C2 ez re the washington post.saturday, april 4 , 2020
diversity and inclusivity in classi-
cal music and advance the work
of artists of color and female
composers.
A nd now, a few weeks into the
coronavirus chaos, Koh has got-
ten a better handle on uncertain
time in uncertain times.
“I thought, I could spend this
period of time being scared,
curled up in a ball in the corner of
the apartment,” she says. “or I
could spend this time only think-
ing about my own survival. or I
could spend this time and try to
help as many people as I can.”
So Koh got to work on Alone
To gether, an online performance
series for which she hyper-com-
pressed her usual process of
discovering composers by asking
21 of them with some level of
financial security (be it from
salary or grants) to donate a new
work between 30 seconds and
one minute long, as well as to
nominate 21 freelance compos-
ers for new commissions funded
by Arco.targeted way to do that.”
Iyer was eager to help Guerin
— an extremely versatile young
multi-instrumentalist and com-
poser — but also wanted to nudge
him into writing his first solo
work for violin. Koh says both
Iyer’s and Guerin’s contributions
share a meditative quality, and
for his part, Iyer says his “for
Violin Alone” was conceived as a
soliloquy for this moment: “Not
even for an audience, but just for
someone to play to themselves.”
“I think all of us are just kind of
reeling from the ongoing calami-
ty and trauma and fire hose of
really [bad] news,” Iyer says.
“Which makes it really hard to
focus on anything. Having a task
like this, that I could do in a day,
there’s something so compact
about it. It felt like — okay, here’s
something I can do right now,
because I don’t know what else I
can do.”
Although Koh knew from her
own experience that she’d be
helping out young composers
with the series, she was surprised
at the thanks she received even
from those who were donating
their work — and their time — for
simply providing a chance to
focus on one thing.
“our brains are jumping
around like crazy trying to find
some kind of balance and adjust-
ment to this new situation,” she
says. “So what I was also thinking
about that length of 30 seconds,
it’s about sitting and trying to
make your mind steady.”
And for the composers she’s
amplifying, it was a way to get
some of that control back, even if
just for a moment at a time.
“ I barely know what can be
accomplished right now,” Iyer
says, “but I think I can write a
piece that’s a minute long.”
[email protected]“of course, there are things
like relief funds,” Koh says. “But
for me I wanted to offer everyone
and these younger composers a
space to do what they love to do
and what they’ve dedicated their
lives to doing.”
Starting Saturday at 7 p.m.,
Koh will perform a selection of
these donated and commissioned
works via Instagram TV (@jen-
niferkohmusic) and facebook
Live (facebook.com/jenniferkoh-
violin). from there, works will
migrate to YouTube and be avail-
able on demand.
Saturday’s program will fea-
ture composer Wang Lu’s “Hover
and recede” ( which Koh likens to
a “microtonal ambulance”) and
Wang’s nominee Joungbum Lee’s
“Hovering Green”(which Koh de-
scribes as, appropriately enough,
“a distorted version of the Spring
Sonata”). Also premiering Satur-
day is jazz pianist and composer
Vijay Iyer’s “for Violin Alone” a nd
his nominee morgan Guerin’s
“Together, but Alone (in Quaran-
tine).”
Upcoming pairings include
Andrew Norman and Katherine
Balch, Anjna Swaminathan and
Layale Chaker, and missy mazzoli
and Cassie Wieland. In a twist,
composer Ian Chang will collabo-
rate on a single piece with his
nominee, Darian Donovan
Thomas.
for Iyer, who also teaches at
Harvard, a moral responsibility
accompanies the mounting fi-
nancial pressures faced by artists.
“People are finding themselves
in almost immediate financial
ruin — artists of every caliber
and every stripe and from every
community,” he says. “A lot of us
who are fortunate to have means
right now wanted to try to do
something for somebody. This
was a nice, very focused andBY MICHAEL ANDOR
BRODEURComposers take time manage-
ment to a completely different
level. It’s a very hands-on ap-
proach. In conjuring music, they
shape time, fundamentally alter-
ing how we experience it from
moment to moment and century
to century. Whether they are
holding a note across a stretch of
seconds or referencing a past
work over the span of hundreds
of years, to compose a work is to
have time at your service. That’s
powerful stuff.
So suffice it to say that the past
month hasn’t been great for com-
posers, who have seen premieres
canceled, commissions stall, in-
come evaporate and — like any-
one else quarantined in their
homes — time lose its texture.
Violinist Jennifer Koh remem-
bers well how it felt during the
first two weeks of the coronavirus
crisis in New York, as the virus
began tightening its grip on the
city she’s called home since 2002.
“It was like every day was a
month, so much transformation
was happening in a short period
of time,” s he says. “There’s a kind
of intensity in that.”
Koh, 43, also remembers well
what her early days as an inde-
pendent artist in New York were
like, even just 10 years ago, living
from gig to gig with an income
tight enough to have her buying
dried beans over the canned ones.
Since then, Koh has become
one of the more acclaimed violin-
ists of our time. (Will I be able to
suggest her may 27 program of
Bach solo sonatas and partitas at
the National museum of Women
in the Arts? Stay tuned.) In 2014,
she founded the artist-driven
nonprofit Arco Collaborative,
whose mission is to promote
She plays so composers can work
christina WalkerFor her alone together series, violinist Jennifer Koh asked composers to donate a 30 -to-60-second-long piece and to nominate a less-
established colleague to get a commission for a second short work. She will perform the results on social media starting Saturday.
