Raine Hamilton

Raine Hamilton creates resonant, acoustic chamber folk with an other-worldly edge, and a lyric presence that cuts deep. Prism-clear vocals and strings anchored in the ancient mountains, reaching up beyond the earthly.

Raine is part prairie songstress, part storyweaver. Each song has a story, delivered between songs with humour and grace. Raine invites her love of the violin into the singer-songwriter genre, writing for violin and voice, as well as for guitar and voice. When joined by the MCO, expect Raine’s songs to be couched in string arrangements that push and pull, that move as they console.

A classical violinist and musicologist by training, Raine and her string trio offer string-quartet-like arrangements of Raine’s original songs. They call this chamber-folk, a hybrid of the classical tradition of string quartet chamber music and the singer songwriter folk that comes so naturally to Raine.

Raine’s latest work, the full-length album Brave Land (2021-22), is a concept album about mountains, and the courage, wisdom, and other worldly connection they represent. Here, as in Raine’s 2018 album Night Sky, her songs are set to intricate and seasoned arrangements for guitar, violin, cello, and double bass. Once again she has worked with string trio collaborators Quintin Bart on double bass, Natanielle Felicitas on cello, and Lloyd Peterson as producer/engineer.

The new album is being released slowly over the course of a year, with the first single having been released in January 2021. As listeners, we can look forward to roughly one song per month, as Raine shares her 11-song album, along with the stories of the songs and other super secret content.

Dominae Sanctae
Raine Hamilton

The composer has provided the following note:

Dominae Sanctae means ‘Holy Women’ in Latin. I composed it using imitative counterpoint and Gregorian-style chant. I feel like my past as a medieval musicologist really shows up in this song. With this song, I am reaching back through my ancestry of holy women, seeking to connect with them, and with God, in a way that would be familiar to them: in the style of Catholic sacred music and chant. The Latin text is original, penned by myself and a friend from my MA studies, Hannah Kilpatrick. Writing these prayers to my lineage of women, in the language they used to pray, was profound for me. I want to describe the feeling of spiritual resonance it afforded me, but I think the song does a better job of that than words alone.

Dominae Sanctae is a prayer of humble thanks to my ancestry of women who knew and honoured God and creation with their every action. This song seeks to honour and recognize them, and also to ask for their teachings that I may follow in their path, that I might know God as they did. Performing this song is an otherworldly experience in so many ways.

Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Arvo Pärt

Up to the mid-1970s, Pärt composed in a chilly, cerebral modern style. Dissatisfied with that approach, and having been deeply impressed by his first exposure to the church music of the Middle Ages, he virtually withdrew from composing. During an eight-year hiatus, he made an intense study of medieval music, emerging with a radically different creative style, one that emphasizes beauty and eloquent simplicity.

Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977) is one of his most frequently performed creations. He wrote, “In the past years, we have had many losses in the world of music to mourn. Why did the date of Benjamin Britten’s death—December 4, 1976—touch such a chord in me? During this time I was obviously at the point where I could recognize the magnitude of such a loss. I had just discovered Britten for myself. Just before his death I began to appreciate the unusual purity of his music. And besides, for a long time I had wanted to meet Britten personally—and now it would not come to that.”

In its oldest, simplest form, dating from medieval times, the word cantus refers simply to a melody. Later it came to mean a lament, or a mystical experience. Pärt’s Cantus opens with the sound of a bell, bringing inevitable associations with churches and funerals. It continues tolling throughout the piece, while the string orchestra plays a dirge, touched with medieval spirit but timeless in its eloquent grief.

Lay Me Down
Raine Hamilton

The composer has provided the following note:

Written on the edge-of-the-world islands of Haida Gwaii, this tune speaks to the space between worlds, and to our impermanence in this one. Mitch Podolak once told me “why don’t you write a song for fiddle and voice?” I knew he must be on to something, so I got to work, feeling out this new-to-me approach. When this song started knocking, I could tell it would be a great fit for the fiddle and voice. The result is a rhythmic, droning piece, anchored in the tonic, while exploring the tension of leaving home, into the in between spaces of existence.

Fourth Movement from ‘Sonata for Strings’
Sir William Walton

With time and experience, the jazz-inflected cheekiness and crackling energy that first brought celebrity to Walton coalesced with a deep vein of warmth. This mature style found an enduring welcome in the concert halls of the world.

In 1971, conductor Sir Neville Marriner approached Walton to commission a new work for string orchestra as a vehicle for his crack ensemble, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. The composer declined. Marriner countered with the possibility of a transcription for string orchestra of Walton’s String Quartet in A Minor (1947). The composer accepted the proposal eagerly.

Work proceeded during the autumn of the year at Walton’s home in Italy. His friend and fellow composer, Sir Malcolm Arnold, completed the piece by transcribing the finale under Walton’s supervision. Marriner and the Academy gave the premiere, under the new title Sonata for Strings, in Perth, Australia, in March 1972. The finale is a dazzling, rhythmically buoyant rondo.

The MCO recorded this piece on Sea Sketches, a 2003 CBC Records release, with Roy Goodman conducting.

Mountain Henge
Raine Hamilton

The composer has provided the following note:

I wrote Mountain Henge at the Banff Centre, where I was surrounded by a protective ring of mountains at all times. There was magnitude to being on the earth and at the same time, contained by the earth like that. It felt like living within a henge, or ring, of mountains.

