Music Around the Corner @ Youthful Vengeance and Glad Day Lit
December 27 and 28, 2025
Program Notes
For artist bios, please visit musicaroundthecorner.com/artists
Francis Malka: Quatuor No. 1
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Allegro
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Moderato
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Allegro
Francis Malka lives in Montréal, Quebec, and is an award-winning author who studied viola at the Montréal Music Conservatory, and mechanical engineering and robotics at the École Polytechnique de Montréal. He is the president of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival, and leads a multifaceted professional life as a composer, writer, painter, art collector, and software engineer.
Written in three movements that act as a sort of palindrome, Malka’s ‘Quatuor No. 1’ is an exploration of the octatonic scale. An octatonic scale is a series of 8 notes that alternate between whole steps and half steps. This generally evokes a sense of being untethered, as there is no home key to return to. This scale became particularly popular as a compositional tool in the late 1800s, as it was a way for composers to evoke faraway, unknown places, away from traditional Western harmonies. However, Malka’s quartet, instead of feeling lost and menacing, is a humorous and lively romp. The quartet swirls and dances through unique harmonies, tossing the melody from instrument to instrument like a game, always evading a landing.
‘Ragamala’ (2013), written by Indian-American composer Reena Esmail, is a string quartet that brings together visual and musical art, Indian and Western classical musical traditions, and the sense of intangible connection between audience and performer that a room takes on during a performance.
‘During the year I spent in India, I began to notice a beautiful thing that would happen at concerts. When the artist would announce the raag to be sung or played that evening, immediately, and almost subconsciously, [...] the audience would begin humming the characteristic phrases of that raag quietly to themselves, intoning with the drone that was already sounding on stage. It had a magical feeling – as if that raag was present in the air, and tiny wisps of it were already starting to precipitate into the audible world[...] Each movement of this quartet opens in exactly the same way, and it is inspired by those quiet intonations.’- Reena Esmail, 2013
Reena Esmail: Ragamala (2013)
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Fantasie (Bihag)
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Scherzo (Malkauns)
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Recitative (Basant)
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Rondo (Jōg)
‘A ragamala, translated from Sanskrit as "garland of ragas," is a series of paintings depicting a range of musical melodies known as ragas.’ (MET Museum, 2014)
Maurice Ravel: String Quartet in F major (1903)
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Allegro moderato- très doux
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Assez vif- très rhythmé
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Très lent
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Vif et agité
Maurice Ravel only wrote one string quartet, and we’re so lucky that he absolutely nailed it on the first try. The work was written during the Parisian craze for the faraway and exotic- the 1900 World Fair still had a grasp on the public imagination, making people dream of foreign places, rich food and colours, new cultures, and freedom from the strict norms of Western society. It was also the tail-end of the Impressionism movement in French visual art, where painters like Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro shunned realism in favour of using dabs of paint to capture light, reflections, and shapes, more concerned with evoking rather than depicting. The label of ‘Impressionist’ was also applied to the work of Claude Debussy, and later, Ravel, though they both rejected the label as simplistic. Musical Impressionists discarded classical harmonies in favour of modes from traditional church music, mixed with more foreign sounds associated with Eastern cultures like octatonic, pentatonic, and whole tone scales, creating a hazy yet deep palette of musical colours, and a unique sense of otherworldliness.
Dubbed as unconventional and divisive at its Paris premiere in 1904, Ravel’s String Quartet in F major has since gained enormous popularity and is now one of the most popular string quartets in the classical repertoire. He dedicated this magical piece to his teacher, Gabriel Fauré, who encouraged him and defended him against his many critics at the Paris Conservatory, and always recognized that his approach to composition was at the cutting edge.
Ravel’s String Quartet draws heavy inspiration from the swirling, virtuosic, and exotic soundworld of Debussy’s String Quartet from 1893, although it has a delicacy and mastery of structure that is so uniquely Ravel. He made no secret of his admiration for Debussy, and at the premiere of the quartet, Debussy expressed the same respect, famously saying “In the name of the gods of music, and in mine, do not change a single note of what you have written.”