“In the 20th century there were giants in the land. Charles Ives, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein. But who is filling those shoes now? Heading many lists is Aaron Jay Kernis.” – Forbes

Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis draws artistic inspiration from a vast and often surprising palette of sources, among them the limitless color spectrum and immense emotional tangle of the orchestra, cantorial music in its beauty and dark intensity, the roiling drama of world events, and the energy and drive of jazz and popular music. All are woven into the tapestry of a musical language of rich lyric splendor, vivid poetic imagery, and fierce instrumental brilliance, and he has been praised for his "fearless originality [and] powerful voice" (The New York Times). Among the most esteemed musical figures of his generation, he is dedicated to creating music which can be meaningful to other people’s lives, and extend communication among us to make an emotional connection with listeners - while frequently challenging audiences and performers alike. That connection has brought his music to major musical stages world-wide, performed and commissioned by many of America‘s foremost artists, including sopranos Renee Fleming and Dawn Upshaw, violinists Joshua Bell, Pamela Frank, Nadja Salerno- Sonnenberg and James Ehnes, pianist Christopher O'Riley and guitarist Sharon Isbin, and such musical institutions as the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra (for the inauguration of its new home at the Kimmel Center), Walt Disney Company, Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, The Knights, Ravinia Festival, San Francisco, Melbourne, Dallas, Toronto, London, and Singapore Symphonies, London Philharmonic, Lincoln Center Great Performers Series, Minnesota and Royal Scottish National Orchestras, American Public Radio; Orpheus, Los Angeles and Saint Paul Chamber Orchestras, Aspen Music Festival, beyond. Recent and upcoming commissions include his 4th Symphony for the New England Conservatory (for its 150th anniversary), Nashville Symphony and Bellingham Festival; a work for cellist Matt Haimovitz; concerti for cellist Joshua Roman, violist Paul Neubauer, flutist Marina Piccinini, and a Grammy winning concerto for violinist James Ehnes, recorded by the Seattle Symphony; a quartet for the Borromeo String Quartet; a series of works for Tippet Rise Art Center; a new work for Yale Schola Cantorum, the Juilliard 415 ensemble and Philharmonia Baroque, and a new work for the San Francisco Conservatory.

One of America's most honored composers, he won a 2019 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition (also winning in best Classical Instrumental Solo) for his violin concerto, Northwestern’s Nemmers Award (2011) and was inducted in to the Classical Music Hall of Fame. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he received the coveted Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition (2002) for the cello and orchestra version of "Colored Field"; the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 2 ("musica instrumentalis"). He has also been awarded the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, an NEA grant, a Bearns Prize, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award. He is the Workshop Director of the Nashville Symphony Composer Lab, and for 11 years, served as New Music Adviser to the Minnesota Orchestra, with which he co-founded and directed its Composer Institute for 15 years.

His works have been recorded on Nonesuch, Koch, Naxos, Onyx, Signum, Virgin and Argo, with which Mr. Kernis had an exclusive recording contract. Previously issued CDs include a widely acclaimed album with Hugh Wolff conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in his Symphony No. 2, "Invisible Mosaic III," and "musica celestis" was nominated for a Grammy, and won France's Diapason d'or Palmares for Best Contemporary Music Disc of the Year. Other recordings include a disc of his Pulitzer-Prize winning String Quartet No. 2 ("musica instrumentalis") and Musica Celestis, both on Arabesque with the Lark Quartet; works for violinists Pamela Frank and Joshua Bell with David Zinman and the Minnesota Orchestra, and his Double Concerto with guitarist Sharon Isbin, violinist Cho-Liang Lin and Hugh Wolff leading the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Originally released on Virgin/EMI was his cello version of "Colored Field" and "Air," created for the cellist Truls Mork and the Minnesota Orchestra with Eiji Oue. Several of his important works recorded on Argo have been re-released by Phoenix, including his Second Symphony, “Musica Celestis” for String Orchestra, “Invisible Moasic III, and "Symphony in Waves," with Gerard Schwarz and the New York Chamber Symphony. Other critically acclaimed recordings include his “Goblin Market,” and “Invisible Mosaic II,” (Signum, with The New Professionals, Rebecca Miller conductor, and Mary King narrator); “Three Flavors,” featuring pianist Andrew Russo, violinist James Ehnes and the Albany Symphony with David Alan Miller, and a disc of his solo and chamber music, “On Distant Shores,” (Phoenix); vocal music with soprano Talise Travigne and the Albany Symphony; his third string quartet (“River”) as part of ‘The Kernis Project,’ a complete cycle of his quartets with the Jasper Quartet, a concerti disc with cellist Joshua Roman and violist Paul Neubauer with conductor Rebecca Miller (Signum); his new flute concerto and ‘Air’ for flute and orchestra with Marina Piccinini with Leonard Slatkin/Marin Alsop and the Peabody Symphony; and most recently his orchestral music, fourth symphony “Chromelodeon,” and “Color Wheel” with the Nashville Symphony, and Giancarlo Guerrero.

