Camerata Pacifica will play its February concerts locally at 1 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 12, 2016, in Hahn Hall on the Miraflores campus of the Music Academy of the West.
Participating Cameratans will include Min Xiao-Fen (pipa), Agnes Gottschewski (violin), Paul Huang (violin), Ani Aznavoorian (cello) and Richard Yongjae O’Neill (viola).
There are two works on the program, both utterly unique and riveting: Wynton Marsalis‘s string quartet, At the Octoroon Balls (1997) and Tan Dun‘s music ritual for pipa and string quartet, Ghost Opera (1994). Those attending the 1 p.m. concert will hear only the Marsalis.
Like hereditary nobility with their quarterings, racist societies are obsessed with fractions. In the 19th century South, before and after the Civil War, an “octoroon” was a person with seven European great grandparents and one African one.
Whether or not this high European content gave the octoroons a social status superior to a “mulatto” (one European parent, one African) or a “quadroon” (three European grandparents, one African), it did not, with few exceptions, make them the social or legal equals of Europeans, owing to the practice of hypodescent, which assigns children of mixed heritage to the subordinate group, regardless of how much of the dominant heritage they possess, if it is less than one hundred percent.
(Dick Cavett once asked Mohammad Ali how he liked having a “pure white” ancestor. “Why’s he got to be pure?” asked Ali.)
Born and raised in New Orleans, hub of the ante-Bellum slave trade, Wynton Marsalis is clearly and keenly aware of every nuance and every harmonic of the term “octoroon.”
On one level, perhaps, At the Octoroon Balls is a kind of catalog of attitudes evoked by the word, yet this amazing string quartet at no time lapses into propaganda or whining. It is a majestic tapestry of all the music that has echoed up and down the Mississippi River for the last three hundred years.
For all the harmonic and rhythmic references, this is an entirely original composition and a masterpiece, at that. Marsalis is not Alan Lomax, collecting and publishing folk tunes.
You will hear much that sounds familiar, but almost nothing that is a direct quotation. It’s a great way to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday.
Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera is on a similar scale with the Marsalis work and employs similar musical forces, but the two compositions have very little else in common.
The Marsalis piece is inextricably American, Dun’s unmistakably Asian. I found much of it to be of an unearthly beauty, much of it baffling, none of it off-putting.
If I don’t have as much to say about it as I did about At the Octoroon Balls it is because I am still sorting it out, and I wouldn’t want to get it wrong.
Admission to the 7:30 p.m. concert is $56; to the 1 p.m. concert, $28. For tickets and other information, show up at the box office, call Camerata Pacifica at 805.884.8410 or email tickets@cameratapacifica.org
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.