Music Across Borders

• Caroline Shaw — Entr’acte

• Samuel Coleridge-Taylor — Fantasie-Stücke

• Annie Gosfield — The Blue Horse Walks on the Horizon

• Philip Glass — Quartet Satz

• Aleksandra Vrebalov — Pannonia Boundless

What does it mean to belong to a place—or to carry a place within you?

Boundless explores music that crosses borders of geography, culture, history, and imagination. Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte opens the program by playfully reimagining the traditions of the string quartet, leading us somewhere both familiar and unexpected. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Fantasie-Stücke follows with lyrical warmth and expressive depth, reflecting the rich musical voice of a composer whose work bridges cultural traditions.

The journey then takes a more contemporary turn with Annie Gosfield’s The Blue Horse Walks on the Horizon, a work that evokes shifting landscapes and the possibilities of music beyond conventional boundaries. Philip Glass’s Quartet Satz crosses another kind of border, bringing the string quartet into the meditative world of repetition and pulse. Glass challenges traditional ideas of classical development, finding movement and transformation within patterns that unfold gradually over time.

The program culminates in Aleksandra Vrebalov’s Pannonia Boundless, inspired by the shared folk traditions of Central and Eastern Europe. Here, political boundaries give way to the deeper cultural connections carried through music, memory, and tradition.

Together, these works invite us to consider the borders we inherit, the cultures we carry, and the ways music can move freely across them. Boundless celebrates the extraordinary ability of music to connect people across geography, history, musical traditions, and generations.