On the manuscript edition of his 24 Caprices for solo violin, Niccolò Paganini wrote a simple dedication under his whirl of a signature: “To artists.”
More than 200 years later, this violinist and composer’s blazingly technical Caprices remain a testing ground for virtuosos, especially young ones. In that way, Paganini’s high-minded dedication can also be read as a taunt: Only true artists need apply.
An expansive new yardstick is emerging. On Juneteenth, the violinist and composer Curtis Stewart released a recording of his “24 American Caprices” for solo violin on the Bright Shiny Things label. It is inspired by music that, he said, has “defined my American experience.” (He will perform selections at 92NY on Oct. 9.)
Like Paganini, Stewart hones specific violin techniques in his caprices, but with a twist. After all, how many cornerstones of violin pedagogy riff on Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September”? Or Kendrick Lamar’s “Complexion”?
Likewise, few composers would entrust their magnum opus to young musicians. In performances and on the premiere recording, Stewart has done just that. Seven of the violinists featured on the commercial release are students, some of whom are still in high school.
Lin-Chi Chuang, a happy-go-lucky 17-year-old who has a big grin and goes by “Jacky,” is one of those musicians. To him, Stewart’s caprices aren’t just showpieces.
“It’s more about how you show the music, rather than how you show the technique,” Chuang said in a video call from the prestigious Perlman Music Program, where Stewart teaches.
Stewart’s caprices mine classic rock, hip-hop, traditionals and more. Chuang started listening to Joni Mitchell for the first time while preparing the 10th caprice, inspired by Mitchell’s song “Big Yellow Taxi.” The seventh caprice, an octave exercise, traces the title refrain of Queen Latifah’s 1993 song “U.N.I.T.Y.” The double trills and fast passages of the third trace a chord progression based on John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and a ghostly account of “Taps” plumbs the violin’s harmonic series, brought forth by lightly resting one’s finger on the strings in specific locations.
Compared with the European pedagogical canon, the inspirations for the American caprices “are coming from relatively young places,” said the violinist Tai Murray, who recorded a caprice based on Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” She plans to assign Stewart’s collection to her students at Yale School of Music in the coming academic year.
“It’s trying to be what it is, which is something that will stand the test of the brutality of, like, a thousand violins trying to play it,” she said. “So many people can play it, and they’re all going to play it differently. But the piece itself is still standing.”
Stewart, 39, said he is still “trying to figure out what my American state of mind is.” In part, he sees these caprices as an act of rebellion, celebrating the much-ballyhooed 250th anniversary of the United States on his own terms.
“I’m tired of being ashamed of being American,” he said. “But when you look at Nina Simone, when you look at Sister Rosetta Tharpe, when you look at Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton, there has been joy here. It was just as shameful and joyous to be American then as it is now.”
Stewart lives in New York, where he was born, the son of two jazz musicians: the tuba player Bob Stewart and the violinist Elektra Kurtis, who died in 2021 and inspired his Grammy-nominated album “Of Love.” Curtis is gregarious and charismatic, with an easygoing charm you rarely encounter in the intense, inward-facing world of classical music.
As a child, however, he was shy and withdrawn. When he wasn’t beavering away at violin études, he obsessed over making D.I.Y. skateboard ramps in the shared backyard of his family’s apartment building. He considered becoming an engineer, and picked up a math degree at the University of Rochester while studying at its Eastman School of Music.
“The violin didn’t feel like me at that point, and I think it didn’t really start feeling like me until I started creating music for myself and my quartet,” he said, referring to PUBLIQuartet, the improvising quartet that he co-founded in 2010. (Jessie Montgomery, a fellow violinist-composer, was also a founding member.)
Another turning point for Stewart came in 2019, with a concert at Carnegie Hall that was organized by Jason and Alicia Hall Moran. For the first time, Stewart played “Louisiana Blues Strut” by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, a stylistically omnivorous Black composer and conductor who died in 2004. Stewart has been chasing the flash of recognition he felt in the piece — with its folksy fiddling and blues-inflected modes — ever since.
“These 24 caprices are kind of an extension of that,” he said. “They’re a way for me to own the violin, to feel like the violin is me.”
Though Stewart’s collection has no precedent in terms of its vantage and scale, he has acknowledged some reference points. The fiddle giant Mark O’Connor wrote and recorded six caprices in the late 1990s. And in the early 20th century, the British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor composed “24 Negro Melodies” for piano; Stewart recently arranged and recorded selections from that suite for violin and orchestra, earning a seventh Grammy nomination.
Stewart’s output has long hinted at a project like “24 American Caprices.” Also the artistic director of the American Composers Orchestra, he has amassed a vast body of work as an interpreter, composer and “re-composer” (his word) of works by Vivaldi, Eugène Ysaÿe and others. He even recorded an improvisation on Paganini’s Caprice No. 11, over a splashy backbeat and writhing electronics, on his album “Of Power.”
Other improvisations became the basis for later caprices. He had previously recorded improvisations on “Giant Steps,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” the jazz standard “Take the ‘A’ Train” and the Greek folk song “Thalassaki Mou,” all of which were later adapted in the caprices.
While composing the collection, Stewart didn’t think of it as being a pedagogical tool, per se. Then, during the 2024-25 season, he was the artist-in-residence at the Kaufman Music Center, one of five commissioners of “24 American Caprices.” (Another is the Juilliard School, where he teaches.) He oversaw a performance of selected caprices, featuring Chuang and other students from the Special Music School at Kaufman. Afterward, Stewart said, the audience “erupted.”
“It felt like a pop or rock concert,” he added. “I was sitting onstage while the violinists were performing these, and they just owned it. They had an opinion about it, they wanted to put their energy into it.”
Stewart even enlisted a student musician for the set’s biggest statement — an eight-minute theme and variations on “Amazing Grace”: Maxwell Brown, 15, from Wilmington, Del. Brown, who attends both the Perlman Music Program and Juilliard’s Pre-College, said he was “absolutely enthralled by” the caprice, which only hints at the theme until it is fully revealed near the end through harmonics.
“I found it extremely beautiful,” Brown said. “It still has all of the technical challenges of any traditional caprice, while being this soulful and groovy work.”
Stewart’s pedagogical background readied him for the collection’s educational aspects. Years ago, while teaching at the LaGuardia High School — his alma mater — he would invent and assign études to address specific students’ technical needs.
“But I never wrote them down,” he said with a groan, “which was so dumb.”
He’ll have no such regrets with the “24 American Caprices.” The sheet music is widely available, and Stewart has uploaded reference videos recorded with violinists from the album, along with a scrolling score. The front page of the collection invites violinists to contact him directly with questions about the many extended techniques: stomps, whistles, tapping and slapping the body of the violin, and “chops” (striking the strings with the bow to create a nonpitched noise, like a record scratch).
The classical music canon forms at a glacial pace, but even so, the caprices are taking hold. Some of Stewart’s Juilliard colleagues have told him that violinists are including the caprices in their auditions, a ritual usually devoted to standard or highly established repertoire. “That was really moving,” he said.
In Stewart’s score, conventional Italian musical terms mingle with chattier English descriptions: “graceful ghost,” “twinkle the keys,” “magical, wooshy,” “swag,” “steady baby” and, simply, “go!” The double harmonic at the end of the 20th caprice, based on Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted and Black,” carries one such directive: “Send the sound.” Violinists, it seems, are only just beginning to do that.
