Featuring Citizen 13660, a powerful work for string quartet and clarinet addressing the experience of Japanese internment, as well as compositions by Glasunov and Weber, performing in a historic 1950s TV studio amidst a multimedia art exhibition.
Program
Chad Cannon, Citizen 13660 — Vignettes for clarinet and string quartet (2014)
A powerful work addressing the experience of Japanese internment. The book Citizen 13660
is a firsthand, illustrated account of the Japanese internment experience by Ms. Miné Okubo,
a US-born American of Japanese ancestry who was educated at UC Berkeley. In 1942, while creating
art for the government’s Works Progress Administration, she was sent to Tanforan Assembly Center
by Executive Order 9066. Later she was moved with thousands of other “evacuees” to Topaz, Utah,
where she spent the remainder of her internment period. As photography was forbidden inside the
camps, her illustrations provide valuable insight into camp life. Composer Chad Cannon chose
8 moments from Okubo’s book to create the piece, with descriptions which will be read from the stage.
Alexander Glasunov, Oriental Reverie for clarinet and string quartet (1886)
A beautiful work offering a view of the East as experienced by European Russians in the late 1800s.
The term "oriental" is from colonial language used to exoticize Eastern cultures. In 2016 it
was deemed outdated and removed from US federal documents.
Carl Maria von Weber, Introduction, Theme & Variations for clarinet and string quartet (1815)
