7/7 – SWISS ORIGINALS : Music of Samuel Burckhardt & Stephan Grieder

Today you’re in for a unique and stimulating program. Our performers have sent us the following notes about themselves and their music-making.

Organist Stephan Grieder (1958) and saxophonist Sam Burckhardt (1957) first played together at a concert in Basel Cathedral, Switzerland in 2002. Since then, they have performed together on an annual basis. Each player brings to the concerts his own musical background and ideas. Stephan Grieder is a classically-trained pianist and organist who also plays contemporary music, from rock to improvised music. Sam Burckhardt, who grew up in Basel, came to Chicago to become a Blues and Jazz musician. Their concerts often include classical pieces – such as an Introduction by Handel – as well as pieces composed by each of them, and improvised pieces which often carry a particular idea. Each musician plays solo pieces as well.

Since the spaces in which they play are most often churches, there is a particularly interesting acoustic involved, and Mr. Burckhardt often plays while moving through the church. (A moving sound source enables the listener to experience the room in a new and different way.)

The first piece on the program – a work of both performers – is titled Spheres. It will be an improvisation which will give the musicians a chance to highlight the space of St. James Cathedral. They say they will let the place, time, and moment guide them.

Blues (the third movement of Five by Three) was composed by Mr. Burckhardt, who moved to Chicago in 1982 to join the band of the legendary Blues pianist Sunnyland Slim. Burckhardt considers his thirteen years in the group as his training ground. He developed a deep love of this uniquely American musical form, and this piece takes important elements of the Blues – pulse, groove, and dynamics – while not always adhering to a specific and strict structure or key.

Pezzo Facile No. 5, written in 1950 by Daniele Zanettovich, is described as a little gem by the Italian composer, creating ever-changing and unexpected harmonies through simple melodic ideas.

The Burning Bush, an organ solo composed by Mr. Grieder, is one of his best-known compositions. It was premièred in Basel in 1994, and it paints a vivid musical account of the biblical story of the Burning Bush.

Meditation, a saxophone solo written and played by Mr. Burckhardt, is a contemplative piece performed while walking through the church. Some of the arpeggios, lines, and series of overtones played into different parts of the church give the listener a sense of warm and cold, of bright and dull, of smooth and rough.

New Jericho, a work written by both performers, is described as a modal improvisation based on the past and present struggles in the Holy Land.