Kernis first came to national attention in 1983 with the acclaimed premiere of his first orchestral work, "dream of the morning sky," by the New York Philharmonic at its Horizons Festival. He was born in Philadelphia on January 15, 1960 and began his musical studies on the violin; at age 12 he began teaching himself piano and, the following year, composition. He attended the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Manhattan and Yale Schools of Music. Leta Miller's book-length portrait of Kernis and his work was published in 2014 by University of Illinois Press as part of its American Composer series. He has taught composition at Yale School of Music since 2003.

Mr. Kernis's music is published by AJK Music and Wise Music Classical.

WWW.AARONJAYKERNIS.COM

PRESS

THE NEW YORK TIMES “arresting, remarkable, with fearless originality and a powerful voice.”

FANFARE “Kernis remains at the top of the profession. He also remains at the top of his game.”

THE NEW YORKER “Few American composers have made as substantial a contribution to the string-quartet repertory as Aaron Jay Kernis, whose ebullient Quartet No. 2, “Musica Instrumentalis,” garnered him the Pulitzer Prize.”

LA SCENA MUSICALE “A violinist himself, Kernis composes gratefully for the instrument, with a full spectrum of tone colours. I find this very lyrical piece totally accessible and delightful - it was a highlight of the evening.”

THE BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER "He’s tapped something primal in his work. Here [in Perpetual Chaconne], a different range from the emotional spectrum...there are overarching non-musical impressions of ‘struggling, healing, feeling, discovering, changing, and (mostly) continually searching... Kernis has taken us on a small journey that covers considerable terrain, in tribute to several before him (including Beethoven). He has made a variation of the variation form, the chaconne, and turned it in to a truly dynamic composition."

BUFFALO NEWS “An indelible memory was formed by Kernis’ “Musica Celestis.” It began life as the slow movement of a string quartet, and was quickly arranged for full string orchestra. Its evocations of endless hymns of praise to God included whispered strings in exquisite soft harmonies. A quick cutoff drops instantly back into slow, lush harmonic thoughts where gentle consecutive falling intervals coalesce to form a hauntingly spiritual and deeply satisfying conclusion.”

CALGARY HERALD “Sublime…'Pieces of Winter Sky.' Here was a beautiful composition, featuring poignant solos, delicately accompanied by the most unobtrusive percussion passages, highlighting a perfectly balanced, lyrical second section. The final section combined a variety of colours and textures to paint a deeper complexion of winter as both savage and sublime, ultimately concluding this remarkable work's successful narrative arc with the same cool timbres with which it began.”

BROADWAYWORLD “Pulitzer-winning composer Aaron Kernis's major new work [Pieces of Winter Sky] for eighth blackbird shimmers elusively in a gauzy haze..."

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “[Still Movement With Hymn]...a potent elegy for piano and strings. The score itself, with its anguished climaxes and interludes of serene mourning, is exquisite.”

