Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Gao Hong
Synopsis On today’s date in 2012, the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet — an ensemble committed to commissioning original works as well as performing new arrangements for four guitars — gave the premiere performance of a suite that took them far afield: to Guangxi province in China, to be exact. The new work, Guangxi Impression, took place at Sundin Hall in St. Paul, but the sounds the four guitarists produced evoked not only a far-off Chinese landscape, but Chinese instruments, as well.
That should not have been all that surprising, since the composer of the specially commissioned piece, Gao Hong, is a virtuoso performer on one of them: the pipa, the traditional pear-shaped, plucked lute of China. Hong has made the United States her home since 1994, and her Guangxi Impressions for a quartet of traditional Western guitars is a suite in three movements, played without pause. The third and final movement is titled ‘Celebrating the Harvest.’
“A bountiful harvest is cause for celebration in Guangxi,” Hong writes, “and I depict this with sounds of percussion bands and people yelling with excitement as they dance. Near the end of the movement I [ask the performers to shout Chinese] words expressing happiness.”
Music Played in Today's Program
Gao Hong (b. 1964): 'Celebrating the Harvest,' from 'Guangxi Impression'; Minneapolis Guitar Quartet; innova 858