Music in the archives…

In 1888 the Manuscript Club gave its first concert at 152 Beacon Street, Mrs. Gardner’s first Boston home. A local paper, Town Topics, described the club that year: “Mrs. Gardner’s latest triumph in Boston is the successful launching of a new musical organization called the Manuscript Club, wherein all the several amateur musicians in town play their own compositions.” The Club had been organized to secure for local composers an intelligent and sympathetic hearing of their compositions and included local female composers – an avant garde idea for the times.

Notice the signature of Margaret Ruthven Lang. [Just click on the image at left to zoom in.] Five years after playing for Mrs. Gardner, in 1893, the Boston Symphony Orchestra programmed Lang’s “Dramatic Overture” and it became the first orchestral work written by a woman performed by an American orchestra.

Who is Hemphill?

“Much was made of a four-horn group [Julius Hemphill's World Saxophone Quartet] working the turf of jazz without a rhythm section. Hemphill insightfully replied that he did not know what all the fuss was about. Nobody pointed to a string quartet to marvel at how well they got along with no rhythm section.”

On October 18, the Gardner will kick off this season’s Composer Portraits series with a concert of music by Julius Hemphill. If you’re a jazz fan, you may know him from the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group, or the revolutionary World Saxophone Quartet. But you may not know that he wrote classical music, too, for string quartet and piano. We’ll be playing it all in the concert at the next After Hours, but until then, a few words about his music from program annotator Ben Young:

Hemphill’s impact and legacy offer different things to different audiences. His identity as a fiery, constructive-minded alto saxophonist powered a substantial part of his recorded output, on which he appears as an improviser but not composer or arranger… Hemphill’s long-form writing for ensemble, with or without his participation as a player, is maybe the hardest subset of his writing to grasp..But the enduring benchmark of Hemphill’s identity as a music-maker is his craftsmanship and style as a jazz composer–arranger, the last giant in the 20th century to make an unmistakably new contribution to the field. This dimension of music making was neglected in the oeuvre that Hemphill entered when he moved to New York in 1973. Only the early work of Butch Morris suggested that there was anyone on the scene paying as much attention to the modernist precepts of beauty, ballad, close harmony, and tight execution.

Photo Roundup

This just in–our photos!

See more after the jump…

A penny for your thoughts

Okay, so we’re not actually paying, but we would love to hear more about what you thought of our first After Hours event last night. Personally, we were thrilled. More than 600 people came to our premiere to take in the art & ambiance, catch up with friends old and new, and enjoy live music and drinks around the courtyard, and we hear you had a great time.

Our friends over at Yelp are already buzzing about the evening, and a little bird tells us that Going will soon be posting pictures from the night. Keep an eye out for the next Improper, and if you’re lucky, your mug may just show up there, too. We’ll have our own Flickr album up on Monday, but in the meantime: what did you think? Add a comment below and let us know.

A couple words from people who attended:

“I think it’s great that one of the best museums in Boston is appealing to a wider audience & offering something to appeal to all 5 senses.”

The best aspect: “Feeling like I was at a private party at this beautiful museum!”

“Wonderful chance to mingle and enjoy the museum in an intimate atmosphere.”

“Relaxed and social vibe, good people watching and the most beautiful venue in the city.”

Preview of coming attractions

A taste of tonight’s tour of the galleries, in search of Asian objects:

Asian objects make up the third largest category of artworks at the Gardner Museum, after Italian and American art. Isabella Gardner’s interest in Asia began in 1883–84, when she and her husband Jack visited Japan, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, and India. She bought only a few things on this trip, but filled scrapbooks with photographs, notes, flowers, and assorted souvenirs.

Then, around 1901–3, Isabella bought Japanese screens and Chinese scrolls, along with carved and painted wooden panels. Most of these came from dealers’ shops here in Boston. A decade later, she sought a few select masterpieces of Asian art.

Isabella left nothing about why she collected what she did, but you can see from this chronology that an interest in Asia and Asian art ran throughout her life…

Sonic calligraphy

I often think of shakuhachi music as sonic calligraphy. Starting from a particular form, the piece of music, you create audible “brush strokes.” As in Japanese calligraphy, the artifacts are part of the art: the roughness of the breath, the unpolished sonorities of the bamboo, the rhythms that flow from the individual performer’s ever-changing physical and emotional state. In calligraphy, the final visual product may be almost unreadable as kanji, even as it expresses the deepest meaning of the characters. It is the same in shakuhachi music: no two performances are the same, and the expression is completely of the moment.

Why After Hours?

Well this is the first blog entry for Gardner After Hours - more to come from some of the cool artists, performers, and staff here at the museum who will be working with us on these nights.

So I guess the first question to be asked and answered is: why are we doing this? To me, the answer is pretty obvious: for you. It’s a new century, and in order to keep being accessible to visitors we have to be open at a time when they can actually visit! Don’t get me wrong; I love all the quirky, surprising and beautiful things about the Gardner, but the first thing I thought when I started working here over four years ago is WE NEED TO BE OPEN AT NIGHT! So after years of rallying the cause, it is finally going to happen and I couldn’t be happier!

Hold your horses…

We’ll be here soon.

In the meantime, browse more images from the Gardner Museum collection here, or check out an online exhibition by Artist-in-Residence Danijel Zezelj (who designed the graphics for After Hours) here.

Above:
Saint George Slaying the Dragon, 1470
Carlo Crivelli, Italian (Venice), 1430-1495
Gold and tempera on wood, 94 x 47.8 cm
Purchased in 1897 from Colnaghi, London, through Berenson.