Can't Take My Soul: Njioma Grevious & Friends (Boulder)

Date and Time

Saturday, Nov 21, 2026 7pm - 9pm

Location

Details

About the event
As Njioma dreamed of the program she wished to bring to the Cultural Caravan, she returned to a provocative musical seed: At the Purchaser’s Option, by Rhiannon Giddens. The piece is an instrumental variation based on a 19th-century advertisement for an enslaved black 22 year-old mother whose nine month-old baby was also for sale, but “at the purchaser’s option.” In other words, the mother-and-child relationship was incidental to the transaction.

In Rhiannon Giddens’ lyrics for the original composition, the mother laments the brutal exploitation of her labor and the pain of being torn from her child. In the recurring chorus, she refuses to let go of the only thing she still feels she can control: “You can take my blood but not my soul.”

Can’t Take My Soul is a tribute to people who used their music to hold fast to the identity and agency that others wished to take from them.

The program continues with the String Quartet in Three Movements by Germaine Tailleferre, a prodigiously talented woman whose musical career was itself proof of her will against all odds and many unsupportive men. She entered the Paris Conservatoire over the objections of her father who refused to pay for her education, and went on to win school prizes in counterpoint, harmony, and accompaniment, as well as the adoration of Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel. She survived bad marriages to husbands hostile to her composing: her first, the caricaturist Ralph Barton, was mentally unstable, and her second destroyed her work. She faced a lifetime of financial instability and being treated as a footnote to her male colleagues. This String Quartet, written during World War I, is concise but brilliant evidence of her resilient talent.

Next, we present the E-flat Piano Quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose talent was never in question but whose responsibility and fealty to his patrons was often challenged. The publisher Hoffmeister commissioned Mozart to write a set of piano quartets in 1785. The first, the G minor K. 478, was apparently too difficult and too serious for the amateur market Hoffmeister was targeting, and it sold so poorly that Hoffmeister not only released Mozart from the contract but actually told him he could keep the advance if he promised to stop writing. Mozart wrote the E-flat quartet anyway, not adjusting the sophistication or difficulty one bit, as a kind of artistic double-down: the market said no, and he wrote a second one.

Finally, the program concludes with Robert Schumann’s Quintet, Op. 44. This piece is arguably the most famous product of a profoundly productive year in which he wrote three string quartets, a piano quartet, and this, the first work to establish the piano quintet as a genre, which would become a standard instrumentation adopted by everyone from Brahms to Dvorak to Shostakovich to Thomas Adès. The almost symphonic brilliance of this piece both exposes and belies the stormy difficulties of Schumann’s life, defined by a near-manic musical and literary imagination that would, just twelve years later, push him to hallucinations, a suicide attempt, and institutionalization until his death.

None of the characters on this program had the lives they wanted: The enslaved mother and child to be sold and possibly separated; the female composer overlooked by generations of misogyny; the genius wunderkind ducking the will of his patrons and publishers; and the tortured innovator, whose brilliance toed the line between sensitivity and insanity. But each held fast to what was authentically and inherently theirs. Their music survives their circumstances to tell their stories.

Program:

Rhiannon Giddens: At the Purchaser's Option

Germaine Tailleferre: String Quartet in Three Movements

Modéré

Intermède

Final: Vif

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Quartet in E-flat major, K. 493

Allegro

Larghetto

Allegretto

Intermission

Robert Schumann: Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 44

Allegro brillante

In modo d'una marcia. Un poco largamente

Scherzo: Molto vivace

Allegro ma non troppo