Serendipity at the 2024 Biennial
By Karen McAferty Morris, National Letters and Vinnie Ream Chair
When we picked up our conference bags, tucked inside we found the novel “Tasa’s Song” by Linda Kass, the Letters Luncheon speaker, which she had generously provided to all of us. “Tasa’s Song,” inspired by true events of her family’s history, is about a Jewish girl, a gifted violinist, whose story begins in pre-World War II Poland. Back at home, I eagerly started reading it, described on the back cover as “celebrat[ing] the bonds of love, the power of memory, the solace of music, and the enduring strength of the human spirit.”
A few chapters in, there’s a passage where 14-year-old Tasa plays the solo violin in her school orchestra’s spring concert of a very difficult composition, Spanish composer and virtuoso violinist Pablo de Sarasate’s “Zigeunerweisen Opus 20,” better known as “Gypsy Airs.” The novel describes Tasa’s able, inspired performance: “The emotional range of the music oscillated like a seesaw from longing to laughter, yearning to teasing, singing to crying.”
At the end, during the allegro multo vivace, as Tasa plays, she envisions exuberant gypsy dancing. The description made me immediately stop and “youtube it.” (I found a live performance of Itzhak Perlman’s performing “Zigeunerweisen,” also truly magnificent. I recommend it, especially after you’ve read the passage in “Tasa’s Song.”)
At the conference itself, we had been treated to a musical concert of the 2024 Music Competition winners, hosted in the main gallery of the lovely Tyson Cultural Arts Center, the walls bedecked with Pen Women Art. I enjoyed all the pieces, but one performance had unwittingly prepared me for reading “Tasa’s Song”: the first-place winner in the Biennial Music Competition, Michelle Green Willner’s “Reverberations” (in Memoriam, Elie Wiesel) “for amplified violin with delay pedal, doubling on viola.”
One of the two performers of this haunting composition was violinist Arkadiy Gips, who, as someone commented afterward, “lived the piece,” with his passionate, astonishing performance rendered even more poignant by his array of deeply emotional facial expressions. Gips, who immigrated from Kyiv in 1994, began playing the violin at age 3; according to the program, his “performances feature Ukrainian, Jewish, Gypsy, Hungarian, and Polish music.” (Gips is worth looking up online, too.)
The similarities among the impressive novel and remarkable performance and extraordinary composition have united to make these experiences deeper and more meaningful to me. I would call it serendipity. Thank you, Linda Kass, performers Arkadiy Gips and Vanessa Ripley, and Michelle Green Willner — and the Central Columbus Branch team that made this entire Biennial utterly unforgettable.