This past Sunday, the New England Conservatory kicked off their weeklong festival. This year, they’re honoring the legacies of two visionary American composers: Charlies Ives and Ruth Crawford Seeger.
The schedule for the week is jam-packed with a wide range of musical events. Composer, musician and educator Eden MacAdam-Somer serves as co-chair of the conservatory’s contemporary musical arts department and has been instrumental in coordinating the festival.
She joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share more about the festival and about her Tuesday night performance. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: First, can you tell us about the origins of the festival and its founder, John Heiss?
Eden MacAdam-Somer: Sure. John Heiss was an incredible pedagogue, flutist and composer — just a really wonderful mentor and educator here at NEC. He was hired by Gunther Schuller back in the 1960s, I believe, and started this festival in the 1970s with the idea that it would bring the whole school together — the academics, the performance department, all of the students, everybody here — by bringing in special guests with free lectures and performances.
My understanding is that at that time, the whole school would shut down, and everybody just came together for all of these events. John Heiss unfortunately passed away in the summer of 2023, and he’s so dearly missed here at NEC, and the faculty were invited this year to reinstate the festival tradition.
This year, we’re dedicating the festival to John Heiss’ memory, and actually, tonight, I’ll be opening the program with a piece that he wrote for violin and electronics. We’re going to kick off our performances tonight, welcoming his spirit in that way.
Rath: Wow. That’s got to feel pretty emotional.
MacAdam-Somer: It is, yeah. I mean, I was really honored when John first asked me to play this piece about 10 years ago, just because he was such an — even during his lifetime, he was a legend here.
The way he taught, he was very demanding and required a lot of energy and focus, but always in a way that invited everyone in to join his joy and enthusiasm for what he was ding. He was never cruel; he was never unkind, that I experienced. You always left rehearsals feeling respected, feeling a deep respect for him and feeling like you grew immensely. We’re really wanting to honor his legacy here.
This week, we’re running this festival celebrating Charles Ives. For honoring Charles Ives, we’ve got to honor Ruth Crawford Seeger. And if we’re honoring Ruth Crawford Seeger and Charles Ives, let’s make this about American musical innovation. So the whole title of the festival is actually ‘Charles Ives, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and American Musical Innovation.’
It’s the legacies of those great artists, but beyond — all of the threads that tie into their life and their legacy as well.
Rath: That’s brilliant. Two of my favorite composers. While I could spend the whole time talking about Charles Ives, I feel like he’s gotten his dues finally over the last maybe 30 years or so. But Ruth Crawford Seeger — I feel like she should still be a household name.
Tell us if you agree with this premise — I know you do — why we should all know about Ruth Crawford Seeger and what we should know about her.
MacAdam Somer: Ruth Crawford Seeger, I think, was one of the most brilliant minds in this country as a composer in the modernist movement. She was awarded the first Guggenheim [Fellowship] for a woman in composition in the 1930s. Her music is incredible, the way she’s dealing with dissonance and rhythmic polyrhythms, different harmonies ... all these layering of ideas.
At the same time, she was very committed to this idea of communication. Almost — I wouldn’t say all of her pieces, but [in] many of her pieces, she writes about the intention to communicate, and this is especially clear in her vocal pieces where she’ll say, “Obscure the text when you’re singing, change the pitches because the text is paramount.” I feel that that aspect of communication carries through to many of her works.
The thing, I guess, that fascinates me about Ruth Crawford Seeger is — here she was, this young, dynamic artist. Trying new ideas. Composing pieces for unusual groups of instrumentation.
At one point, she invented a new language for the Women’s Chorus because she was in Europe, in Germany: she couldn’t get hold of a translation of the Bhagavad Gita while she was in Germany. So, she thought, “Well, I’ll just create my own language for this piece.” So, really incredibly creative.
Rath: Hearing you talk about her passions, I just know there are a lot of things — folk music is one that jumps out — that overlap with your own passions as a composer. I’m wondering how much Ruth Crawford Seeger was an influence on you.
MacAdam-Somer: As I’ve gotten to know her music, I can relate to her on so many levels, I feel. I’m a contemporary performer. I play a lot of contemporary music. I write contemporary music. I am also a traditional artist. I’ve spent a lot of time playing traditional American folk music. And an improviser, which she was also.
I have three young children. My youngest is two. And so I’m thinking about her navigating in the early years when she came back to the U.S., and she was having babies and trying to manage a career as a composer and manage a marriage and be the wife, mother and artist that she wanted to be.
Of course, all of that resonates with me very deeply.
Rath: Wow. So, it may be hard for you to look past tonight when you’re performing, but tell us what there is to look forward to the rest of the week and into the weekend.
MacAdam-Somer: Yeah, this is an incredible week. First of all, we started on Sunday with a barn dance. That was great. We had so many locals come out. The students were dancing, faculty, even our production crew were partying! It was a great time.
And then, on Monday night, we had our chamber orchestra perform. Tuesday night, our department concert — which also features a really incredible work, I should mention, by Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Raven Chacon. He has written an incredible piece called “American Ledger No. 1,” which tells the story … It’s a graphic score that provides the narrative for the birth and development of the United States through, I would say, Indigenous people’s perspectives.
[The piece] talks about different military actions, times of violence, times of protest, the development of cities and currency. We’re closing our concert tonight with that piece. We just finished a rehearsal, and it’s an incredible work.
Tomorrow night is a performance by the Symphony Orchestra, which will be presenting works by Ives and [Antonín] Dvořák. Thursday even is going to be a really interesting doubleheader. At 6 p.m., we have our opera, [which is] about an hour long. Following that, there will be an artist talk with the composer of the opera, John Musto. And then everybody’s invited to come right over to Jordan Hall at 8 p.m. for a collaborative performance between the Jazz Studies department and one of our classical vocal ensembles, SongLab. So it’s going to be a really interesting concert.
On Friday night, we have another doubleheader: the opera, again at 6 p.m. in the Blackbox Theater, and then again at 8, you can come over to Jordan Hall and hear a concert of chamber music featuring Don and Vivian Weilerstein performed Ives’ “Third Violin Sonata,” the NEC Chamber Singers are performing “Chant” by Ruth Crawford-Seeger.
And then, also that night, the Meraki String Quartet is going to play Pozzi Escot’s “Jubilation.” Pozzi was another one of our phenomenal faculty members who is no longer with us.
It’s going to be just an incredible week. And then, of course, the opera also runs on Saturday and Sunday.
So, it’s safe to say you can come here any time this week and check out all kinds of wonderful events.
