AT A GLANCE
SOUND HORIZONS
(September 6)
KERNIS @ THE KEYS
(October 6)
NOSFERATU
(October 30)
KOREAMERICA II
(January 31)
NIGHT OF THE LIVING COMPOSERS
(March 8)
AVANT GARDEN PARTY
(June 8)
Dorma, Ador is a choral lullaby written in 2000 for the Dale Warland Singers. It is a variation of a lovely tune based on Portuguese folk elements which written by my friend Janika Vandervelde, and uses nonsense syllables that sound something like Portuguese.
Translation of the text:
Sleep, go to sleep.
My sweet little boy.
2) Aaron Jay Kernis, (1960) A movement from Ecstatic Meditations (1998)
Texts by Mechtild of Magdeburg (1207-1292), translated by Jane Hirsfield
Mechthild was born around the year 1210. The writings for which she is known speak of her experience of the love of God as it was revealed to her, beginning when she was twelve years old. At about eighteen, she responded to it by joining a community of BEguines (a group of women who began to experiment with the possibility of a way of life outside of the socially endorsed alternatives of wife or cloistered nun). After forty years, she moved to the Cistercian convent of Helfta (southwest of Magdeburg, Germany) and in about 1270 completed her writings there. The four movements of Ecstatic Meditations were completed in 1998 for the VocalEssence Ensemble Singers in Minneapolis.
I Cannot Dance, O Lord (1999)
Aaron Jay Kernis
I cannot dance, O Lord
Unless you lead me.
If You wish me to leap joyfully,
Let me hear You dance and sing -
Then I will leap into Love -
And from Love into Knowledge,
And from Knowledge into the Harvest,
That sweetest Fruit beyond human sense.
There will I stay with you whirling.
3) Terry Riley (b.1935) Quando Cosas Malas Caen del Cielo (When Bad Things Fall from the Sky) (2003)
Terry Riley will go down in musical history for inventing Minimalism, but until 1993 he never wrote for guitar. Then, after years of persistence by David Tanenbaum, and with his son Gyan beginning guitar studies, Terry began a series of 26 guitar pieces. called “The Book of Abeyozzud.” Each piece in the book begins with a different letter of the Spanish alphabet, and it is dedicated to the rich cultural and musical traditions of Spain. When Terry Riley heard the Just Intonation National Steel guitar used by his friend Lou Harrison, he became interested to write for it. But the real inspiration for this piece was political.
In March 2003 Terry Riley was arrested for marching in an illegal protest against the coming Iraq war. The judge offered him three methods of paying his fine: a few days in jail, a sum of money, or Community Service. Terry Riley convinced the court to let his Community Service be musical, and he wrote this piece, continuing his protest, and describing the experience of being in the peace movement in the United States at this time.
Broadstreet is the street Riley was marching on when he was arrested. The movement has the energy and spirit of the peace march. The second movement depicts his loneliness in jail, and the third describes his determination to continue. The fourth movement is a profound meditation on war, and it contains the feelings Riley had when the bombs started falling on the first day of the war.
Here's a note about Nationals:
National Steel Guitars (nationalguitars.com) were invented in the 1920s when jazz guitars needed to be louder in order to be heard in their bands. Since electric guitars were not yet possible, National guitars were made with a steel body and they included a number of resonators, or speaker cones, inside the body. Lou Harrison heard Nationals as a young child, and when he heard one near the end of his life he immediately recognized the sound he wanted for his last guitar piece. He chose Just Intonation, a tuning more in line with natural acoustic principals, in that the relationship between tones is one of whole numbers. For guitars this requires a specially made fingerboard, because the frets are no longer straight across. National Guitars made such a fret board from a design by Lou Harrison's student, Bill Slye. Harrison then chose DADGAD tuning for the six strings, a very unusual tuning for classical guitar players.
4) Aaron Jay Kernis, Air (1995)
Air is songlike and melodic, and is one of the purest and sparest pieces I wrote in the '90s. It contains many hymn or chant-like elements, and though rooted in Eb major, it retains a kind of plaintive quality more reminiscent of minor or modal tonalities. Formally, it combines a developing variation form with a simple song form.
It was written in 1995 for violinist Joshua Bell. Later version of the work were created for cello and piano, flute and piano, and for violin or cello with orchestra.
5) Terry Riley, Llanto (Lament) (1996/arr. 1998) is in a simple ABA form with the somewhat anguished middle section flanked by outer sections containing an introspective dialogue between the two instruments.
6) Terry Riley, Cantos Desierto (1996/arr. 1998) Literally, Derserted Songs…but they could also be thought of as songs in and around the desert.
7) Aaron Jay Kernis, Meditation (in memory of John Lennon) (1981)
Meditation was written not long after I had moved to New York City, and shortly after the tragic death of John Lennon.