THE BALTIMORE SUN “This frequently performed and recorded composer’s popularity attests to his savvy melding of two seeming opposites, romanticism and minimalism. His work often is described as eclectic and accessible…When Kernis winds up a conversation saying “music is communication”; you know what he means.”

THE BOSTON MUSICAL INTELLIGENCER "Aaron Jay Kernis delivered a massive, honest-to-goodness symphony “containing the entire world.” Chromelodeon, Symphony number 4, made a tremendous impression. The composer did not stint in any way, not in size of orchestra, complexity of meaning, or generosity of expression." Aaron Jay Kernis: Violin Concerto 2019 Grammy Award Winner

PREMIERES: Toronto, Seattle, Melbourne, Dallas Symphony Orchestras:

"A bravura performance of a movement that bristled with rhythmic vitality."

"An impressive showcase for the violin as well as orchestra...it deserves to be heard again."

"The resulting sounds [of the soloist/orchestral dialogue] created new and revealing colours of their own...ending in a transcendent shimmer." Musical Toronto

“bristled with rhythmic vitality… impressive showcase for the violin as well as orchestra…deserves to be heard again.” Concertonet

“Kernis fills me with optimism, hearing a piece that sounds so fresh, full of new sounds & ideas. The orchestral sound could be big and dissonant, or softly reflective, mellow but still very new sounding in its invocation of quasi-jazzy sonorities. a few minutes before the end, I watched Ehnes play a cadenza, creating sounds I’ve never heard from a violin before, as much a treat to hear, as to watch. I must hear it again!” Barzac Blog (Toronto)

“the concerto demonstrated Kernis’ command of the complete orchestral palette, from cataclysmic brass passages to otherworldly solo harmonics over hushed strings. He made imaginative and inventive use of percussion, harp, and tuba. And in the wildly eclectic third movement, Kernis pushed the soloist toward the frontiers of technique, with double-stop runs and a final cadenza so scarily difficult that audience members were gasping in disbelief.” Seattle Times

“…brash ebullience…in-your-face, can-do confidence in the last, fun movement. The audience loved it. The orchestra applauded as enthusiastically as the concertgoers. Ehnes performed it superbly.” The Sun Break (Seattle)

KILLER NEW VIOLIN CONCERTO: “one of today’s finest composers…Talk about making a great first impression! A concerto built to last – [he] thought through the concerto idea and created something substantial and fresh without relying on esoteric novelties [and] animates all of these conventional elements with a marvelously contemporary spirit. The first two movements have deep emotional resonance, the finale is so infectiously zippy (and outrageously hard to play) it leaves you with a buzz…a rich, compelling harmonic language and flow of ideas…a many-colored, joyful composition that has something compelling to say, and that resonates afterward.” Mimetera Blog

“this concerto has legs, and James Ehnes’ playing is a marvel. The third movement cadenza, with its left-hand pizzicato runs, inspired little gasps of astonishment from the audience. The concerto itself is one I’d happily hear again…it is a piece that doesn’t take itself too seriously even as it works within a dauntingly complex musical language. Kernis’ own notes about the piece observe that it has a wide- ranging set of musical influences: the first movement, Chaconne, is influenced by the Baroque dance form, while the second, Ballad, takes its cues simultaneously from jazz and the complex harmonies of French composer Olivier Messiaen. The third movement, the most technically daunting of the lot, is called Toccatini, inspired both by the Baroque toccata and by the idea of a fun new martini, and includes over-the-top percussion effects such as a train whistle. This eclecticism, combined with James Ehnes’ virtuosity, results in eminently listenable “new music”—just what we need.” Theater Jones

