Great Performances: Now Hear This

At Festival Mozaic, Scott Yoo and his wife, the flutist Alice Dade, get to know America’s greatest Romantic composer, Amy Beach, and European women composers of her time. Across the country, they explore Beach’s New England roots and career, in a time when polite society looked down on women composers. Despite this resistance, Beach was one of the first to try to invent a truly American music.

Scott Yoo follows the trail of Florence Price, who fled discrimination in the South for a new life in Chicago. Here, with pianist Michelle Cann, he explores Price’s music and African American influences, and learns from leading spiritual, gospel, blues and jazz musicians how plantation spirituals--a mixture of West African music and European hymns--shaped nearly all of American popular music.

Each year, Scott Yoo and his musician friends spend a month teaching students--just as Aaron Copland did over his career--carrying on the long musical tradition of masters teaching students, who become masters themselves. Together they’ll play the works of Copland, to discover how he drew from his Jewish roots, Modernism, and most importantly American folk music to invent the American sound.

For the first time in Now Hear This, Scott Yoo meets and plays with living composers. In Chicago, legendary guitarist Sergio Assad shows him how the music of Brazil has helped his compositions become a staple of the classical canon. In San Francisco, Indian American Reena Esmail teaches him about the rhythms and scales of traditional Indian music, and how they inspire her signature sound.

Scott Yoo and his wife Alice Dade, a leading flutist, travel to Buenos Aires to discover the music of Astor Piazzolla, who fell in love with tango. Then fell out of love. Then tango fell out of love with him. Scott and Alice play with Argentina’s greatest musicians and dancers, to find out if Piazzolla and tango could ever reconcile.

Many composers have struggled with mental health problems, few more famously than Robert Schumann. Scott goes to Scotland, Germany and France, with cellist Bion Tsang, psychiatrist and pianist Dr. Richard Kogan and other fascinating musicians and scholars, to understand the connection between mental health and creativity in the work of Schumann and other great artists.