Mountain Henge is a song of thanks to the earth and to our Maker. I wrote it originally for viola and voice, and in the studio recorded version we expanded the arrangement to include the Raine Hamilton String Trio instrumentation of cello and bass. Today, we will hear it arranged for the MCO and its many, many strings.

Oblivion
Astor Piazzolla

Piazzolla became a Latin American musical legend by taking the traditional tango—the sultry dance that sprang up in the back alleys and brothels of Buenos Aires in the final quarter of the 19th century—and mixing it with classical music and jazz to create the more sophisticated and experimental “nuevo tango” (new tango).

His life-long restlessness began when his family emigrated to New York when he was three. After a period spent playing the bandoneón (a small, square accordion) in American tango bands, he returned to Argentina in 1937. He studied with renowned composer Alberto Ginastera for six years.

In 1954, an orchestral work he composed for the Buenos Aires Philharmonic won him a scholarship for a year’s study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, friend of Stravinsky and tutor to an entire generation of composers, including numerous Americans. “Up to then, I had composed symphonies, chamber music, string quartets,” Piazzolla recalled. “But when Nadia Boulanger analyzed my music, she said she could nowhere find any Piazzolla. She could find Ravel and Stravinsky, also Béla Bartók and Hindemith—but never Piazzolla … Nadia made me play a tango to her and she said, ‘You idiot! That is the real Piazzolla!’ So I threw away all the other music and, in 1954, started working on my New Tango.”

His compositions in this style, designed more for serious listening than for dancing, met with heated resistance from traditionalists after he resettled in Argentina. “Musicians hated me,” he recalled. “I was taking the old tango away from them. They even put a gun to my head once.” Nuevo tango first found acceptance in France and the United States. Fed up with his countrymen’s scorn, Piazzolla relocated to Paris for good in 1974.

During the final two decades of his life, he earned worldwide fame, touring with his band and composing busily for stage, screen and concert rooms. His fellow Argentines finally came to accept his new style, to the point where they hailed him as the saviour of tango, whose popularity had declined during the ‘50s and ‘60s.

In the late 1980s, classical performers such as violinist Gidon Kremer and the Kronos Quartet began taking his music into their repertoire. Among his compositions of this period are a Bandoneón Concerto that shows the influence of Bach, a Cello Sonata written for Mstislav Rostropovich, and Five Tango Sensations, a moody piece for bandoneón and strings commissioned by Kronos. Shortly before his death, he was commissioned by the Paris Opéra to compose a work on the life of Carlos Gardel, the great 1930s tango singer with whom he had worked in Gardel’s prime. Piazzolla wrote some 750 pieces in all.

It Matters
Raine Hamilton

The composer has provided the following note:

Shared with the blessing of local Indigenous Elder Gramma Shingoose, this song is based on an altercation she experienced with the police. It Matters speaks to the systemic racism prevalent in policing and government, and to the history of colonial trauma that continues to matter in the present.

Fourth Movement from String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, ‘American’
Antonín Dvořák

Dvořák’s fame had grown so great by the early 1890s that he was invited to become the first Director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. His arrival in the autumn of 1892 marked the beginning of a three‑year period spent almost entirely in America. He found much here that fascinated him. He developed a particular interest in the music of African Americans and Native Americans. “I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what we call Negro melodies,” he told the New York Herald. “This can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, merry, gracious, or what you will. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot find a thematic source here.”

Statements such as these led to confusion as to whether he used authentic African American and Native American melodies in the works he composed in America, the first of which was the Symphony in E Minor (which he sub-titled Impressions and Greetings from the New World). Four days before the premiere, which took place in New York on 16 December 1893, he made his methods and goals perfectly clear: “It is this American folk spirit that I have tried to reproduce in my new symphony. I have not actually used any of the melodies. I have simply written themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, and orchestral colour.”

Dvořák composed a substantial amount of chamber music, favouring the string quartet above all. From 1862 to 1895, he created 14 of them, virtually the same total as Beethoven. No. 12 is by far the most popular. This flows in large degree from its being equal in ‘folksiness’ to the Ninth Symphony, which he had completed one month before.

At the suggestion of his personal assistant, Josef Kovařík, Dvořák spent the summer of 1893 in the farming hamlet of Spillville, Iowa, where Kovařík had been born, rather than returning to Europe. Spillville’s 300 residents were Czech immigrants, and the intensely homesick composer felt right at home in their midst. He conducted a church choir and played its organ for services, took long early-morning walks during which he noted down the songs of birds, fished the Turkey River and consumed vast quantities of his favourite Pilsner beer.

His contentment proved a powerful stimulus to creativity. In just 15 days, 8 June to 23 June, he composed String Quartet No. 12 (known thereafter as the ‘American’ Quartet). At the end of the sketch he wrote, “Thanks be to God, I am satisfied, it went quickly.” Such was the concentration and surety of its creation that the manuscript score contains hardly any corrections. Inspiration continued unabated. Six days later, he finished the sketches of another equally splendid chamber work, the String Quintet, Op. 97.

He was so eager to hear the new quartet that he pressed three members of the Kovařík family into joining him to give it an informal run-through. He played the viola part, and Josef the cello. The Kneisel Quartet performed the formal, public debut in Boston on 1 January 1894.

The boisterous finale opens with a vivacious chugging rhythm that calls to mind a locomotive, a machine that fascinated the composer. Czech musicologist Jan Smaczny has drawn a parallel between the sweet-natured second theme and a service in the Spillville church.