“The night, in fact, belonged to brilliant, young Canadian violinist, James Ehnes whose dazzling performance of the Violin Concerto by Aaron Jay Kernis reconfirmed him as one of the most prodigiously talented violinists of his generation. As colourful and busy as a Mambo print, Kernis’s concerto (a major work that lasts about half an hour) opens dramatically. The first movement uses the full resources of a large orchestra to create a succession of vivid episodes… Ballad, the blues-inflected central movement, allowed Ehnes to contrast melting lyricism with trenchant melancholy, once again against a beautifully coloured sonic backdrop. Energetic and not without a sense of humour, the concluding Toccatini bubbles over with musical ideas all designed to showcase Ehnes’s astounding technique. Limelight Magazine

"Entertaining, dazzling, smile-inducing, toe-tapping music...Kernis is the preeminent orchestral showman of the age." Gramophone

BBC Music Magazine, Concerto Choice: “With a highly charged first movement, Kernis sets his stall with intense drama before a fabulously film noir-ish second movement. Smokey, muted trumpets, a song-like lamentation on the violin and a frisson of kit-percussion makes this a standout turn from both composer and soloist. The final movement is a wilder extension of this jazz-tinged mode, and the thrilling final minute-and-a-half sees Ehnes bowing, picking, and plucking to a frenzied finish.”

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE Kernis’s Color Wheel is a 22-minute orchestral concerto. Its celebratory panache spins not only through the colour spectrum but the stylistic spectrum as well: so many characteristic American sounds find a home with this prize-winning composer, jostling inside a variation chain in fussily luscious orchestrations...an exhilarating ride, blessed with a clear recording that vividly captures the music’s whirlwind textures.

NIEUWE NOTEN "...In his own country, [Kernis] is one of the greatest. Naxos proves this with a CD on which Color Wheel and his fourth symphony are performed. Kernis's status becomes beautifully clear when we look at Color Wheel. It is a very dynamic, lively and colorful piece…like no other, Kernis knows how to fascinate the listener with his beautiful sound finds. This also applies to his fourth symphony [Chromelodeon]...Beautiful pieces and beautifully performed."

GRAMOPHONE “Just the kind of exhilarating showpiece that had been ordered (Color Wheel).”

CONCERTONET “…a bombast of musical hues, bold, mixed or morphing, and abstractly evocative. Transcendence imbues this work. It can initially strike as cinematic, in the best sense, but roiling under is a clamorous orchestral matrix that keeps pulling you deeper into its mysteries. Symphony n° 4…. gentle wending chimes, progressing to dense instrumentation that vaults to a primal orchestral scream; escalating the orchestral fury; and a propulsive musical mosaic. It is contemplative, projecting both hope and disquieting energy.”

ALL MUSIC GUIDE “…both are colorful pieces with structures built on contrast. Kernis, as ever, is consistently lively, and he's a perfect match for Guerrero, extended and flexible in tonality but not atonal. The album would make a good starting point for listeners wanting to get at the essential stuff of this composer.”

MUSICAL AMERICA “For Kernis, the title Chromelodeon suggests chromaticism, color and melody, and the symphony is rich in all three. Color Wheel is a 20-minute-orchestral showcase. Grab a copy now.”

MUSIC CITY “Chromelodeon ends with a final, climactic perfection—it is a heroic tale told in absolute musical terms. It is interesting and complicated music that draws on the work of great minds that precede it and greatly rewards repeated hearings. This recording will find its due place in the pantheon of American Classics. There remains remarkable power in absolute expression.”

GAPPLEGATE “…a commanding sense of orchestral color is matched by an ever-burgeoning inventive continuousness in both works. Color Wheel gives us twenty-some-odd minutes of brightly shimmering concerted dazzle and depth for orchestra. It bursts forward like a rapidly soaring bird. The music has endless energy and expanded harmonic declamation one gladly surrenders to with a sense of surprising inevitability. Chromelodeon is masterful fare, brilliantly expansive. Anyone who loves music that is "ahead" in the most interesting senses will find in this volume a source of considerable interest. Kernis deserves your attention, especially this one! Highly recommended.”

