Over the past decade, our two ensembles have built a musical friendship that has opened new perspectives. Throughout our collaboration, we have been driven by curiosity - about the distinct qualities of our ensembles, about the musical expression that arises between us, and about what happens when 1000 years of music history, 50 young voices, and a string quartet merge into one.

On paper, a girls’ choir and a string quartet may seem refined, even traditional. But we have never been interested in refinement for its own sake. We have pursued a tangible and raw power, insisting on presenting the fragile and uncompromising side by side - as well as the intimate and the fierce.

This concert has evolved from this shared curiosity, harnessing the power of a string quartet and a girls’ choir - and the collective force that emerges when multiple voices meet - creating movement and transformation.

In the first half, you will encounter strong female voices through Nordic folk melodies and new music by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Finnish Lotta Wennäkoski, American Caroline Shaw, and Danish electronical composer Astrid Sonne. Different musical languages, different sonic landscapes - yet united by the same impulse: to open a space and allow something new to unfold. You will also meet an early Danish power lady, Queen Dagmar from the 12th century, and hear the cracking voice of Marie Tang Kristensen, a Danish housewife whose songs were captured on wax cylinders in 1907.

In the second half, we present in wildness by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang. The piece is written especially for our two ensembles, and it is an extraordinary honor to present new music by one of the most significant composers of our time. in wildness draws inspiration from the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Hans Christian Andersen - two poets who, each in their own way and language, describe a movement away from established society and into nature, into the unknown. Not as an escape, but as a possibility. As a way of imagining a different world, and a different future.

in wildness is a co-commission between the Danish National Girls’ Choir, UCSB Arts & Lectures, Carnegie Hall, La Jolla Music Society, Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Stanford Live and Washington Performing Arts.

To present this today feels like an invitation: to listen. To stay curious. To believe that new beginnings can emerge when we dare to step into the wild - together.

The journey begins tonight - with you.
Thank you for stepping into the wild with us.

CAROLINE SHAW (b. 1982)
Allemande from Partita for 8 Voices (2009-2011) (arr.)

In Partita for 8 Voices, the familiar historic framework of the traditional baroque suite is soon stretched and broken, through “speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects” (Pulitzer jury citation). Its composer Caroline Shaw (b. Greenville, NC, August 1, 1982), singer with the innovative vocal group Roomful of Teeth, with whom she created the four-movement Pulitzer prize – winning Partita says: “Allemande opens with the organized chaos of square dance calls overlapping with technical wall drawing directions of the artist Sol LeWitt, suddenly congealing into a bright, angular tune that never keeps its feet on the ground for very long. There are allusions to the movement’s intended simulation of motion and of space in the short phrases of text throughout, which are sometimes sung and sometimes embedded as spoken texture.” Allemande is newly arranged for the Danish National Girls' Choir.

Note from Caroline Shaw:
Partita is a simple piece. Born of a love of surface and structure, of the human voice, of dancing and tired ligaments, of music, and of our basic desire to draw a line from one point to another. Most of Partita is wordless.

LOTTA WENNÄKOSKI (b. 1970)
“Vorüber, ach, vorüber!” (Pass by, oh Pass by!) from Pige (Girl) (2021-2022) 

Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski (b. Helsinki, Finland, 1970) wrote the string quartet Pige (Girl) in 2021–2022 as a contemporary companion to Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet. Its opening movement, “Vorüber, ach, vorüber!”, takes its title from the girl’s terrified plea – “Get away! Oh, get away!” – in Schubert’s song Der Tod und das Mädchen. “This ‘maiden’s song’ has not found its way to Schubert’s string quartet, so I wanted to use its material in mine,” Wennäkoski says. Rather than confronting Death head-on, Wennäkoski turns our attention to the girl herself: anxious, resistant, and acutely alive.

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Andante con moto from String Quartet No.14 in D minor, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden”

The powerful image of Death as a friend whose hand gently and unrelentingly approaches, caresses, and claims a maiden goes back to at least medieval times. Franz Schubert (b. Vienna, Austria, January 31, 1797; d. Vienna, November 19, 1828) found the image in the poem Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the maiden) by Matthias Claudius. In 1817, he set this to music as a song (D. 531). Its haunting piano accompaniment is built on an insistent long–short–short rhythm, an ominous tread that becomes a rhythmic death motif, heard only beneath the voice of Death itself. Seven years later, the rhythmic motif became the emotional heartbeat of the Andante con moto variation movement of his D minor String Quartet, D. 810 (1824).

ANNA THORVALDSDOTTIR (ÞORVALDSDÓTTIR) (b. 1977)
“Þann heilaga kross” (On the Holy Cross)(2009)

On the holy cross by leading Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir (Þorvaldsdóttir)(b. Borgarnes, Iceland, July 11, 1977) is an Icelandic psalm setting that brings together both the timeless and today. Its text, contemplating the Crucifixion with plainspoken intensity, is attributed to 16th century hymn writer Martin Hegelund, with tune and words first published in 1589. Þorvaldsdóttir frames the melody with a haze of dreamlike sonorities that hover in and out of consonance. The choir moves in largely homophonic blocks through three verses, with open fifths and bald harmony producing a ritualistic atmosphere.

RUNE TONSGAARD SØRENSEN (b. 1983)
Once a Shoemaker (trad.) (arr.)

