Your hometown. The roof over your head. A gathering of far-flung family and friends.
However we define it, home is something that lives in us as much as we live in it.
The Austin-based Miró Quartet’s most recent recording, Home (Pentatone Records, 2024), showcases American works that explore the meaning of home. The recording features works by Pulitzer Prize-winners Kevin Puts, George Walker, Caroline Shaw and Samuel Barber, and a beguiling arrangement of Harold Arlen’s hit song “Over the Rainbow.”
The idea for the recording was inspired by two major global events that put the concept of home in a new light – the years-long migration crisis from the Middle East and Africa and the COVID-19 pandemic. Writing on commission from the Miró, Kevin Puts channeled into his new quartet work his concern for the millions of Syrian nationals who, since 2011, had been migrating to Europe to flee the civil war in their homeland.
The recording’s title work, Puts’ work Home (2019), explores what it means to be displaced from home, forced from shelter and community to escape violence and trauma. Miró Quartet cellist Josh Gindele says the journey from the safety of home into an uncertain future is woven into the musical DNA of Puts’ work.
“Kevin wrote the piece with the idea that we start in C major, which is this very resonant, happy, heartwarming key that represents home, the place of comfort, the place where your family is, the place that you knew and grew up in,” Gindele said. “But being forced out of that and just all the unknowns with that kind of moment in your life – where are you going to end up, what it’s going to look like, are you going to survive it?”
The quartet performed the first of several scheduled premieres of Puts’ Home in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the remaining performances to be postponed indefinitely. The Miró Quartet musicians, who normally travel upwards of 200 days each year performing concerts around the world, were suddenly confined to their homes and facing uncertain professional futures.
“The pandemic was a really scary time for all artists, because we didn’t know what our future was going to look like. We didn’t know if we were ever going to play concerts again,” Gindele said. “We were forced to stay in our homes. We couldn’t leave our cities. It was just a new reality for society as a whole. And so, I think it made the piece even more poignant for us.”
The pandemic lockdown was the context in which another work on the recording, Caroline Shaw’s Microfictions, came about. From confinement at home, Shaw searched for inspiration for her new quartet work. On Twitter (now X), she came across T. R. Darling’s tweets of extremely short stories, which he calls “microfictions,” and which he posts under the handle @QuietPineTrees.
Shaw decided she would write her own microfictions on the inspiration of Darling’s tweets and use her short texts as the basis for her new work for the Miró.
“The work she wrote for us is a set of six microfictions that she wrote inspired by this gentleman’s work and inspired in some ways by home and being in her apartment and having a different perspective on life as an artist and a musician,” Gindele said.
Complementing the new works by Shaw and Puts are two American quartet classics – the second movement from George Walker’s String Quartet No. 1 and Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, Op. 11. Walker was the first African American graduate of the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music and the first African American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize and was the recipient of countless other awards and honors. He was close with his maternal grandmother, who had escaped from slavery, and who helped create the warm home environment that nurtured Walker’s musical gifts. She died the year before Walker composed his First Quartet, the second movement of which he dedicated to her.
“(Walker’s) grandmother was the product of slavery. She had a very, very difficult life. Yet somehow, by all accounts from George … she managed to have a really upbeat, wonderfully positive, supportive, maternal way about her,” Gindele said. “And so, I think when he wrote this for her, as an homage to her, it really tells the story of what home and home life can and should be like.”
For the second movement of his String Quartet No. 1, Walker derived inspiration from the second movement of his Curtis Institute classmate Samuel Barber’s String Quartet. Right after completing the quartet, Barber arranged its Adagio movement for string orchestra. Barber’s Adagio for Strings is now one of the best-known works of American music. Beautiful and elegiac, it was broadcast on radio with the announcement of the death of President Roosevelt, the National Symphony Orchestra performed it on the death of President John F. Kennedy and it has figured at countless other moments of collective mourning in the U.S. and around the world.
“When we look at home, we look at our home, we look at the city that we live in, we look at our community, we look at the people we spend time with – our family – but we also look at the country as a whole. And I think Barber and the Adagio represent that as well as anything. It’s also just such an iconic piece of literature that it felt like it needed to be on this album – the whole string quartet needed to be on this album,” Gindele said.
Concluding the Miró’s Home is William Ryden’s string quartet arrangement of “Over the Rainbow,” from 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. The film’s protagonist, Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland), sings the song as she imagines what a place far away from her Kansas home might be like. The song sets up the action of the now-classic film, which is about leaving home, journeying far and wide, encountering the wonders and horrors of the world and ultimately realizing that home – the people and places that make us who we are – is with us wherever we go.
Though distinctly American, “Over the Rainbow” conveys a universal message – that home is where, in every sense, we find ourselves.
