You need to engage with the present if you really want to appreciate the musical past.
That, in a nutshell, is the premise underlying the latest program that the Seattle-based chamber music series Byron Schenkman & Friends will present on Sunday, March 26, at Benaroya Hall. Instead of merely repeating baroque masterpieces by J.S. Bach, the concert includes a contemporary counterpart tailor-made for Schenkman and his colleagues by the acclaimed American composer Caroline Shaw.
“Over the last 10 years, BS&F has grown into something bigger than just me and my friends playing chamber music for people who enjoy listening to it,” Schenkman said. “It’s become more expansive and more inclusive on the one hand, and more intimate on the other by creating a space where musicians and audiences can show up and be their full selves.”
The 56-year-old harpsichordist, pianist, music director and educator has been a leading figure in the Pacific Northwest’s early music scene since the 1990s. Schenkman founded BS&F in 2013 with the intention of focusing on early music repertoire from the 17th and early 18th centuries, along with excursions into later eras.
But the seismic shifts in American society since around 2016 made Schenkman question long-held assumptions. “I began to wonder where we are heading as a country and started realizing how I never questioned that the music we played was mostly by white men. As in a lot of professions, in music we often work with the people we already know. The danger is that this can turn into an echo chamber, where we become closed to different ideas because we’re so used to doing things in a certain way.”
Determined to break out of that comfort zone, Schenkman started making it a priority to engage musicians as well as to program composers representing “the global majority” alongside the familiar names. “We aren’t ‘canceling’ anything,” they point out. “In fact, this program includes two of my favorite Bach concertos. The idea is that you get to hear these along with two pieces that dialogue with them and that are completely new to you.”
Joined by violinist Rachell Ellen Wong and a string ensemble, Schenkman will play the solo harpsichord parts in the Bach compositions as well as in two contemporary responses to the German composer. One is “Buh-roke” by Damien Geter, a composer especially known for his recent, monumental “An African American Requiem.” Schenkman performed the world premiere of Geter’s piece with the Portland Baroque Orchestra in 2021. “Buh-roke,” as the composer puts it, “pays tribute to baroque techniques with a funky twist.”
Shaw provides the other response to Bach with her new Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings, commissioned to mark BS&F’s 10th-anniversary season. Schenkman recalls first becoming aware of Shaw through her a cappella “Partita for 8 Voices,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 (the youngest composer to ever win that award). “It really grabbed me, so I started teaching that piece in the music history classes I teach at Seattle University,” Schenkman said.
After Schenkman gave a concert at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., they met Shaw, who was working on some string quartets there as composer in residence. (The resulting album by the Attacca Quartet, titled “Orange,” is one of three releases of Shaw’s music that have garnered Grammy Awards.)
Both discovered they had lots of mutual friends. Shaw, who was born in 1982 and grew up as a child prodigy in Greenville, North Carolina, is well-known in early music circles through her parallel career as a performer, both singing and playing baroque violin. A few years ago, the San Francisco-based Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale — the largest period instrument ensemble in the United States — commissioned her to write a series of works, which gave her a chance to weave in the sound of the harpsichord. But the new concerto for BS&F is her first full-scale piece featuring the instrument.
“I love Byron’s playing. He’s made so many different recordings, which I listened to while writing the piece,” Shaw said in a recent conversation from her home in New York. She also found inspiration in recalling some of the early music groups with which she used to freelance as a singer and violinist. “What I love about early music is that the information you’re given on the page is minimal.” She compares the freedom to create between the lines with how pop music works, “where a lot that has to do with vibe and style and articulation is unwritten.”
For her new concerto, Shaw says she used the “familiar grammar” of Bach’s period but “twisted it into other things to construct a wild, weird, surrealist story — an alternative reality that didn’t happen but that might have existed.”
Looking ahead to the next chapter of BS&F, Schenkman says the intention is to continue “expanding and lifting up different voices that haven’t been heard as much and shifting the balance of who automatically gets attention. These new perspectives have made my life and work become so much more interesting.”
