Great Barrington — A few weeks before The Foundry brought tango and afrobeat to West Stockbridge, Close Encounters with Music (CEWM) presented Celtic Baroque band Makaris at the Mahaiwe, and on April 14, they are continuing the cross-cultural trend with a program they are calling “Something Borrowed, Something Blue,” because all of the composers on this program, Gershwin, Ravel, Bruch, Cui, Debussy, and Haydn, have been caught at one time or another with their hand in the musical cookie jar.
The musicians performing on Sunday are pianist Michael Chertock, violinist Itamar Zorman, and cellist and CEWM Artistic Director Yehuda Hanani.
Of course, without borrowed influences, music everywhere would be vulnerable to a problem biologists refer to as a lack of genetic diversity. So unless you have a lot of daring innovators like Edgard Varèse and Trent Reznor on the job, monotony is likely to set in. This is notwithstanding the myriad influences from the natural world and the realm of human emotion that have always played a role in shaping music’s development. If you name your favorite piece of music, a musicologist will quickly name dozens of composers whose works precede it in more ways than chronologically.
In the case of George Gershwin and Maurice Ravel, it is not always easy to know for sure who influenced whom. When you hear blue notes in Ravel’s music, for example, there is a good chance Gershwin inspired it. But there is indirect borrowing and direct borrowing, not to mention stealing. (Igor Stravinsky famously quipped, “Good composers borrow; Great composers steal.”) Everyone has their own definition of what borrowing is, and only a small proportion of them come from the pens of professional musicologists.
Another interesting pair of influencers was Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, both leading figures in 19th- and early-20th- century French music. Neither liked the term “impressionistic” as it was applied to their music, and yet it stuck. Debussy, Ravel’s senior by about 12 years, is known to have made a strong impression on Ravel during the early part of the younger composer’s career. Both are breathtakingly original, even as they reflect musical ideas “borrowed” from one another and from the distant and recent past.
A reception on the Mahaiwe stage follows Sunday’s concert. You are invited to meet the musicians and enjoy a light repast from Authentic Eats by Ukrainian chef Oleg.
Hear pianist Michael Chertock, violinist Itamar Zorman, and cellist and CEWM Artistic Director Yehuda Hanani perform a program of Gershwin, Bruch, Cui, Ravel, Haydn, and Debussy on Sunday, April 14, 4 p.m., at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, 14 Castle Street, Great Barrington, MA. Tickets are available here or by calling (413) 528-0100.
