Hans Christian Anderson
• Fantasy Pieces for Cello and piano by Robert Schumann
• The King, the Cat, and the Fiddle — a funny fable for violin soloist; string ensemble, and piano; music by Bruce Adolphe, story by Yehudi Menuhin and Christopher Hope

Featuring:

• Violin I: Kelly Hall-Tompkins
• Violin II: Dorian Kincaid
• Viola: Stephanie Mientka
• Cello: Alice Yoo
• Bass: Mark Lillie
• Piano: Marija Stroke

June 28, 7 PM – Schubert’s Grand Vision

• Doors: 6:30 PM
• Concert: 7 PM

• Prokofiev Sonata for Violin and Piano in F Minor
• Ligeti Sonata for Solo Cello
• Schubert B-Flat Piano Trio

Featuring:

• Violin: Ari Isaacman-Beck
• Cello: Matthew Zalkind
• Piano:  Marija Stroke

Talks

June 23, 5 PM – Visions and Decisions: Imagination and Technique in Music Composition

Join author and speaker Teresa Funke for an inside look as she interviews/moderates an intimate conversation with SummerFest artistic director, Bruce Adolphe about his new book, Visions & Decisions: Imagination and Technique in Music Composition. Venue TBD.

If you enjoy Mozart, Gesualdo, Harold Pinter, Sofia Gubaidulina, Duke Ellington, Alfred Hitchcock, and Janáček, and if you are intrigued by neuroscience and sleep research, and you also order falafel platters for take-out, this is the book for you.

The new book, just published in February 2023 by Cambridge University Press, is called Visions and Decisions: Imagination and Technique in Music Composition.  It is focused primarily on composition and improvisation in a wide range of styles past and present, and it also looks at playwriting, film, painting, my piano puzzlers, and even how to order falafel platters to go in the styles of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms. The ideas in it are supported by scientific research, drawing on neuroscience, cognitive psychology, dream and sleep studies, as well as current research into creative processes. People referenced in the book include Duke Ellington, Kaija Saariaho, Sofia Gubaidulina, Elliott Carter, Luciano Berio, Reena Esmail, Anthony Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Harold Pinter, Picasso, Stravinsky, Gesualdo, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, and Janacek, as well as scientists Antonio Damasio (Brain and Creativity Institute), Robert Stickgold (Harvard), and more.

• Wine Reception: 5 PM
• Talk: 5:30 PM