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Gabriella Smith Tessellations

Clara Schumann Andante

Reena Esmail Meri Sakhi Ki Avaaz

Stephanie Bibbo, violin | Darcy Rindt, violaIsaac Pastor-Chermak, cello | Stacey Pelinka, flute

Roman Fukshansky, clarinet | Scott Macomber, trumpet

Sarah Wood, violin | Isaac Pastor-Chermak, cello | Britt Day, piano

Saili Oak, Hindustani singer | Maya Kherani, sopranoStephanie Bibbo & Sarah Wood, violins | Darcy Rindt, viola

Isaac Pastor-Chermak cello | Britt Day, piano

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Sunday , March 28 , 2021 | 4 :00PM PDT

O U R R A D B E R K E L E Y S Y M P H O N Y W O M E N S P O N S O R S

O U R R A D B E R K E L E Y S Y M P H O N Y W O M E N S P O N S O R S

Susan AcquistapaceGertrude AllenLaura Bennett

Kathleen CrandallDianne Crosby

Carolyn DoellingAnn Eastman

Sandra FloydDeborah Gould

Kathleen HenschelEdith JacksonJanet MaestreHelen Meyer

Mary MurtaughCarrie McAlister

Jan McCutcheonBebe McRae

Linda Schacht GagePatricia Shanks

Lisa Taylor

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B e r k e l e y S e r i e s S p o n s o r

B e r k e l e y S e r i e s S p o n s o r

“Meri sakhi ki avaaz (my sister’s voice)Sweet is the voice of my sisterranj meinin the season of sorrowumeed ka ehsaas ([gives] a feeling of hope)”-Reena Esmail

Snake skins, turtle shells, honeycombs.Raspberries, crystals, quilts. Motherhood. Myson’s nightmares.

These are tessellations: shapes repeated overand over again, fitting together, without gaps oroverlaps, infinite, ongoing.

Fissures in the rocks, cracks in the mud, lines onmy face. Fish scales, endless lockdown.Womanhood. Moorish mosaic, origami,pineapple, quarantine. The endless virtual worldsmy son builds in Minecraft, a geometry that hecan control. He creates, he destroys, he rebuilds.He dies, he respawns.

What patterns are we part of—and which onescan we control? Sunrise, sunset.

The steady heartbeat pushing us through eachday.

In this season of sorrow, what gives you thefeeling of hope?

Gabriella Smith seeks to connect “listeners withthe natural world.” She grapples with the grief,loss, rage, fear, and hopelessness that she feelsin the cruel face of climate change.

But she’s also rooted and exuberant in the joy,beauty, and wonder that she feels in the world’slast wild places. She goes into the woods, underthe sea.

There’s control in composition—the execution ofa grand vision, delegating parts in service of arealized whole. Co-creating a community ofsound, orchestrating movement and joy. You dothis, now you do that, and together here’s whatwill be.

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How do we manage to compose our days,conceiving and birthing, arranging and raising,cleaning, crying, laughing, making, then lyingdown to rest—before doing it all, over and overagain?

There’s a heartbeat running through this piece.Racing, but steady. Sounds call, respond, cryout. Relentless. Like how I’ve felt for one yearnow, homebound with two young children, cut offfrom our worlds and wild with uncertainty,isolation, the days a frustrating blur of snacksand disarray. But like Smith’s music, the chaosgets cut through with hope. Light comes throughthe cracks—in this unraveling, there is awe andpotential.

I read yet another article about what thispandemic is doing to women. To workingwomen, to mothers, to working women who aremothers. The way we hold it together, hold it upto the light. The unseen labor behind the scenes.Ashes to ashes, dustball to dustball, a spiral oftime, love, stress, sleep.

This past year we’ve cultivated new kinds ofattention. Knowing each bird that comes to thefeeder, the shorebirds we see on the water, theloud crows on the line. We’ve named thebackyard possums, watched just hatched babyducks, tracking time by the blossoms of the appletree around the corner.

I read about the women finding new selves,breaking out of old skins. I read about them, andalso I am one. Transforming and shedding.Liberated and ready. The composer in thewoods, the wild woman in the kitchen. The lossand the fear—the joy and the wonder.

That pattern is a recipe. That recipe is asymphony. That symphony is a life.

That’s why we create. Over and over, again.

“Tessellations”, Gabriella Smith

Program Notes

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Program Notes

“Piano Trio in G minor, opus 17” by Clara Schumann

“A woman must not desire to compose — therehas never yet been one able to do it. Should Iexpect to be the one?”