Danish violinist and composer Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen (b. Roskilde, Denmark, March 22, 1983) is best known as a founding member of the Danish String Quartet, an ensemble whose work increasingly blurs the line between classical quartet tradition and Nordic folk music. En Skomager Har Jeg Været (Once a Shoemaker) is a traditional Danish ballad about a shoemaker who travels to confess his sins, as heard on a 1907 acoustic field recording. Sørensen, the quartet and choir then reflect upon its melody, adding gentle, delicately drawn string, hummed and choral textures.

ASTRID SONNE (b. 1994)
"How Far" (2022)

Danish composer and violist Astrid Sonne (b. Bornholm, Denmark, August 23, 1994) moves fluently between contemporary composition, experimental pop, and vocal music. How Far (2022) explores the idea of the “inner voice” – how sound can feel larger, stranger, and more resonant inside the body than it does when projected outward. “It’s an inner conversation with oneself; exploring its pace and time and the confusion and acceptance that comes with that,” she says. “My initial idea was to record it with other singers but in the process, I figured that I had to use my own voice in order for me to create a personal and intimate space.”

CAROLINE SHAW (b. 1982)
"And So" (2019) from Is A Rose (2016-19)

And So by Caroline Shaw is the second of a trilogy of songs initially written for Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra’s New Music for Old Instruments Initiative. Robert Burns’s love lyric Red, Red Rose was the earliest of the three, in 2016. Shaw is consciously ambiguous about the text she herself wrote for And So, making for a piece that keeps stopping to examine its own language – to ask what words are worth when time is running out. “It may be a song about love, or it may be about loss, or it may simply be about the act of writing and listening to music,” she said while still creating the piece. Shaw has since recorded it herself as a standalone song, with string quartet playing its “spare and quiet” writing.

Note from Caroline Shaw:


The lyrics for “And So” are in conversation with Robert Burns’ “Red, Red Rose,” with the history of roses in poetry, and, in a way, with Gertrude Stein, Billy Joel, Shakespeare, and existentialism. I don’t want to explain the meaning of the song too much, since I’m still finding different corners in it and I like the ambiguity of certain lines and harmonies. It may be a song about love, or it may be about loss, or it may simply be about the act of writing and listening to music. The orchestral writing for “And So” is spare and quiet, almost like the sound of someone writing a simple song at the piano.

NIELSEN (arr. Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen)
“Tit er jeg glad og et brudestykke” (Oft I am glad and a traditional wedding tune) 

Speaking of his new song collection En snes danske viser, Carl Nielsen (b. Sortelung, Funen, Denmark, June 9, 1865; d. Copenhagen, October 3, 1931) wrote in 1917: “In these tunes, I have taken pains to achieve the utmost clarity . . . to invest them with the characteristics that they appear to be already familiar. In this rests the secret of the popular song tradition.” Written in wartime Europe, the collection reflects Nielsen’s effort to revitalize Danish folksong through directness and restraint. Tidt er jeg glad, og vil dog gerne græde (I am often happy and yet want to cry) dates from 1916 and was published in Vol. 2, which quickly gained wide popularity. In a recent arrangement by Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, the song is reimagined for Danish String Quartet and Danish National Girls’ Choir, where Nielsen’s restrained lyricism is both expanded and honored.

— Program notes copyright © 2026 Keith Horner.
Comments welcomed: khnotes@sympatico.ca

‘In Wildness is the preservation of the World’

This quotation is from the 1851 essay Walking by the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau. I read this essay in high school and it has stayed with me ever since. It is a rambling, mostly sunny but sometimes prickly text about the lessons we can learn, about society and ourselves, by walking through the natural world. In some places, the essay is more about what we should be walking away from than what we should be walking towards.

A large part of this essay is about walking West, towards the setting sun, which in 1851 was still a less-tamed section of the United States. When Thoreau walks westward he is turning his back on ‘civilized’ Massachusetts, with its cities and laws and politics and decorum, and walking towards the wilderness. Although his descriptions of walking are light and joyful they are given in the same spirit of rejection of the rules of society as found in his book Walden, or in his essay Civil Disobedience.

Thoreau’s text has been heavily amended and reworked by me, and I apologize for the variances between my text and the original. I took out the historical examples, the digressions, and the archaic references to various nations and peoples that we now might find embarrassing or dated or offensive. Most of all, I took out the direct references to American exceptionalism. The society Thoreau is walking away from is, of course, American society, and the world he is walking towards is his imagined, potentially golden American future. One has to admire his optimism. As an ardent abolitionist, Thoreau was well aware that the wilderness he was so passionate about might soon be fought over, as politicians argued about how to divide the wilderness into free states and slave states. The ‘wildness’ that Thoreau writes about in ‘Walking’ is as much a political wildness as it is a personal or metaphoric one.

Thoreau’s essay is often interrupted by lyrics to old songs and poems. I took this as an invitation to interrupt my text with two poems by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, written roughly at the same time as Thoreau’s essay. Both of these poems are about walking in the woods, but I rewrote both significantly, in order to keep the woods front and center. I apologize for the variances between my text and the originals here too.

The biggest change I made to these texts is in who the narrators are, and how they speak to us. The original texts are messages to us from two notoriously cranky men from the 19th century. I hoped that converting these texts into a hopeful, direct address, from a group of modern, committed young women, might make these messages easier for us to hear, to pay attention to, and to believe.