‘Cinematic Refuge’: Catalyst Quartet to bring film-inspired program to Tanglewood Nov. 14

Lenox — The Catalyst Quartet will perform “Cinematic Refuge”—a program highlighting film-inspired works tied to themes of freedom from oppression—at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 14, in Studio E of Tanglewood’s Linde Center for Music and Learning. The ensemble, founded by the Sphinx Organization, features violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Abi Fayette; violist Paul Laraia; and cellist Karlos Rodriguez.

I spoke this week with Catalyst violist Paul Laraia to learn about the group’s mission and to preview their program for the 14th. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The title ‘Cinematic Refuge’ suggests music as a place of safety or escape. What does refuge mean to you as an artist?

Music’s power to explore deep emotions and human connections is probably the reason why I even went into music in the first place.

I didn’t come from a musical family, per se, although Carla and Abby both came from sort of musical dynasty families. But for me, it was really sort of a foreign thing, especially classical music.

And so, interestingly enough, my personal window into the classical music world was through movie scores like John Williams and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. And it just happens to be a beautiful sort of coincidence that we’re kind of going back to the roots in terms of doing a program that celebrates that.

But I think for many, many people, it’s that music’s power just transcends the visual, it transcends even words to a certain degree. And especially when you combine those things, it becomes even more powerful.

I distinctly remember times when I was growing up, going through those teenage years where you really feel like, ‘Who am I?’ And trying to deal with all these intense emotions. And I used to turn to music. For instance, whenever I felt extremely frustrated, I would blast Shostakovich in my room on full volume. And it just spoke to me in a way that nobody could ever come to a teenager that was feeling those emotions and try to talk it out. It helped me tap into things, feelings I didn’t even know how to digest.

There’d be times when I would just go into an echoey staircase and play solo Bach, just to sort of cleanse the soul. Once again, there’s just no words for that. There’s no words for that inner dialogue you have with music that you have with the sounds that are echoing around you—that you have with intervals and harmony and all these intangible elements—that yet somehow they all combine to make us feel all these different ways.

And so when we talk about musical refuge, at least for me, I think it’s this idea that music takes you to a place that you just can’t really get to on your own. Artists and others have been writing about this phenomenon for the entirety of history, and it’s—honestly—it’s such a blessing that I get to do it full time. I’m glad you asked that question, because it makes me realize how blessed I actually am.

Let’s talk about Bernard Herrmann. His ‘Echoes for String Quartet’ feels like a film score without a film. How does performing it change your perception of him beyond his being Alfred Hitchcock’s composer?

Oh, yes! Of course! Well, I think you’re spot on with the idea that it does feel—playing that work does feel like you’re going through all these different scene changes. And yet there’s still that haunting motif that keeps coming back, sort of brings a unifying factor. Even though you’re in a new scene—still, it’s all connected and continuous.

I would say playing it, you really get a sense, I think, of Bernard’s inner world, his own inner world. That may be his job as a film score composer—to bring life to somebody else’s vision or to sort of illuminate the scenes that you’re literally seeing as a watcher. But you almost get a sense that you’re in the inner movie of the composer, and maybe even the inner movie of your own self as the listener. It’s a really haunting work, but I definitely think it’s haunting—more so than just in the visual sense. Yes, it conjures up images, but I think it’s a very intimate work for him.

I did a little bit of reading of the little literature that exists for this work, and it seemed to me that he was actually being a bit self-defeatist in his attitude towards the piece. It’s such a wonderful work, but he always had his own inner dialogue about how much of a classical composer he really was. And so it’s really fascinating, because it’s an extremely intimate work in that way.

So, which film composers have excelled at writing music for the concert hall?

This is obviously a matter of personal opinion. And I think my complicated answer to that question is that film is simply another medium—for a composer at least— it’s simply another medium, like opera or like chamber music, or like any other medium that you could bring your musical gifts to and sort of enlighten.

Obviously, there have been plenty of composers who have not been traditionally associated with film scoring, like Shostakovich, whose concert music has always been wildly successful.

So it’s a very interesting question too, because it kind of points out the polarization of somebody like Korngold, who began his life as a wildly respected prodigy of classical music. And he did the opposite of your question, which was that he was already such an incredible composer for the classical medium and for the stage and that he totally invigorated the movie business because of the skill he had with concert music.

And so maybe that also means that my simple answer to your question would be that, well, Korngold’s symphonic works have become true staples, like his violin concerto, which is just gorgeous sonically. But it consists of four different components from his movie scores.

Film composers are highly valued by movie directors and studios. Why are they still undervalued in the classical music world?

Ah! That goes right to what I just said!

Yeah…

You’re asking me the good, tough questions, but I feel like I could get in trouble by throwing out opinions here. Still, I think it could have something to do with that little spark of legitimacy we all seek in being classically trained, especially classically trained composers.

You want to think, ‘Oh! This is serious music!’

I think I heard somewhere from one of my German friends that they have technical distinctions in Germany for composers who are—I don’t know what the German word is—but serious new music composers or light new music composers.

As humans, we have a need for making distinctions. And I think even in Brahms’ and Beethoven’s time, they were already trying to make distinctions between programmatic music and absolute music.

So I think what it comes down to is that everybody wants to think that a new work is the most profound thing in the world, without acknowledging that something light and simple can also be profound. Also, just because it’s a different medium that doesn’t celebrate absolutism doesn’t mean it’s not going to be wildly profound as well.

So I guess it has something to do with attitudes and training. But I think this is changing, because somebody like Philip Glass—he really is one of the first to earn massive respect from both sides of the situation.

Your group has been at the forefront of conversations around diversity in classical music since long before it became a broader industry focus. How has the landscape changed or not changed?