“I think that we all have a greater love for our community now than we’ve ever had before, and that piece kind of summed it up,” Gindele said. “It felt like the bow on the present at the end, tie that up and it just felt like the right thing to do.”
Video transcript: Jennifer Hambrick's interview with Josh Gindele, cellist of the Miró Quartet:
Jennifer Hambrick: I’m speaking with Josh Gindele, who I the cellist with the Miró Quartet, and we’re here to talk about the quartet’s most recent recording, Home, released on the PentaTone label. So, Josh, thanks so much for joining me today. What inspired the Miro Quartet to make a recording on the subject of “home?”
Josh Gindele: Well, it’s a complicated answer but I will start with saying that one of the pieces on the program, by Kevin Puts, is entitled Home. And I’m going to just tell a brief story and put some things in context. So, Kevin loves visuals for his music. It’s what makes him such a great opera composer. And Home was written about the migration crisis from the Middle East into Europe in, like, 2014, I believe it was. The idea that all of these Iraqi and Iranian people were forced from their homes because of government strife, and they flooded into Western Europe. And Kevin wrote this piece with the idea that we start in C major, which is this very resonant, happy, heartwarming, key that represents home, the place of comfort, the place where your family is, the place that you knew and grew up in. But being forced out of that and how terrifying and just all the unknowns with that kind of moment in your life – Where are you going to end up?
What it's going to look like – are you going to survive it? And so, Kevin wrote that piece for us, and we had premiered the first premiere – and then because we often do like multiple premieres of works, five or six – by the second one came around, the pandemic had hit. And we had this new respect for – we all did – we were in our own homes. We were forced to stay in our homes. We couldn’t leave our cities. It was just a new reality for society as a whole. And so, I think it made the piece even more poignant for us. And at the same time, Caroline happened to be writing the Microfictions, which is also on the album. And her lack of being able to communicate with people and be with other artists. And she felt uninspired because she was stuck in her apartment in Brooklyn. And again, we just started to understand the value of home and put it in a different perspective and understand it in a different way. Adn that got us thinking – how can we represent home as Americans, how can we represent home as native Texans, as Austin natives, and how can we pay homage to the things that bring us comfort and solace? So it kind of grew out of this idea that Kevin put forth, but we kind of made it our own.
JH: And the “Caroline” to whom you refer is none other than Caroline Shaw. That sort of opens the door, I think, for this next question. Could you talk about your personal understanding of home and also your quartet’s understanding of home?
JG: Yeah, it’s – I think as a group that travels as much as we do, upwards of 200 days a year, our idea of home was a little different. We value it so much because we’re not there as much as a lot of other people are. But the pandemic was a really scary time for all artists, because we didn’t know what our future was going to look like. We didn’t know if we were ever going to play concerts again. We didn’t know how we were going to get out there and inspire and create. But we do it because we love playing for people and getting an emotional response out of people who listen to the music. So what makes the pieces on this album so poignant for me - Kevin and Caroline Shaw and Barber, George walker – is that they all are very deep emotional pieces with stories that have real depth. And I also think that we realize the value of our home in Austin, Texas. We’ve been teaching at the University of Texas now for 21 years, and the stability of that provided us so much within the context of the pandemic and the creation of this project. And again, I think we just have a deeper love and deeper respect for everything that we call home. We’ve actually even in some ways changed how we do business as a quartet because of that. We spend less time away from home now, post-pandemic, than we did before the pandemic.
JH: Let’s talk about the works on the recording, beginning with the title work, Home, by Kevin Puts. You’ve already told us a little bit about it, but any other comments you’d like to add?
JG: Kevin is a composer that we come back to time and time again because every time we play his works – this is the third work he’s written for us – audiences, you never get that “contemporary music is hard to listen to” comment Kevin has a real way with language and his harmony and melody, and even in this piece, when he is representing the turmoil of these people leaving their homes, it gets more dissonant, it gets more thorny, it gets more rhythmical, the tempos keep getting faster and faster, more technical for the musicians – it still has something that everybody can understand and listen to. It never veers to a place that is sort of incomprehensible. And that’s Kevin’s real gift. It’s what makes him so wonderful at writing operas, it’s why he won a Pulitzer Prize for his operas. So we’ve known Kevin for a long time. He was on the faculty of the University of Texas when we first got there. And also just personally, we’re so fond of him and our working relationship with him is so great that it’s a real collaboration, it’s a true collaboration. Yeah, we have like a little mini love affair with Kevin Puts.
JH: Sure, sure, sure. And Kevin Puts, as you mentioned, is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, but all of the composers on this album in their day received the Pulitzer Prize, as well. We’ll move on to the next piece on the recording, which is a movement from George Walker’s Lyric Quartet on this recording, there’s a quite different understanding of “home” conveyed in this piece of music.
