December 6, 2022
- WIU STUDENT CHAMBER MUSIC GALA RECITAL
- Time: 4:00 PM
- Location: COFAC Recital Hall
- Description:
This performance is free and open for general audience seating.
String Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20 - Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
I – Allegro Moderato ma con fuoco
IV – Presto
Ioana Popescu, violin
Gisselle Marie Sanchez Diaz, violin
Alice Müller, violin
Madalyn Pridemore, violin
João Pedro Motta Rocha, viola
Keira Botica, viola
Tomás Estigarribia, violoncello
María Fernanda Rodriguez Hurtado, violoncello
Felix Mendelssohn, from a letter to Marc-André Souchay, who had asked Mendelssohn the meanings of some of his Songs without Words:
There is so much talk about music, and yet so little is said. For my part, I believe that words do not suffice for such a purpose, and if I found they did suffice I would finally have nothing more to do with music. People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should be thinking as they hear it is unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me it is exactly the reverse, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words. These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words. The thoughts that are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite. And so I find in every effort to express such thoughts in words that something is right but, at the same time, that something is lacking in all of them . . . . If you ask me what I was thinking of when I wrote it, I would say: just the song as it stands. And if I happen to have had certain words in mind for one or another of these songs, I would never want to tell them to anyone, because the same words never mean the same things to different people. Only the song can say the same thing, can arouse the same feelings in one person as in another, a feeling that is not expressed, however, by the same words.
Berlin, October 15, 1842
- Related Web Site: WIU School of Music
- Contact Information:
Joanie Herbert
Phone: 309-298-1843
Email: JE-Herbert@wiu.edu - Source: School of Music
