Unresolved

Anthony R. Green Sacred Ground (2021)
‍Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel String Quartet in Eb major (1834)
‍Béla Bartók String Quartet No. 6, BB 119

In this program Arneis explores unresolved aspects of race, gender, and war through works of Anthony R. Green, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, and Bela Bartok.  “Sacred Ground” was commissioned by Chamber Music Tulsa to commemorate the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre.  Green starts the work with “a cry and dense music” that then turns into “a complicated reflection, an unstable meditation” expressing how issues of race in the USA that led to the events in 1921 are still unresolved.  Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s creative energy and desire to compose rivaled that of her brother Felix.  Their father Abraham reprimanded Fanny for her desire to pursue composition seriously, stating in a letter that “music will perhaps become [Felix’s] profession, whilst for you it can and must only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing.”  These barriers based on gender still exist for composers.  Bela Bartok wrote his sixth and last string quartet in 1939 as the beginning of World War II shook Europe to its core. Via his involvement with the League of Nations as a committee member he bore early witness to deteriorating human rights on the continent paired with rising nationalistic tensions, tragedies that still plague our global community to this day.