Composer and pianist Jessica Krash represents every woman in the arts who has followed her muse to achieve career goals while raising a family. The Chevy Chase resident closes Strathmore’s Women in the Arts series Thursday in a program of her original works, two of them world premieres.
A Harvard graduate with high honors, she boasts a master’s degree in piano from Juilliard School of Music and a doctorate in composition from the University of Maryland. Although she grew up adoring and studying the classics, she stands at a crossroads between traditional and new music.
“New music has changed in the last 20 years by getting more personable,” she says. “I tell my students at George Washington University that music is a combination of ideas and feelings, and it’s important to balance the two. I like the architecture of music. It’s always tricky to write political music without cheapening it, but it’s important to write music about our times.”
Her titles incorporate her personal observations of the modern world. The two world premieres, “Fog” and “Fever,” are as different in context as they are in length.
“I wrote ‘Fog’ to be the length of the first half of a program,” she says. “It starts slow like Indian classical music to represent being in a fog, or the onset of a heartbeat at the beginning of life. It’s a way of looking at relationships between old and new music, a metaphor between youth and middle age. It’s about discovering how we got here from there, an attempt to understand where traditional classical music fits into a modern piece. They need to cross-fertilize each other.
” ‘Fever’ lasts only six minutes and is about style and one’s state of mind. It goes between being mesmerized to scared, with moments of real beauty.”
IF YOU GO:
Jessica Krash closes the Strathmore Celebrates: Women in the Arts series
» When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday
» Venue: Mansion at Strathmore, 10701 Rockville Pike, North Bethesda
» Tickets: $26 adults, $23 seniors, $15 students
» Info: 301-581-5100,
www.strathmore.org
