Music festival promises an earful

Duke Ellington will get his due. The music of Bach will shine in a glass-filled setting. And listeners can board the "Different Trains" of Steve Reich.

During a dinner concert at Salem Tavern on Aug. 24, the Festival Brass ensemble will team up with percussionist John Beck in arrangements of Big Band-era favorites for brass quintet and percussion.

These and other components will highlight the 2011 Carolina Summer Music Festival, which runs Aug. 14-27 in venues across Winston-Salem.

"It's sort of a variety of old and new," said Joe Mount, a horn player who serves as one of the festival's three artistic directors.

The festival's other directors are flutist Elizabeth Ransom and violinist Jacqui Carrasco. Mount and Ransom perform in the Winston-Salem Symphony; Carrasco teaches at Wake Forest University and performs a wide variety of music.

The old stuff would be that of J.S. Bach, which will be performed Aug. 17 amid the works of Jon Kuhn, a glass artist, at his studio on Liberty Street.

Peter Kairoff, a pianist/harpsichordist who teaches at Wake Forest University, is featured in the all-Bach program, the particulars of which are still being determined. He'll team up with Ransom and Carrasco.

Among the most contemporary material at this year's festival is Reich's "Different Trains," which will be featured in an all-Reich program Aug. 26 at Krankies Coffee on Third Street. This will be the second time in as many summers that the festival's players have ventured to Krankies to perform for a crowd of beer and coffee drinkers.

Carrasco said that the festival's performance of Reich's "Different Trains" will be a rare one in Winston-Salem and contribute to the international celebration of the composer's 75th birthday.

"Steve Reich is such an important American composer," Carrasco said. His music "is really accessible, but it's also satisfying to very serious music lovers."

"Different Trains" (1988) is scored for string quartet and a pre-recorded performance tape. In explanatory notes for "Different Trains" that appear on the website of his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, Reich writes that the idea behind "Trains" is that "carefully chosen speech recordings generate the musical materials for musical instruments."

"Trains" was inspired by Reich's early childhood: After his parents separated, his mother moved to Los Angeles and his father stayed in New York. As part of a divided-custody arrangement, Reich frequently traveled by train between New York and Los Angeles between 1939 and 1942, accompanied by his governess.

"While the trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains," Reich's notes say. "With this in mind, I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation."

The tape in "Trains" includes recordings of the governess' reminiscences of the trips; a retired Pullman porter talking about his life; and three Holocaust survivors speaking of their experiences. Also recorded are the sounds of string quartets as well as those of American and European trains from the 1930s and '40s.

"In order to combine the taped speech with the string instruments, I selected small speech samples that are more or less clearly pitched and then notated them as accurately as possible in musical notation," Reich's notes say. "The strings then literally imitate the speech melody."

"Trains" "thus presents both a documentary and a musical reality and begins a new musical direction. It is a direction that I expect will lead to a new kind of documentary music video theatre in the not too distant future."

As for what happens during the rest of the festival, musicians will also bring back to life how contemporary music was heard in the Vienna of the 1920s. They will do this by performing composer Arnold Schoenberg's arrangements of such pieces as Debussy's "Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun," Mahler's "Songs of a Wayfarer" and Johann Strauss' "Emperor Waltz."

The arrangements, to be performed Aug. 27 at Gray Auditorium, are for chamber-music ensembles of varying types and sizes. James Allbritten, who also conducts Piedmont Opera shows and concerts at UNC School of the Arts, will lead an ensemble of one singer and 11 musicians. The instruments will include a harmonium because Schoenberg's arrangements typically included one.

"I've been on a harmonium search for last few weeks," Mount said. "It's an interesting quest. … It's, like, where do you find a harmonium in Winston-Salem?"

The one that Mount located will be played by Raymond Ebert, the former organist at Centenary United Methodist Church.

A Harmonium 101 lesson: The instrument, a small reed organ, was patented in 1842 by Parisian Alexander-Francois Debain. It was once a fixture in homes, smaller churches and movie theaters.

As was the case with the 2010 festival, this year's festival will devote a day, Aug. 20, to jazz. The day will pay tribute to Duke Ellington. There will be two presentations of "Mood Indigo: A Tribute to Duke Ellington." Vocalist Martha Bassett will join the area's best jazz musicians in such numbers as "Mood Indigo," "Solitude," "Sophisticated Lady," "Satin Doll" and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore."

To make things more audience-friendly, there will be an afternoon and evening performance of "Mood Indigo." In past years, the festival's jazz program has been presented twice on the same evening.

The jazz day will begin with a morning concert for kids and include an afternoon screening of a jazz documentary.

The documentary will be Brice Broder's "Chops" (2007), which records how a Florida ensemble fared at the Essentially Ellington Festival.

The festival is a competition for high school bands hosted annually by Jazz at Lincoln Center of New York and its artistic director, Wynton Marsalis. Owen Broder, Brice's son, studied saxophone at UNCSA.

In the morning concert, called "Jazz4kidz Takes the A Train: A Family Concert," David Ford will narrate a child-friendly introduction to key concepts of jazz and the music of one of jazz's greatest composers. Ford, an announcer on WFDD, 88.5-FM, did something similar during last year's "Jazz4kidz" concert.

Ford is "terrific at this," Mount said. "He gets them clapping and moving and scat-singing. It's not just like a lecture-demo or something. People get up and participate a bit. In the end, they can come up and touch the instruments — carefully."