The concert opened with the world premiere of a co-commission (with the Nashville Symphony) celebrating New England Conservatory’s 150th anniversary. Not content with merely a festive overture, Aaron Jay Kernis delivered a massive, honest-to-goodness symphony “containing the entire world.” Chromelodeon, his Number 4, made a tremendous impression. The composer did not stint in any way, not in size of orchestra, complexity of meaning, or generosity of expression. “Out of Silence” opens as tuned percussions evoke a musical dawn of creation. The viola choir mournfully searches, the winds ponder before a martial tutti erupts. Wrathful trombones give way to a return to a quiet veiled odyssey. Ingenious, almost contrapuntal interludes unfold as Germanic sentences, verbs at the end. One thought of Thomas Mann. Lively ideas morph quickly, but with enough familiarity to ground us. Another big crescendo, and then a pianissimo close with solo piccolo.

As “Thorn Rose | Weep Freedom” begins, potent footfalls menace. Then a string quartet intones the movement’s subject, a Handellian aria. Continuous development, or processes like it, ensues, in 10 variations which never depart entirely from allusions to Handel. Something is always happening, frequently forcefully, although Kernis’s vocabulary includes relaxation. The gory giant thunders by, near the end, attempting to crush the theme before it finally disintegrates, mistily.

Most like an occasional, celebratory piece, the short last movement, “Fanfare Chromelodia”, carries whiffs of an academic festival. New melodies emerge as other pass; themes give quarter and surrender; jazzy attitudes grow complex. A big unison across octaves told us “final cadence comes here”.

Could Kernis have asked for a more expert premiere of his emphatic Fourth? No, he told BMInt, he could not have imagined a more propitious birth. The composer’s comfort in the term “symphony” is justified by his large and confident addition to the genre. This one looks to have long and shapely gams.

Seattle Symphony unveils a new, custom concerto

Composer Aaron Jay Kernis Ludovic Morlot conducts the Seattle Symphony and soloist James Ehnes in a program of renowned American composer Aaron Jay Kernis’ new work, as well as Debussy’s “Printemps” and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony.

By Thomas May

How is the current political environment affecting the work of American artists?

This week’s Seattle Symphony concerts offer one very recent example. The orchestra will give the U.S. premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’ Violin Concerto, conducted by music director Ludovic Morlot and featuring James Ehnes as the soloist.

The rest of the program, devoted to a “spring awakening” theme, includes Debussy’s “L’enfant prodigue” and, as a harbinger of spring, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (“Pastoral”).

The concerto is the SSO’s most significant new commission by an American composer this season. But Kernis found himself stalled as he was working on the last movement in November. “I was composing it when the U.S. presidential election happened, and there were weeks when I could not write a thing,” he said in a recent phone interview from his home in New York.

While Kernis has reflected on contemporary issues in other works — images of the Gulf War directly influenced his Second Symphony (1991) — the Violin Concerto itself has no program and is “unpolitical,” he says. But the overall structure he’d designed for the piece required a fast, upbeat conclusion.

“I was so affected that I just couldn’t do it,” he said. “Given the mood of the time, it took me a while to get back to the ideas I’d had in mind. But I knew I had to wrest myself out of my postelection torpor, that I needed to write this scherzo.”

His imagination kicked back into action, and Kernis produced a hyper-energetic finale he has titled “Toccatini” — playing on the Baroque-era model of a fast virtuoso piece (“toccata”) and “martini.” The result is a dizzying concoction that evokes jazz and Stravinsky.

Kernis, 57, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1998 for “Musica Instrumentalis,” a string quartet that reflects the composer’s rethinking of musical ideas from the Baroque. His Violin Concerto also turns to Baroque forms for its two outer movements, while the middle — which he composed first — alludes to blues and the French modernist Olivier Messiaen.

In 2009, SSO conductor laureate Gerard Schwarz premiered “Symphony of Meditations,” a large-scale work for orchestra and chorus to which Kernis set poetry by a medieval Sephardic mystic. Of the four orchestras that co- commissioned the Violin Concerto, Kernis says he knows the SSO best on the basis of that collaboration.