You have all the good questions!

So, when the quartet started in 2010, we wanted our identity to be associated with refreshing the string quartet for the 21st century—and providing an American sense to it. Because, for so long, the ‘Golden Age’ quartets, even in our own country, have had a strong connection to Eastern European traditions and Marlboro and so on. And you’ll see that most serious string quartets have very serious names that are not in English. They’re in Latin or Italian or something, even though most of these people aren’t from those places. So that’s one of the reasons we wanted to go with the name Catalyst, because it’s very English and very American. The name actually means something to us.

We wanted a mix of new music, but we also had a reverence for all of the old masterworks that have influenced us. We made room for many, many different voices, which is exactly what we think of when we think of America. And that was part of the idea behind this program too:

The seed for this program came from thinking of all the great composers who came to the United States to escape fascism and all the various evils that were happening in Europe. Korngold was one of them, being Jewish—not that he specifically fled for his life, but he would’ve been in trouble if he had stayed over there.

We celebrate the fact that our country and the wealth of its culture come from diversity. We were founded by the Sphinx Organization, so of course we had… Shall I explain a little bit what the Sphinx Organization is?

Please do!

It’s an organization focused specifically on diversity in classical music. It started out as a competition for Black, Latino, and Latinx string players. The founder was a violinist of color who went through the whole conservatory learning process and went away feeling like there was not much of a community there. But he also discovered composers like William Grant Still and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson. So he recognized that there was actually more community out there than he had assumed. And he realized that most of the major American cities that host our greatest orchestras have humongous populations of Black and Latino residents, Latinx residents. Yet that is not apparent when you actually look at the personnel in these symphonies. Not that there’s a specific rule against it, but it’s a humongous discrepancy, really humongous.

And so we came from that space. That’s how we all met each other and formed. We had a little bit of access to that network in terms of exploring underrepresented composers, doing new commissions. That has always been a part of our ethos.

But to finish answering your question… In 2010, it was a really, really uphill battle. Everybody thought that what we were doing was very niche.

It was like, ‘Oh, it’s your niche and pigeon hole… You guys come from those cultures, so you’re allowed to do that, but we can’t, because we aren’t from those cultures; We can’t touch that stuff because it’s your niche, not ours.’

And it was pretty disheartening.

But we always pledged to do a mix. Our mission was to put Beethoven side by side with Perkinson, side by side with something new, so that when an audience comes to the concert, all those things have a dialogue with each other.

And it has really worked—the actual concertizing… and speaking to the concert goers afterwards. In my heart, I feel that music’s power is—on a visceral level—definitely there. And it absolutely works.

It’s as if people didn’t realize they were interested in this kind of music. Hearing it makes you interested. It’s amazing. But then, after 2020, when the industry started having more accountability around opening doors, I felt hopeful that this trend might last, because we’ve been trying to tell you about this for over a decade now. And all of a sudden, it’s the hottest ticket ever.

So people were coming to us saying things like, ‘Oh! All these scores have wrong notes! How do you play this music? Please give us the notes, give us the right notes!’

It had been the first time they had approached much of this repertoire, which historically hadn’t received the same kind of editing or vetting as all of the old repertoire. Our newly uncovered repertory just never received that kind of love. And there have been copyright issues too, because companies hang onto those rights—like the William Grant Still rights and the Florence Price rights. And they actually make tons and tons of money by charging the orchestras and renters much more than it would cost to get a Beethoven urtext or something like that.

So it’s a very complicated landscape of… Yeah! Exactly! I can see your face, and I don’t know how you’re going to be able to write that into the article, but it is not right, yet there is no simple fix.

A lot of my friends and colleagues who are sort of champions of diversity have written op-ed pieces and try to do the social media thing to sort of work on this. But it’s not simple. You can’t just point your finger at one bad guy and have the whole situation be fixed. Sometimes it’s the families of the estates that are hanging onto the rights. It’s very complicated.

So the post-COVID time was very interesting. And I will say now that we’ve entered a new phase, where anybody who was secretly thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t know about all of this extra diversity stuff…’ Now, all of a sudden, they get to be more vocal about being anti-woke. And, honestly, it’s horrible. It is supremely horrible.

And many of the initiatives that were based on the gung-ho attitude of ‘Well, we’ve got to fix this quick’ have fizzled out. So it’s interesting, because you get to see the organizations that have really put in the good work and have been genuine—because they’re still going.

That’s because their response in 2020 was to aim for sustainability around this issue and not just blitzkrieg it. That’s what many organizations missed the mark on while doing a lot under the banner of diversity—like designating special days for, say, all the Black or Latin composers. Or Lunar New Year-themed programs.

And guess what? That’s not the way to integrate the music with all of the traditional repertoire we love. Actually integrating it would create a sense of sustainability and intergenerational, intercultural dialogue, which is kind of the whole point.

The point isn’t to make special days where such music is treated completely differently than what we think of as the absolute music or the great or the grand. But there are a lot of organizations that really are keeping the ball rolling. And I would say the greatest benefit that has come from all of this is that the dialogue has been opened. Because a lot of people in the ’90s probably thought, ‘Hey! We’re doing pretty good with this diversity stuff!’ But nobody wanted to talk about it. So I think the fact that conversations are happening is a good thing, even if sometimes they get a little ugly.

If audiences walk away from a ‘Cinematic Refuge’ with one lasting feeling, what do you want it to be?

Hope. That’s the first word that comes to mind. Also, I expect people to leave the venue with a fresh appreciation of how much wonder there is in this world.

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The Linde Center for Music and Learning is located at 3 W. Hawthorne Rd, Lenox, MA 01240. For more information and tickets, visit the TLI website.