Michelle Makarski, John Cage, John Harbison, Stephen Hartke, Yehudi Wyner

Modern music－especially American music, with its tendency to invite various traditions to share the same compositional space－can be a generous art, an art which welcomes inclusivity. Here are works by 
John Cage (b 1912), Yehudi Wyner (b 1929), John Harbison (b 1938), and Stephen Hartke (b 1952)－four American composers from different generations with different sensibilities, representing very different approaches to writing for the violin. Yet however much these works represent various facets of American violin music, each in its own way provides an example of the American habit of musical absorption and transformation.

John Cage and Yehudi Wyner, for instance, exemplify two extremes in American music. Cage's Six Melodies is non-imposing music, emotionally uninflected, unpredictable. It is without dramatic gestures, intentionally small of scale and gentle of sound. Wyner's Concert Duo, by contrast, is a substantial score, full of nuanced drama, calculated expressivity, and classical reference.

Harbison's Four Songs of Solitude and Hartke's Oh Them Rats Is Mean in My Kitchen also suggest a duality between an introspective music and a more open one. Both works, moreover, almost ask to be considered jointly, since they were written in the same year, 1985, by composers who happen to have been born in the same town, Orange, New Jersey. Both works explore only pure violin sound, Harbison's being for the instrument alone, Hartke's for a violin duo.

Four Songs was written as a present for the composer's wife, the violinist Rose Mary Harbison, and, like Cage's Six Melodies, it consists of brief individual pieces of song-like character and somewhat lonely temperament.

Where Harbison transforms folk roots into refined and solitary music, Hartke, in Oh Them Rats, has created a more raucous, blues-influenced work. The impetus for Oh Them Rats is the rhythm of the opening line from Blind Lemon Jefferson's Maltese Cat Blues, which struck Hartke when he heard it in a recording by Tennessee blues singer Sleepy John Estes.