Jimmy katz
vijay iyer is one of the 21
composers chosen to donate a
piece for Koh’s series.I’m sure I’m leaving others
out, but that’s only so I can offer
the relieving news that “World
on fire” does settle into a
watchable rhythm, as the con-
nections between all these
characters begin to emerge and
cohere. The writing is brisk and
efficient, but it does take a few
more episodes (there are seven
in all) to make the best use of
actors as talented as Hunt,
Bean and manville.
“World on fire” struggles
most on battlefields and in
other scenes requiring cinemat-
ic scope. (After all, who wants
to stage Dunkirk after we’ve all
seen “Dunkirk”?) What’s more
interesting about “World on
fire” is what it doesn’t do:
There’s never a swelling,
Churchillian sense of British
resolve and pride, and, amid
the Holocaust, there’s p ractical-
ly nothing in the Warsaw seg-
ments about what happens to
Jews.
Instead, “World on fire”
zooms in on other victims, such
as Nancy’s German neighbors
(Johannes Zeiler and Victoria
mayer) who try to hide the fact
that their young daughter (Dora
Zygouri) has epilepsy and is
subject to the Third reich’s hor-
rifying roundup of the sick and
disabled.
Where we expect deepening
displays of sympathy and resolu-
tion, the series often veers to-
ward the opposite. We also get
one heck of a cliffhanger at the
tail end. After the disappoint-
ment of being left in the lurch by
“Sanditon” earlier this year,
“masterpiece” viewers can at
least take comfort in the news
that a second season of “World
on fire” i s in the works. It would
be nice to give these morose
characters a fighting chance.
[email protected]World on Fire (one hour) from
PBs’s “masterpiece,” premieres
sunday at 9 p.m. on Weta and mPt.That’s history for you — messy
and not always narratively com-
pliant. Created and written by
Peter Bowker, “World on fire”
opens in 1939 on Harry and Lois
(Jonah Hauer-King and Julia
Brown), a pretty pair of love-
struck young socialists in man-
chester, England, causing a ruck-
us at a r ally of Nazi s ympathizers.
Soon enough they are parted, as
Harry heads to Poland to work as
a translator and Lois works as a
jazz singer entertaining the Brit-
ish troops.
Six months later, in Warsaw,
Harry has fallen in love with a
cafe waitress named Kasia (Zofia
Wichłacz), just as her father and
brother are heading off to join
the fight against the Nazi inva-
sion. Things turn awful very
quickly, and Harry’s plans to get
Kasia out of the country go awry;
instead he returns to the English
estate of his emotionally dis-
tanced mother, robina (“Phan-
tom Thread’s” Lesley manville),
accompanied by Kasia’s fright-
ened little brother, Jan (Eryk
Biedunkiewicz).
The first hour of “World of
fire” i nvolves a dizzying degree
of characters and plot threads —
some might call it “meanwhile
abuse.” Helen Hunt gives a
staunch but satisfying perfor-
mance as Nancy, an American
radio correspondent based in
Berlin, whose increasingly fran-
tic dispatches are censored by
her Nazi minders. Her nephew,
Webster (Brian J. Smith), is an
American doctor in Paris, who is
falling in love with a french
African jazz saxophonist, Albert
(Parker Sawyers), just as the
Germans gear up to invade
france.
Back in manchester, mean-
while, Sean Bean (“Game of
Thrones”) plays Lois’s father,
Douglas, a World War I veteran
whose experiences have turned
him into a pacifist.tv review from c1These Brits don’t always
keep calm and carry on
PBs/BBc/mammoth screen
Jonah Hauer-King stars in “world on Fire,” a pBS miniseries that
follows characters in europe during world war ii.whatever — there’s probably a
song for it.”
Withers achieved staggering
emotional breadth with such
simple techniques, jotting lyrical
thought-bubbles down on scraps
of paper, then meditating on
them until their durability felt
worthy of a song. It made him a
patient editor who refused to be
confined by whatever the world
normally expects from a love
song. He wrote love songs about
family (“Grandma’s Hands”). He
wrote love songs for his friends
(“Lean on me”). He wrote love
songs to the face across the
pillow that doubled as love songs
to existence (“Lovely Day”). If
you feel as if you could listen to
them a thousand times, it’s be-
cause Withers sounds as if he
sang them to himself a thousand
times before putting them into
circulation.
I could probably stand to hear
“Lovely Day” t en thousand more
times. Listen to how Withers
stretches the word “day” across
the sky like a rainbow while a
backgrounded voice plays the
role of his subconscious: “Lovely
day, lovely day, lovely day, love-
ly-day.”
Withers is exalting the uni-
verse, yes. But he’s talking to
himself, too. Just like on “Ain’t
No Sunshine.” When we sing
along, the repetition in his music
becomes a mantra that we use to
convince ourselves that this life
— in all its loneliness and bliss —
is real.
[email protected]
appreciation from c1
I could go on and on and on and on about singer Bill Withers
michael ochs archives/getty images
ruminating on words he’d jotted down, Bill withers, pictured circa 197 3, honed his songs in his head so that they would stick in yours.