Clara Schumann expressed this when she was20 years old, and I don’t doubt that this questiontessellated within her all those years, perhapssometimes quiet, and on some days acrescendo. It can be so loud, the self-doubt.Even 19th century musical prodigies sufferedfrom imposter syndrome. How effectively it canquash desire.

But the need to create can be louder. In womenlike Clara, the art won. At least, for a while.

She composed this, her one and only piano trio,“during her stay in Dresden” the narratives tellus, evoking a bucolic vacation or a leisurely time.It was 1845 and she was there with her husbandRobert, who would, of course, become far morefamous than she. They hoped that the climateand sanative mineral waters might help heal him.“Nervous stress” was his diagnosis and I can’tread that without a slight pang in my heart andgut. During their several year “stay” in DresdenClara cared for her suicidal husband. She alsogave birth to their first 4 children, one of whomdied, and she suffered at least one miscarriage.She managed the household, she gave privatepiano lessons, she paid the bills. And shecomposed this one last work.

Robert, bless his anxious heart, was sympatheticto her plight. He wrote of her “musical and tenderingenuity” and noted the age-old quandary: “Butto have children, and a husband who is alwaysliving in the realm of imagination, does not gotogether with composing. She cannot work at itregularly, and I am often disturbed to think howmany profound ideas are lost because shecannot work them out.”

Indeed.

Clara, bless her hardest-working-woman-in-show-business heart, once wrote that “There isnothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only

because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world ofsound.”

Clara, where did you find those hours, in thatDresden home, with your babies, your sickhusband in his realm, with the dishes and thediapers and the revolutionary rumbles outsidethe home? Did you disappear entirely into thatworld of sound, or did the ghosts of those you’dlost sit with you while you wrote to forget?

Clara wrote this piece between 1845 and 1846.In 1849 Clara was 7 months pregnant when theuprising erupted —she knew Robert would beconscripted so she took him and their 7 year olddaughter away in the night, through dark fieldsto a train and she rode with them to safety.Then she returned to save her three youngerchildren, who she’d left with a maid, and she ranalone through fields patrolled by armed men.She saved her children. She saved them all.She had three more children. She stoppedcomposing. Robert was institutionalized. Hedied by suicide. She supported her family byteaching and performing piano concerts.

I think about what it must have felt like, then, totravel the continent and give those concerts, herchildren home with a cook and a maid, to be ona stage, lost briefly in the realm of her own self.What an honor, now, to experience her world ofsound.

“Meri Sakhi Ki Avaaz (MySister's Voice)”, Reena Esmail

“And who will join this standing upand the ones who stood without sweet companywill sing and singback into the mountains andif necessaryeven under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

― June Jordan

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Program Notes

An artist doesn’t create entirely outside of hercircumstances—we create in reaction andrelation to our communities, our surroundings.This pandemic, the loss and suffering and chaos.The crises of our country, of our climate. Racialreckonings and systemic brutality. Our poemswill reflect the rage and the grief, our requiemstoo relevant. I imagine the landscapes we’llpaint: charred California hills, skies dark orange.Even our wine will taste of last year’s smoke.Our portraits wearing masks. The stories of thistime: deeply human. Deeply complex. And alsomultifaceted. There is never one story—instead,a multiplicity of narratives. A chorus not a solo.

For Reena Esmail, creating art during apandemic has been a process of just trying tometabolize and respond to the energy of thistime. Focusing on her own practice. For Reena,creativity is confronting her own growing edges,and her own limitations. Creativity is staring intothe unknown.

Reena’s piece MSKA is about the resonanceand joy of connection. And how important it is forus to find new paths to intertwine our narrativesso that we are able to all be the protagonists ofour own stories. MSKA is about how much wedepend on one another -- and how those rolescan reverse so easily, depending on thesituation.

