Under Four Flags

QUESTIONS FOR ANN-MARIE BARKER SCHWARTZ

Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz, who holds degrees in both Music Performance and American History, is the founding director and violinist of Musicians of Ma’alwyck. As a chamber ensemble that tells history through music, Musicians of Ma’alwyck brings together two of Ann-Marie’s great passions.

Can you remember the first moment when you first thought of yourself as artist?

I’ve always loved collegiality and that communal spirit of making music with other people. In 1987, I  played in the pit for the Glimmerglass production of Eugene Onegin, and it was a kind of revelatory moment. I thought: I’m all in, my life is following this path, and there’s no turning back. Around that same time, I started playing with the Albany Symphony, but it wasn’t enough money to live on, so was also announcing at WHMT. I loved working there because there was a record library of 17 or 18 thousand LPs to explore.

Tell us about your relationship to Cherry Valley. 

When I first started playing with Glimmerglass, our kids were really little, so we knew commuting wasn’t going to be an option. We chose Cherry Valley because it seemed to us like an idyllic village—I don’t know how to explain it—it seemed like stepping back in time about 50 years. It felt like a real community.

What’s the genesis of the program you are bringing to Cherry Valley Artworks?

A former board member recommended I check out the music of his grandfather, Samuel Gardner. I spent some time with his archives at Yale and found some really incredible music. Gardner won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1918, but he’s been sort of forgotten. The quintet we’ll play next week is a tribute to violinist David Hochstein, who was a blossoming virtuoso, with a promising career ahead of him, when World War I broke out. Because Hochstein’s father had passed and he was the eldest son, he was originally exempted from duty, but he enlisted anyway, and was killed at the age of only 26. The quintet is a musical depiction of Hochstein’s life—it’s happy in the beginning but gets increasingly darker. 

We commissioned Max Caplan, with whom we’ve done a lot of work, to score Under Four Flags, which is basically a propaganda film meant to gain support for American involvement in World War I. Max is a pacificist, so his take on the film is very strong, and at times ironic.

The concert will open with a piece by Romanian composer Mihail Jora. We’re so focused on the effects of the war in France and England that I think we forget about the tremendous suffering on that side of the world. As we play the piece, we will show some incredible images of the Romanian Army from 1918.

What’s the best question you were ever asked in an interview?

The best question I ever got was not during an official interview, but on a plane. I was sitting next to a man who, when he found out I was a musician, asked me, “So if you had all the money in the world, what would you do with it?” By then I had had a glass of wine, and without thinking about it, I said, “I would commission an opera on an American theme, because there are so many interesting stories to tell.” As we were getting off the plane, he introduced himself as Pierre du Pont.

What’s a recent great thing you watched/saw/read/listened to?

One thing that comes immediately to mind is  All the Light We Cannot See, an amazing novel set in World War II. It’s about a blind French girl who takes refuge in her great-uncle’s house in a small village and joins the French Resistance efforts. It’s an incredible story.

On May 28, 2026, at the Star Theater, Ann-Marie Barker Schwartz and Musicians of Ma’alwyck present “Under Four Flags,” a program honoring those lost in World War I with music and a film shaped directly by the conflict.