About the program:

The evening begins with pianist and composer Amy Williams performing excerpts from John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. Written between 1946 and 1948, this cycle of twenty short pieces uses bolts, screws, and other objects inserted into the strings of a piano to create shimmering, bell-like sounds. Cage was influenced at the time by Indian philosophy and the writings of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, which shaped the meditative and balanced character of the music. First performed at Black Mountain College in 1948, Sonatas and Interludes is now considered one of Cage’s most important works.

The Asheville Symphony String Quartet, featuring Brian Allen, Karen Pommerich, Kara Poorbaugh, and Franklin Keel, will perform Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 1 in D minor, Op. 7. Written in 1904–05, this expansive, single-movement work lasts nearly 50 minutes and traces an emotional journey from late romantic lyricism toward the boundaries of modernism. It is one of Schoenberg’s most groundbreaking early compositions, showing the first signs of the new harmonic language that would later define him as the father of twelve-tone music.

The program concludes with the Asheville Symphony Percussion Quartet, featuring Todd Mueller, Matthew Richmond, Nathan Tingler, and Brian Tinkel, performing Amy Williams’s Dream Landscape alongside Double Music by John Cage and Lou Harrison. Dream Landscape evokes shifting sonic textures, and Double Music, composed jointly by Cage and Harrison in 1941, is a playful and inventive work for four percussionists. The evening will feature guest soloist and composer Amy Williams performing alongside the musicians from the Asheville Symphony Orchestra. The program reflects the collaborative spirit that both composers carried into their years at Black Mountain College.

This concert resonates with the history of the 1944 Summer Music Institute at Black Mountain College. That gathering brought together many of Schoenberg’s closest colleagues, including Edward Steuermann, Ernst Krenek, and Roger Sessions, and marked the largest celebration of Schoenberg’s music in America at the time. Sessions later described it as “the most important thing that has ever happened in musical education in America.”