A B O U T K A T E S C H A T Z

A B O U T K A T E S C H A T Z

Kate Schatz (pronounced ‘Shots’) is the New York Times-bestsellingauthor of Rad American Women A-Z and Rad Women Worldwide, aswell as My Rad Life: A Journal and Rid of Me: A Story. She is the co-founder of Solidarity Sundays, a nationwide network of feminist activistgroups. She’s a writer, organizer, public speaker, educator, and left-handed vegetarian Bay Area-born-and-bred feminist activist mama.Kate’s books have gotten love from BUST, Elle, Publisher’s Weekly,BuzzFeed, MTV, Ms., Teen Vogue, Kirkus Reviews, GOOD, The NewYork Times, AFROPUNK, among others. She and her collaboratorMiriam Klein Stahl have appeared on Mashable, msnbc, and numerouspublic radio programs and podcasts, including Politically Reactive with

Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu, KQED Forum, Minnesota Public Radio, and KPCC’s Take Two.As a public speaker, Kate has appeared at over 100 public schools and libraries, and has givenkeynotes and talks for a wide range of organizations, speaking about everything from her books tocontemporary feminism to electoral politics and political change.Her book of fiction, Rid of Me: A Story, was published in 2006 as part of the acclaimed 33 1/3series. Her work has been published in LENNY, Buzzfeed, Signature, Brightly, Oxford American,East Bay Express, Denver Quarterly, and Joyland, among others. Her short story “Folsom,Survivor” was included as a “Notable Short Story” in Best American Short Stories 2011, and heressay “What I Mean (or Dear White People)” appears in the anthology Radical Hope: Letters ofLove and Dissent in Dangerous Times. She is the former Chair of the School of Literary Arts at Oakland School for the Arts, where shetaught fiction, poetry, and journalism to 9th-12th graders for many years. She taught writing andliterature at UC Santa Cruz, San Jose State, and Rhode Island College. She received her MFA inFiction from Brown University, and a double BA in Women’s Studies/Creative Writing from UCSanta Cruz. She lives with her family on the island of Alameda and is represented by the agentCharlotte Sheedy.

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Gabriella Smith is a composer and environmentalist. She grew up in the SanFrancisco Bay Area playing and writing music, hiking, backpacking, andvolunteering on a songbird research project. Whether for orchestras,chamber ensembles, voices, or electronics, Gabriella’s music comes from alove of play, exploring new sounds on instruments, building compellingmusical arcs, and connecting listeners with the natural world. Recenthighlights include the LA Phil’s performances of Tumblebird Contrails,conducted by John Adams; and the Aizuri Quartet’s recording of Carrot

Revolution on their Grammy-nominated debut album Blueprinting. She recently recorded her first full-length album, Lost Coast, with cellist Gabriel Cabezas at Greenhouse Studios in Iceland, to bereleased in 2021 on Bedroom Community.

Art is t B ios

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds ofIndian and Western classical music, and brings communities togetherthrough the creation of equitable musical spaces. Esmail’s work has been commissioned by ensembles including the LosAngeles Master Chorale, Kronos Quartet, Imani Winds, RichmondSymphony, Town Music Seattle, Albany Symphony, Chicago Sinfonietta,River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, San Francisco Girls Chorus, The EloraFestival, Juilliard415, and Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Upcoming seasonsinclude new work for Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Amherst College Choir and Orchestra, Santa Fe Pro Musica, andConspirare.Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2023 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and SeattleSymphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. Previously, she was named a 2019 United StatesArtist Fellow in Music, and the 2019 Grand Prize Winner of the S & R Foundation’s WashingtonAward. Esmail was also a 2017-18 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow. She was the 2012 WalterHinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (and subsequent publication of awork by C.F. Peters)

About Berke ley SymphonyBerkeley Symphony is unique among Bay Area and American orchestras for its commitment toinnovation and community engagement. Founded in 1971 in the intellectual and artistic nexus ofBerkeley, California, the Symphony is committed to performing and commissioning new music withspecial emphasis on the work of women and ethnically diverse composers. As an organizationBerkeley Symphony is attuned to the culturally diverse people and the vibrant creative climate of itshome city.Berkeley Symphony entered a new era in January 2009 when Joana Carneiro became the Orchestra’sthird Music Director in its 40-year history. After Maestro Carneiro announced her intent to step downas Berkeley Symphony’s Music Director following nine years at its artistic helm, an international searchbegan to select her replacement. This search resulted in four finalists conducting BerkeleySymphony’s Symphonic Series concerts in the 2018-19 concert season, with Joseph Young (a last-minute replacement for a finalist who fell ill), striking instant chemistry with Berkeley Symphonymusicians and earning the title of Music Director shortly thereafter. Maestro Young formally began histenure as Music Director in the 2019-20 season, and continues to build upon Berkeley Symphony’slegacy of innovative programming, award-winning educational programs, and extensive communityengagement efforts.