Garden of Earthly Delights

Isabella Stewart Gardner was an avid and skilled gardener and landscape designer. It may be possible that her initial interest in horticulture came through her grandmother Isabella Tod Stewart, who received awards for agriculture from the state of New York (which Isabella put on display in the Short Gallery of the museum). Her home at 152 Beacon Street, Boston, was filled with tropical plants, large palms and ferns. She took advantage of large bay windows overlooking the sidewalk below to create a changing display of flowers visible to all passers-by. The flowers were grown by her father-in-law, John Lowell Gardner, Sr. whose relationship with Isabella possibly focused her gardening interests. John Sr. was a member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and received many show awards for ornamental plants and vegetables. His extensive gardens at Green Hill, Brookline, were recognized in Boston and beyond, for their beauty and attention to detail.

Isabella and her husband inherited Green Hill in 1883 and she continued to reside there seasonally until 1919. Working with John Lowell Gardner Sr.’s English gardener, Charles Montague Atkinson, she honed her skills. With its extensive greenhouses, Green Hill provided an opportunity for her to explore plants and garden design. She continued to participate in the Massachusetts Horticultural Society annual shows and her efforts were rewarded with many awards for her floral entries. In addition, she created several theme gardens at Green Hill, including an Italian garden, an ‘English lawn’ and a Japanese Garden. Her gardening experience was manifest in the creation of the courtyard and gardens at Fenway Court in 1900, a “garden beautiful” to compliment the “house beautiful” within.

Top photo: Isabella Gardner in the conservatory at Green Hill, 1905. Photographer Thomas E. Marr.

Bottom photo: Japanese Garden, Green Hill, 1905. Photographer Thomas E. Marr.

- Kristin

As the Gardner Museum’s archivist, Kristin Parker tends to photographs and documents relating to Mrs. Gardner as carefully as Isabella tended her own gardens. Click here to read her most recent post on Mrs. Gardner’s travel scrapbooks.

More on Mahanthappa

Okay, so we’re a little late. At this point, if you don’t already have tickets, you’re not going to be able to see the Rudresh Mahanthappa Quartet’s concert in the Tapestry Room tonight, because we’re completely, utterly beyond sold out. But, if you’re the plan-ahead type and you do have those tickets already in hand, we thought you might enjoy a couple interviews with Rudresh that came out in the past week, in the Boston Globe and Boston Phoenix. A few quotes are probably in order:

He’s a self-described egghead, a numbers nut who could have become a mathematician or economist. He’s a science-fiction fan who loves William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” and is liable to zone out to sci-fi reruns on TV. But when Rudresh Mahanthappa takes the stage, it’s with an alto saxophone, not chalk and blackboard, that he burrows into theorems and explores alternate planes, in a musical language so vivid and complex that hard-bitten jazz arbiters have dared to compare him to Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane. (Read more from Globe writer Siddhartha Mitter.)

“If you look at what a lot of composers in the 20th century did — Bartók, Schoenberg, Webern — what I’m doing on Codebook is not particularly groundbreaking.” But Mahanthappa is drawn to his puzzle problems as a way of thinking outside the box at the same time that he delves into material that really interests him. And he’s drawn — like earlier modern composers — to creating his own self-contained systems. “Say you decide that the piece is always going to go minor third, half step, major third, in any direction. Some really amazing music can come out of that because each note carries more weight — whether to go up or down becomes much more serious than in another circumstance.” (Read more from Phoenix editor Jon Garelick.)

But don’t take our word for it. After the concert tonight, ask Rudresh your questions about his music yourself. He’ll be signing CD’s downstairs in the museum’s Spanish Cloister after the performance, starting at about 8:30. Whether or not you were able to track down one of those elusive concert tickets, you can catch a glimpse of Mahanthappa and his quartet there, and maybe even talk string theory over a cocktail or two. Free gallery talks, a funky new self-guided tour focused on cross-cultural exchange in the Gardner collection, and some awesome fusion food in the cafe will keep you busy enough until then.

Mrs. Gardner Abroad

Mrs. Gardner compiled 27 scrapbooks during her extensive world travels which included, in part, journeys to Europe, Turkey, Japan and Cuba and each experience was carefully recorded. In some scrapbooks, her observations are made in the style of an anthropologist taking field notes, as she sketched and defined hieroglyphics and illustrated monuments or jotted down excerpts from local myths. In others she included photographs purchased at local photographer’s shops, which catered to the tourist industry. Mrs. Gardner dedicated Sundays to her scrap booking, pasting photographs, pressed flowers and other ephemera into her books. The scrapbooks illustrate the link between her early travels and the later construction of her museum.

More on Magnus

Considering coming to our “Composer Portraits” concert Thursday night? Find out more about Magnus Lindberg, the composer we’ll be profiling, in this article in Sunday’s Boston Globe.

This 49-year-old Finnish composer is a major voice in European music, but one that is heard all too rarely in this country…He wields a technical arsenal of enormous sophistication but his music never comes across as arid or brainy. Saturated with color and textural detail and brimming with a remarkable density of sound, his best works address themselves to a broad audience without descending into a pallid or pandering neo-Romanticism. He is a master of concluding strokes that unlock the mystery of what has just transpired, and few composers can so artfully wed moments of surprise with a forward-rushing sense of destination. And finally, as his various concertos testify, he has created some of the most strikingly virtuosic music for orchestra and solo instruments of the last 20 years.

Read on for more, including thoughts on Lindberg’s early experiences with punk rock and what the northeast corridor has in common with the Silk Road.

Happy 1903!

