Tui St. George Tucker’s Requiem To Premiere April 30 Blue Ridge Composer Honored with Concert at ASU By Jeff Eason HIgh Country composer Tui St. George Tucker (1924-2004) will be remembered with a special presentation of her piece, Requiem, to be performed at the Rosen School of Music at ASU on Saturday, April 30th. When Blowing Rock resident Tui St. George Tucker passed away last April, the High Country lost a musician and composer of rare ability…even if most of us failed to realize it at the time. The truth is that Tucker was better known in the modern music circles of New York than she was in her own home town. Tucker’s Requiem, a piece of music that she worked on for over a half century, will premiere on Saturday, April 30th at the Hayes School of Music at Appalachian State University in Boone. The performance begins at 8 p.m in the Rosen Concert Hall. Admission is free, but contributions to the Tui St. George Tucker Scholarship Fund at ASU are welcomed. This new scholarship fund is designed to aid composition students in the Hayes School of Music. Although Tucker gained fame in the 20th century primarily as a microtonal composer, Requiem is a tonal work in the mode of Faure’s Requiem, according to Douglas Miller, a member of Appalachian State’s Hayes School of Music. Miller first discovered Tucker’s composition during a visit to her cabin in Blowing Rock and persuaded her to let him prepare the piece for public performance. The requiem will be performed by an 80-voice chorus and full orchestra. “Tui saw the Blue Ridge Mountains for the first time in the summer of 1946 when she visited her dear friend, the poet Vera Lachmann,” wrote fellow musician and personal friend Jay Brown last April in a Mountain Times article marking her passing. “Vera had escaped Nazi Germany, and in 1944 she founded the Camp Catawba for Boys, located near the Blue Ridge Parkway on the Boone side of Blowing Rock. Beginning in 1947, Tui spent her summers as the camp’s music director. Imagine Beethoven as a summer camp instructor and you have some idea of what the young boys of Camp Catawba were up against. With fiery red hair and an explosive temper that coincided with her Dionysian lust for life, Tui seared an enduring impression on the campers. “The children were often elevated to musical greatness, performing such works as Bach’s Magnificat, and Handel’s Messiah, and even performing at New York’s Town Hall. “At least two-dozen of the boys from Camp Catawba have gone on to become professional musicians.” Some of the musicians from Camp Catawba will serve as guest musicians at the Requiem performance including camp alumni organist Paul Jordan from Connecticut and pianist Samual Bartos from New York. To bring her microtonal compositions to life, Tui created her own recorders—wooden flutes—that had holes in them that would allow for the playing of the “notes between the notes.” Most listeners of western music are attuned to a 12-tone music system, with twelve steps between the octaves. But that is one of many possibilities. Sliding instruments such as trombones, harmonicas and slide guitars give the listener a glimpse into that glissando world where the tones between the well-established notes are explored. “Stringed instruments are already microtonal unless you play them very carefully,” said Tucker in a 1999 interview with The Mountain Times. “I played French horn for a while. As you go up in the scale, all of the notes give off a series of overtones. “It’s fun to listen on the piano to all the overtones interacting. I got into that. I felt that we were ready for some new colors. On the piano are twelve tones. Those are half-steps. So if you use quartertones you have a 24-tone octave.” Centaur Records, a Louisiana-based classical music label, released an album of Tucker’s compositions in 1998 titled The Music of Tui St. George Tucker. The CD contains music recorded over three decades from 1967 to 1997 and even features a performance by the Springhouse Farm Choir of Valle Crucis. The April 30th concert will be accompanied by a special exhibit in the lobby of the Broyhill Music Center. For more information, call the Rosen School of Music at (828) 262-3020.