6) Aaron Jay Kernis, Two Awakenings and a Double Lullaby (2006)
I. The Salutation
II. The Light Gatherer
III. Double Lullaby
Two Awakenings and a Double Lullaby, a song cycle for high soprano, violin, guitar and piano was written in 2006 to commemorate the opening of the new Concert Hall at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. This cycle of three songs is dedicated to my beloved twins, Jonah and Delphine, who are now nearly four years old. The work was composed with the exceptional talents of dear friends Hila Plitmann, Axel Strauss and David Tanenbaum in mind.
I. The Salutation, a text by the little-known English Metaphysical poet and clergyman Thomas Traherne (1636-74), is a meditation on the rise of consciousness from nothingness, the mysteries of existence and infinite glories of being. It’s begins with bell-like sounds in the piano and guitar and uses these sounds transformed throughout the movement.
II. In The Light Gatherer, English writer Carol Ann Duffy (one of my very favorite living poets - b.1955, Glasgow) presents her young daughter infused with light and color in myriad ways, with a beautiful realization of the exuberance of childhood and the delight in witnessing growth and change.
III. Double Lullaby is a gentle, lyrical song which intertwines the soprano and violin in duet. I’ve placed two well-known texts alongside each other‚ (the words in English from Englebert Humperdincks‚ “Lullaby from Hansel and Gretel” (which treats the word ‚”two” like a touchstone), and “Angels Watching Over Me,” a traditional American spiritual. Two Awakenings and a Double Lullaby was commissioned especially by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for the Inaugural Year at Civic Center with generous funding from the Fleishhacker Foundation. The cycle lasts approximately 22 minutes.
notes by Aaron Jay Kernis
Two Awakenings and a Double Lullaby
Aaron Jay Kernis (2006)
TEXTS
1.THE SALUTATION
These little Limbs,
These Eyes and Hands which here I find,
These rosy Cheeks wherewith my Life begins;
Where have ye been? Behind
What Curtain were ye from me hid so long!
Where was, in what Abyss, my speaking Tongue?
When silent I
So many thousand thousand Years
Beneath the Dust did in a Chaos lie,
How could I Smiles, or Tears,
Or Lips, or Hands, or Eyes, or Ears perceive?
Welcome ye Treasures which I now receive.
I that so long
Was Nothing from Eternity,
Did little think such Joys as Ear and Tongue
To celebrate or see:
Such Sounds to hear, such Hands to feel, such Feet,
Beneath the Skies, on such a Ground to meet.
New burnish’d Joys!
Which finest Gold and Pearl excel!
Such sacred Treasures are the Limbs of Boys
In which a Soul doth dwell:
Their organized Joints and azure Veins
More Wealth include than all the World contains.
From Dust I rise
And out of Nothing now awake;
These brighter Regions which salute mine Eyes
A Gift from God I take:
The Earth, the Seas, the Light, the lofty Skies,
The Sun and Stars are mine; if these I prize.
Long time before
I in my mother’s Womb was born,
A God, preparing, did this glorious store,
The World, for me adorn.
Into this Eden so divine and fair,
So wide and bright, I come His son and Heir.
A Stranger here,
Strange things doth meet, strange Glory see,
Strange Treasures lodged in this fair World appear,
Strange all and New to me:
But that they mine should be who Nothing was,
That Strangest is of all; yet brought to pass.
—Thomas Traherne (1636-1674)
2. THE LIGHT GATHERER
When you were small, your cupped palms
each held a candlesworth under the skin,
enough light to begin,
and as you grew,
light gathered in you, two clear raindrops
in your eyes,
warm pearls, shy,
in the lobes of your ears, even always
the light of a smile after your tears.
Your kissed feet glowed in my one hand,
or I’d enter a room to see the corner you played in
lit like a stage-set,
the crown of your bowed head spotlit.
When language came, it glittered like a river,
silver, clever with fish,
and you slept
with the whole moon held in your arms for a night-light
where I knelt watching.
Light gatherer. You fell from a star
into my lap, the soft lamp at the bedside
mirrored in you,
and now you shine like a snowgirl,
a buttercup under a chin, the wide blue yonder
you squeal at and fly in,
like a jeweled cave,
turquoise and diamond and gold, opening out
at the end of a tunnel of years.
—Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955)
The Light Gatherer, from: The Feminine Gospels, © Carol Ann Duffy 2002
Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd.,
20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.
3. DOUBLE LULLABY
When at night I go to sleep,
Fourteen angels watch do keep;
Two my head are guarding,
Two my feet are guiding,
Two are on my right hand,
Two are on my left hand,
Two who warmly cover,
Two who o’er me hover,
Two to whom ‘tis given
To guide my steps to heaven.
Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921)
All night, all day,
Angels watching over me, my Lord.
All night, all day,
Angels watching over me.
Sun is a-setting in the West,
Angels watching over me, my Lord.
Sleep my child, take your rest;
Angels watching over me.
All night, all day,
Angels watching over me, my Lord.
All night, all day,
Angels watching over me.
When at night I go to sleep,
Angels watching over me, my Lord.
Pray the Lord my soul to keep,
Angels watching over me.
American Traditional Spiritual