Kernis dedicated his Violin Concerto to James Ehnes, artistic director of the Seattle Chamber Music Festival. Because Ehnes has been a fixture at SCMS for more than two decades, area music lovers tend to associate the violinist with chamber music above all, though he is also an internationally acclaimed concert soloist.

A decade ago, the BBC Proms commissioned Kernis to write a violin-piano duo for Ehnes: “Two Movements (with Bells).” Their first collaboration, it was a memory piece that paid homage to his late father’s love of jazz and midcentury American popular song. A friendship developed, and Ehnes eventually asked for a concerto.

Along with Ehnes’ superb technique, Kernis says he especially admires his “adaptability and personality. James plays Mozart so beautifully, with such warmth, but doesn’t distort the music. I think of him as a classicist.”

As he composed, recalls Kernis, his original concept was that the concerto would be more “Apollonian.” “I initially started in a more classical vein but got pushed in this Dionysian direction of hyper-virtuosity. Little cadenzas are spread throughout the piece. I really wanted to put James in the central role.”

Ehnes points out that the concerto has “all of Aaron’s trademarks: lyricism, extreme — and I mean extreme — virtuosity, fascinating chromaticism and strikingly colorful orchestration. I think my favorite quality in his music is that it speaks very honestly to the listener, despite often being very complex.”

Review: Joshua Bell and Sam Haywood at Granada

Classical Virtuosos Earn Standing Ovations

Sam Haywood.

Story by Gabriel Tanguay

Joshua Bell made his annual visit to the Granada Theatre last Tuesday, accompanied by pianist Sam Haywood. Playing to a packed house, virtuosos Bell and Haywood initiated the concert with Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in D Major, played to perfection as Bell showcased his famous full-body playing style. Bow held delicately with two fingers, Bell performed Beethoven’s frantic sonata like a raging sea of passion to Haywood’s effortless unfolding of notes. The duo continued with Brahm’s Scherzo in C Minor, full of drama and excitement and a great encapsulation of the composer’s vigor, and delighted with Sarasate’s Carmen Concert Fantasy, Op. 25, delivering the famous operatic refrain to the audience’s hungry ears.

With applause and standing ovations between each piece, the highlight of the evening was Aaron Jay Kernis’s “Air” for Violin and Piano, commissioned by Bell himself in 1995. The abstract, heartbreakingly beautiful piece is both love song and exploration of intense emotion, and it was a rare treat to hear it performed by Bell and Haywood’s master hands.

Santa Barbara is lucky to have such a talent visit the Granada every year, be that on his own or complemented by equally renowned musicians.

NY CULTURE By CORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIM

Philharmonic Trumpets Faith and Power

For six days, the Israelites had circled the city in silence, led by their priests bearing the Ark of the Covenant. Only the sound of the shofar, the curved ram's horn, rang out across the walls, instilling terror in the hearts of the besieged. On the seventh day, after the seventh tour of the walls, the priests blew a single long note on the shofar, the sign for the Israelites to let out a thunderous roar. The walls collapsed; Jericho was theirs for the sacking.

Aaron Jay Kernis composed 'A Voice, a Messenger,' a concerto for trumpet and orchestra, for the New York Philharmonic. SEATTLE YOUTH SYMPHONY

Not only people but nature itself seems to take note whenever the trumpet and its curvier cousin, the shofar, make their appearances in the Bible. No wonder, then, that composers seeking to bring a note of awe to their music have always found the trumpet to be a natural ally—just try to imagine Bach's "Christmas Oratorio" without its gleaming, jubilant trumpets or Handel's "Messiah" without the rousing wake-up call of "The Trumpet Shall Sound."