Mrs. Gardner was well aware of the curiosity the building of her museum as well as its architect (herself) aroused in the citizens of Boston, and she collected news clippings that described reactions to both. Click on the scan at left to zoom in and read the original story of the museum’s opening celebration.

While a select few were offered the privilege of visiting the museum during its earliest days, its official opening was on New Year’s Eve, lasting into the first wee hours of 1903. Invitations were sent to 200 friends and acquaintances. Arrangements were made for members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to play under the direction of conductor Wilhelm Gericke accompanied by nine singers from the local Cecilia Society. Mrs. Gardner received her guests in the Music Room (later rearranged to form the Tapestry Room) dressed head to toe in black. After the concert, mirrored doors were pushed aside to reveal the lush courtyard, lit from every balcony by round flame-colored lanterns. Just imagine the reaction of those first visitors as they stepped into the magical, never-before-seen, space – an escape from the wintry cold outside. One of her guests described his reaction nicely, in a letter of thanks:

“Has the music-room dissolved, this morning, in the sunshine? I felt, last night, as though I were in a Hans Anderson Fairy Tale, ready to go on a flying carpet at any moment…”

 

Kristin Parker enjoys flipping through old newspapers, and much more, here at the Gardner Museum as our archivist. Take a look at another archival document, a concert program for another of Isabella’s renowned soirees, in her post about Isabella’s “Manuscript Club,” here.

We hope to see you in the New Year, too. And a hint: admission is free on January 1st every year, a fitting homage to the museum’s opening over a century ago. Or celebrate at the first After Hours of ‘08, on January 17. We’ll see you next year!

 

Isabella’s advice for the holiday table

As was the custom in nineteenth century society, great wealth brought civic responsibility. Mrs. Gardner fulfilled her duties with unusual flair. Fenway Court (the turn-of-the-century moniker for today’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) was the setting for events to benefit local charities as well as support for artistic creation. These events included an annual garden competition, plays performed in the Gothic Room, and modern dance performances. Concerts and lavish dinner parties also took place.

A Musical Feast

Many people think of the Renaissance as a flowering in the visual arts, but in fact all of the arts went through vital changes during this period of European cultural rebirth. Even food changed during the Renaissance—surviving recipes from the period indicate a shift away from the boiled grains and blancmange of the Middle Ages to more refined wines (viticulture took a huge leap forward in the Renaissance), meats with complicated sauces, and even exotic New World imports such as potatoes. In short, it was the kind of European food that we’re used to in the 21^st century. Wealthy noble families such as the Medicis and Gonzagas in Italy, the Burgundian dynasty in France, and the Tudors in England, competed to hire the best cooks, along with the best painters, best sculptors, and of course…the best musicians.

Unlike painting or sculpture, cooking and music are ephemeral arts that have to be recreated for each occasion. In a world where we can listen to music on demand from a dozen different sources, we often don’t appreciate how special music could be in an era when live performance was the only way music was ever heard, and no performance could ever be captured or replayed. Music was often present at great feasts and celebrations, and no feast characterized this “seize the moment” idea better than the annual festival of Martinmas, celebrated in early November.

Questions for Chris Enright

On November 15th, composer and pianist Chris Enright will open the Jazz at the Gardner series with a performance at 7pm. We talked with Chris recently about his music.

Tell us a little about the music you’ll be playing. Any stories behind how any of these tunes came into being?
We’ll be playing at least one movement from my “Blessed Are The Forgetful” suite. It was originally an extended composition project I had to do while I was at Berklee.

I had a hard time getting rolling, and found most of the writing for the project to be too academic. If you spend enough time studying music, it’s pretty easy to over-think things and micromanage a piece. At the time, I was working for one of my former music teachers, Ran Blake, who often writes pieces inspired by various Hitchcock films. So I decided to write a suite inspired by one of my favorite films, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” It really opened things up for me and I started fusing the technique I’d gained from Berklee, with my own compositional voice. I use this technique with a lot of my pieces.

We’ve got rhythm

Take a sneak peak at this month’s gallery tour:

Sure, we have concerts every Sunday in season, performances throughout the year, and other hip events, but what is the rhythm of the Gardner? Seems obvious that old Isabella Gardner had style, but did she have rhythm? Could she boogie in those heavy, silk and satin, Victorian duds she wore? Let’s look to the design of her museum for answers. This is a short lesson in close looking and spatial awareness.

Think back about how you entered the museum. The entrance hall is low-ceilinged and cramped. Walking into the Spanish Cloister area gives you a bit more breathing room, and you see some art, and a little more interesting scenery. Once in the cloisters, windows allow views outside, and you get obstructed views of the courtyard. Most people naturally move toward the court to get the full view. When finally standing at the edge of the court, space, light, and color explode before you.

The short journey takes you from small, constricted, dark spaces to wide open wonder!

Musicians talk about Hemphill

For Duke Ellington, the pinnacle of praise was to describe a musician as “beyond category.” The late Texas-born saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill, who came up through the worlds of R&B and jazz, merits the full measure of that Ellingtonian encomium. Read more.

For an article in yesterday’s Globe, jazz correspondent Kevin Lowenthal interviewed a number of the musicians performing this Thursday at After Hours about saxophonist Julius Hemphill’s legacy and impact. Click the link above to read more about what pianist Ursula Oppens and saxophonist Marty Ehrlich, both playing in the 7pm concert “Music of Julius Hemphill,” had to say. You’ll also get another perspective from saxophonist Russ Gershon, who will be playing live in the courtyard from 5-7pm.

Tickets to the 7pm concert are going fast, so act soon if you’re interested in hearing some of Hemphill’s music. The courtyard performance is included with After Hours admission.