Red Cedar Chamber Music continues global voyage through Eastern Iowa concerts

The second leg of the second leg of Red Cedar Chamber Music’s around the world tour is about to set sail.

The voyage began in 2023 with “Fresh Folk,” the first of three concert series, which turned the spotlight on six new works for violin and cello commissioned from composers in Ukraine, Finland, Argentina, Scotland, the Philippines and the American West.

This year’s “Voyagers” series began its journey from Feb. 6 to 17, then pulled into port to make way for the “Old Friends” series in late March, featuring guest Choong-Jin Chang, principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. A classmate of Red Cedar violinist Miera Kim at the Curtis Institute of Music in the late 1980s, he had a week off in which to perform in Eastern Iowa.

Now Red Cedar’s Iowa City core ensemble of Kim and cellist Carey Bostian are ready to resume “Voyagers” with a Rural Outreach performance April 17, 2024, in Central City. Ports of call continue around the region, ending with Main Stage concerts April 27 in Cedar Rapids and April 28 in Iowa City.

The duo will give audiences flavors of the rhythms and voicings of works inspired by Greek, American, Gullah, Lebanese, Chinese and Argentine folk traditions.

The 2025 program, titled “Cultural Passport,” will take listeners to Korea, Iran, Mexico, Finland and Vietnam.

The series isn’t titled “Fresh Folk I, II and III” to avoid confusion for patrons, and because all three programs are very different, with no works being repeated.

“They are totally related programs, but they’re all separate,” Bostian noted, with five completely different world premiere compositions this time around.

He’s happy to have had a break in the “Voyagers” action.

“Frankly, it’s working out really well,” he said, “because this program is good. It’s really challenging, and there’s so many different styles. We do feel like it’s going to be a big advantage to come back to everything.”

Program

Bostian and Kim were happy with the response for their call for composers for “Fresh Folk,” but decided to cast a wider net for “Voyagers.” That yielded 42 submissions, including 23 international composers and 19 women. From that response, they not only were able to commission pieces for “Voyagers,” but also five for next year’s “Cultural Passport.”

Each “Voyagers” concert begins with a set of traditional tunes from the British Isles, then launches into the new works.

Two pieces are by American women, offering very different glimpses into the nation’s past and present.

Lauren McCall’s “Hush Harbor” includes two spirituals from the Gullah/Geechee people, descendants of West African slaves brought to America in the 1700s to work the fields along the South Carolina-Georgia coasts. McCall is a composer and educator from Atlanta.

“It’s a vocal tradition there, so it’s very melodic,” Bostian said, but he and Kim will let their instruments do the singing.

From Victoria Malawey, a singer/songwriter and scholar based in the Twin Cities, comes “Echoes of America.” Malawey weaves together minimalist fragments of American folk songs, to create a work “about the conflict between our incredible American ideals,” Bostian said.

“Our liberties, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and then the conflict, of course, between those ideals and in the actual history, with people being oppressed and discriminated against in all sorts of ways,” he said. “ … It has been really super effective with the audience. They can hear that conflict.”

Three other works come from ancient cultures in China, Greece and the Middle East.

Bostian described the pieces as having “very different styles, very complex ornamentation,” and said, “We've just put in hours and hours and hours and hours” of practice.

“Grecian Suite” by Jimmy Kachulis features three Greek dances. An internationally award-winning composer and educator, Kachulis teaches at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Bostian said the “heavily ornamented” dance music is “a little rougher style than we normally would play.”

Roydon Tse, born in Hong Kong and now based in Toronto, originally offered to write a piece in the Korean tradition, but since Kim’s heritage is Korean, she and Bostian asked Tse to instead create a work reflecting Chinese idioms. Tse agreed, and the result is “Da Xi,” which Bostian said is “the word for Cantonese opera,” saying it’s “a big spectacle” in an “improvisational story style.”

“The piece is really well put together,” he said. “ … We’ve definitely had to work to get the right color so that it resonates with the sound. It’s a little tangy, the sound of the erhu,” a Chinese two-stringed bowed instrument. “It’s a little mournful,” and has a large pizzicato section, where the strings are plucked instead of bowed.

“This is a young composer that I feel like we will want to keep track of,” Bostian said. “He’s very talented.”

Bostian, whose heritage is half Syrian, also wanted to program a work reflecting Middle Eastern traditions. He and Kim found that with “Zejel,” by Wajdi Abou Diab, who was born in Lebanon, has studied at home and abroad and takes inspiration from both his homeland and European classical music. Bostian said it’s very demanding, and will close out the concerts.

Capturing an oral strophic poetic, verse-repeating form, it features a call-and-response.

“There’s a rhythm to it. It’s like rap. The poet says something and the audience responds,” Bostian explained.

Learning and stretching

The 10-minute piece also requires the duo to go all-in, using their feet for percussion, often playing two voices on each instrument in microtones not found in the music that musicians and audiences from Europe and the United States are used to hearing.

“He uses the Arabic scale, which for us, are notes that we’ve worked all our lives not to play,” Bostian said with a laugh. He likens them to “ghost notes,” hollow sounds that come when the fingers on the left hand aren’t pressed down all the way.

“So between the Arabic scale and these performance instructions in terms of ghost notes, there's a lot of stuff that is outside of our normal parameters,” Bostian said.

Tucked between the new commissions is Hirono Borter’s “Tango Nostalgia,” written in 2021. Red Cedar had commissioned “Train” from her for last year’s inaugural “Fresh Folk” program, and since the duo wanted something with a South American feel, programmed the tango to fill that need.

It also fills their desire to learn and stretch.

“We started this because we wanted to learn,” Bostian said. “As an organization, we are always exploring different instrumentations. Mira and I have always loved world folk music. So that’s why we started it, and it absolutely has stretched us both as musicians and as instrumentalists.

“Also, it is really timely and essential that we recognize other cultures.”

Pulling together all the pieces and presenting it to earlier audiences, as well as area elementary and high school students, has been a labor of love.

“We’re very pleased with the shape of the program,” Bostian said. “We haven't tinkered with it — we just really got it right.”

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