JG: You know, this is a piece that, I think, until recently a lot of people hadn’t heard. You’d hear it on orchestral programs. It is often presented like Barber’s Adagio as a chamber orchestra version they call Lyric for Strings, but it was initially the second movement of this string quartet. And George was a fascinating composer. This movement, and the reason I think we put it on this album, is that it does hold up next to the great Adagio by Barber. It is equally emotionally yoked and tells a story in a real narrative, and he wrote it about his grandmother. His grandmother was the product of slavery. She had a very, very difficult life. Yet somehow, by all accounts from George – and then to know him and to know his personality – she managed to have a really upbeat, wonderfully positive supportive maternal way about her. And because she raised George, he ended up being that gentle, wonderful, humorous, happy guy. And so, I think when he wrote this for her, as an homage to her, it really tells the story of what home and home life can and should be like. She encouraged him so much that he became the first African American student at the Curtis Institute of Music and graduate. He as the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, unfortunately not until the 90s, which is nuts. And he was a genius. He played multiple instruments really brilliantly and, again, the product of a great person raising him the way that she felt like she should. This may be unusual for your listeners or for people, and whether it’s our recording or a recording of a chamber orchestra playing Lyric for Strings, I just encourage people to listen to it, because it really should be sort of a staple of the repertoire. I think this getting there, but it’s stunningly beautiful.
JH: You mentioned Caroline Shaw’s Microfictions and sort of the home context for her in which she wrote the piece, but tell us about this piece.
JG: We had been talking with Caroline for a long time about a work. And she’s so busy now. She’s like the hottest composer in all classical music over the last five years now, so asking her to do anything is usually an exercise in patience. We love her. We first collaborated with her, and she did some singing and playing with us, in a concert at Lincoln Center. And since then, we’ve actually done some viola quintets with her playing viola and done some other stuff with her. And we asked her to write this piece, and she was stuck at home. She was in her apartment in Brooklyn at the time. And then she sound this wonderful science fiction author on Twitter called T. R. Darling. He's actually a former radio host, too, oddly. And he was writing what he referred to as microfictions, which used the character limitations of Twitter to express himself, but with some limitations. And so, Caroline decided that she would write her own microfictions. And so, the work she wrote for us is a set of six microfictions that she wrote, words, poems that she wrote inspired by this gentleman's work and inspired in some ways by home and being in her apartment and having q different perspective on life as an artist and a musician. It's fun to listen to, and we included Caroline reading her own words on the album because as a singer but also as the writer of the words and composer, we felt that she could express the m the best.
JH: You alluded earlier to Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Barber’s String Quartet is also on this recording, and it is a staple of the string quartet repertoire, largely because of its second movement, which Barber orchestrated as his Adagio for Strings. That movement, in particular, is an iconic work of American music. In that sense, or in what other sense, does it connect with the concept of home?
JG: Well, that piece, you know – we as Americans don’t have a deep-rooted sense of classical music in our culture because it hasn’t been around that long. If you go to Germany, go to Austria, everybody knows all of Beethoven’s writing, Mozart’s. I think there are very few pieces that have kind of penetrated the fabric of American society – Rhapsody in Blue, Barber’s Adagio. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, that’s what we heard. It’s in movies. You know, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It’s one of the very few pieces that has permeated deeply the fabric of American society. And for us that’s what makes it feel like home. And Barber himself kind of knew that he wrote something special, which I think is great. But for us, when we look at home, I think we look at home – I’m actually in a hotel right now, so this is not my home – we look at our home, we look at the city that we live in, we look at our community, we look at the people we spend time with, our family but we also look at the country as a whole. And I think Barber and the Adagio represent that as well as anything. It’s also just such an iconic piece of literature that it felt like it needed to be on this album – the whole string quartet needed to be on this album.
JH: You end the recording with Harold Arlen’s “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” the iconic song from the film The Wizard of Oz. That film is about leaving home, journeying, encountering some wondrous things, and realizing that, along the journey that seemed to take you so far away from home, our true home – as the people and places that make us who we are – was with us all along. Your thoughts on this piece?
JG: That arrangement is one that we found when we were students at the Juilliard School in 1998 and we have performed it on and off as an encore for almost 30 years now. Not only is the arrangement epically good – so good actually that when Kevin outs heard it he said, “You have to send me this because harmonically this is some of the most interesting writing I’ve heard in a long time – but also it just, again, I think that piece, I think for everybody, even just internationally – somehow Somewhere over the Rainbow resonates with people, it has that impact. I think we had a different appreciation for that piece after the pandemic. And also, just realizing how important our community was to us. And I think that we all have a greater love for our community now than we’ve ever had before, and that piece kind of summed it up. It felt like the bow on the present at the end, tie that up and it just felt like the right thing to do.