A very different sort of trumpet will take center stage for three nights beginning Tuesday at the New York Philharmonic when Philip Smith, the orchestra's principal trumpeter, premieres "A Voice, a Messenger" by Aaron Jay Kernis as part of the program "Alan Gilbert and Soloists from the Philharmonic." And yet the work's roots reach all the way back to Jericho. (The concerto is a co-commission of the New York Philharmonic and the Big Ten Band Directors Association.) Mr. Smith, a devout Christian, requested that Mr. Kernis—a Jewish composer whose past works have included Holocaust references and texts by the medieval Spanish mystic Solomon Ibn Gabirol—base the piece on trumpet references in the Bible. The New York Philharmonic has championed Mr. Kernis's music since 1983, when the composer was only 23 years old. "It had something that appealed to me," Mr. Smith says. "It was music that reflected his faith." For inspiration, the trumpeter gave Mr. Kernis reams of biblical passages and commentary. "That made it all the more confusing," Mr. Kernis says. "What crystallized it for me was when I attended services on the first night of Rosh Hashana two years ago and there heard the shofar: that put everything in context."

Instead of bringing to life a specific biblical episode or evoking the Apocalypse ("Messiaen already did that"), his four-movement work took on the reflective, searching character of the Jewish Days of Awe. "It's more of an inner drama," Mr. Kernis says. "There is a sense of facing doubt as one does on the High Holidays, as one looks back on the year and remembers." In the work's fourth and final movement, he says, "the sound of the trumpet causes fear, as if something unwelcome is imminent."

"I don't think Aaron was specifically saying, 'This is a movement of war, this is a moment in the camp,'" Mr. Smith says. "But it sounds like he reflected on those [ideas] and came up with a story of his own. The first movement is very reflective. It builds intensely. You feel as if you're sharing your inner heart with the Lord. The second movement is a dance, a celebration. The third movement, played on the flugelhorn, is a very mellow Night Prayer, less pleading, to my mind, more calm. The finale sounds the most as if something is being said: If the two prayer movements are like talking to God, the last one is as if God is talking back."

That final movement also contains the most overt references to the different kinds of shofar blasts that are called for on Rosh Hashana: tekiah, a single long blast; shevarim, three short notes; teruah, nine quick blasts in rapid succession; and tekiah gadolah, one very loud and sustained note that functions as a call to battle in the Bible. Although Mr. Kernis decided not to feature an actual shofar in the work—Mr. Smith owns one and knows how to play it—he says the ram's-horn calls are "transformed" in the concerto, and relate to the techniques used. He also came across a reference to Rosh Hashana services during the time of the Second Temple, when the shofar would be flanked by two silver trumpets. The work's conclusion will have two trumpeters stand up and join Mr. Smith at the front of the stage. For Mr. Smith, it is a perfect union of faith and art. As it is, he takes pride in playing an instrument that features so prominently in the Bible—"an instrument of power," as he calls it. His favorite trumpet-related Bible verse is from Corinthians, and an apt motto for a section leader in the New York Philharmonic: "If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself for the battle?"

Arts & Leisure

A String Quartet Worthy of Its Prize, No Question By LAWRENCE A. JOHNSON

SINCE the Pulitzer Prize for music was established in 1943, the awards have provoked as much debate and, often, consternation as those for fiction and journalism. Some choices have proved astute: Copland's ''Appalachian Spring,'' Hanson's Symphony No. 4, Menotti's ''Consul'' and Sessions's Concerto for Orchestra. Others, from this distance, can only seem mysterious.

What, for example, has become of Leslie Bassett's Variations for Orchestra (1966) or Richard Wernick's ''Visions of Wonder and Terror'' (1977)? And who can fail to be stumped by the 1990 prize awarded to Mel Powell's ''Duplicates: A Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra'' over John Corigliano's greatly esteemed (and widely performed) Symphony No. 1?

But few could disagree with the 1998 Pulitzer Prize awarded to Aaron Jay Kernis for his String Quartet No. 2, ''Musica Instrumentalis.'' As performed by the Lark Quartet on a new disk with Mr. