“Godfrey has assured skill and imagination [and] flawlessly attains what he sets out to achieve.”
About Toward Light
Written by Daniel Strong Godfrey
Performed by Cassatt String Quartet & Eliot Fisk
Toward Light (2023) for guitar and string quartet, featuring guitarist Eliot Fisk, finds Godfrey grappling with the deep uncertainty of our time, and reaching towards hopeful outcomes. The opening movement, “Dusk: Prayer,” begins with a dialogue between quartet and solo guitar. The strings provide lush, mournful chordal statements and the guitar answers with poetic soliloquies. As the movement intensifies and the soloist and quartet play together, the material in the guitar part becomes more impassioned and virtuosic, with elaborate embellishment. “Midnight: Dance” features a macabre minuet, replete with castanet inspired triplet figures, and eerie string tremolos, and elastic lines reminiscent of early 20th century Vienna. The guitar cadenza also evokes the flamenco tradition, with rasgueado strums, rich vibrato in embroidered bass figures, fleet tremolo, and brisk scalar passages. The final movement, “Dawn: Escape,” is vigorous and rhythmic, with Godfrey treating the quintet like a miniature orchestra, eliciting an exciting array of colors. The movement drives to a powerful climax of repeated chords, closing with a surprising and delightful passage of ricochet articulations passed through the quartet, ending with a glissando up to a lighthearted final chord.
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Daniel S. Godfrey (b. 1949) has earned awards and commissions from the J. S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, among many others. His music has been performed by soloists, chamber ensembles and orchestras throughout the U.S. and abroad. He is founder and co-director of the Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music (on the Maine coast) and is co-author of Music Since 1945, published by Schirmer Books. Godfrey’s works are recorded on the Albany, Bridge, CRI (New World), GM, Innova, Klavier, Koch, and Mark recording labels, in addition to this new project on New Focus Recordings. His music is available through publishers Carl Fischer, G. Schirmer, and Opus Imprints.
Godfrey received his M.M. in music composition from the Yale University School of Music and his Ph.D. in composition from the University of Iowa. He is Professor Emeritus at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media, and Design in Boston, Massachusetts, where he recently served for eight years as Chair of Music. Prior to his appointment at Northeastern, Godfrey was Professor of Music Composition, Theory and History at Syracuse University’s Setnor School of Music. He has also held guest faculty appointments in composition at the Eastman School of Music and the Indiana University School of Music. He currently resides in Skaneateles, New York.
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Hailed for its “mighty rapport and relentless commitment,” the Cassatt String Quartet has performed throughout the world — with appearances at major venues across the United States, Europe, and Asia — for four decades. Its discography of over forty albums has won critical acclaim and expanded the quartet repertoire for future generations of string quartets.
Founded in 1985, the Cassatt Quartet now celebrates its 40th anniversary with an ongoing dedication to connecting composers, audiences, and communities in dialogue, and to championing the music of living American composers, whose music has been central to the quartet’s focus and mission. Among recent highlights are commissions and premieres of new works by Joan Tower, Laura Kaminsky, and Victoria Bond; mentoring gifted student composers at educational institutions such as Bennington, Williams College, SUNY Purchase; the quartet’s own Seal Bay Festival; and this CD, featuring collaborative works written for the Cassatt String Quartet, by the ensemble’s longtime colleague and collaborator Daniel Strong Godfrey.
The Cassatt Quartet has been fortunate to enjoy a partnership for nearly the quartet’s entire lifespan with Daniel Strong Godfrey. This relationship, both artistic and personal, has led to a significant body of works commissioned and written for the quartet. We are thankful to our extraordinary collaborators Ursula Oppens, Eliot Fisk, and Nicole Johnson — and to the group’s former members, who contributed during the course of this recording project, which came to fruition over a ten-year period. And we are deeply grateful to Dan Godfrey for his friendship and artistry; we hope you love these extraordinary works as much as we do.
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Classical guitarist Eliot Fisk was the last direct disciple of legendary guitarist, Andres Segovia, and also the last direct student of the renowned harpsichordist and brilliant scholar, Ralph Kirkpatrick. As such he seeks to embody the great romantic tradition and the best of modernity. He has revolutionized the guitar repertoire through countless transcriptions spanning five centuries, including the entire solo repertoire for lute, violin, and cello by J.S. Bach and the twenty-four Capricci, Op. 1 of Niccolo Paganini, featured along with numerous other works on more than 40 CD’s.
He is the dedicatee of numerous new works inspired by his dramatic performing style. These include groundbreaking compositions for solo guitar, for guitar in a myriad of chamber music combinations, and for guitar and orchestra by composers such as Luciano Berio, Robert Beaser, George Rochberg, Leonardo Balada, Xavier Montsalvatge, Nicholas Maw, Kurt Schwertsik, Ralf Gawlick, and Daniel Strong Godfrey. Eliot Fisk has performed on five continents to immense public and critical acclaim. Renowned the world over as a mentor to younger colleagues, he has revolutionized the pedagogy of the classical guitar, having taught in five languages at the Hochschule für Musik Köln, the Universität Mozarteum (Salzburg), the New England Conservatory of Music (Boston), the Accademia Chigiana (Siena, Italy) and at Yale University, where following his graduation from Yale College in 1976 (summa cum laude) he was asked to found the guitar department at the Yale School of Music in 1977 at the age of 22.
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Produced by Judith Sherman
Engineering and editing assistant: Jeanne Velonis
Special thanks to Joe Chilorio
Photos: Paula Artal-Isbrand (Drakes Island Beach, Wells, Maine)Design: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com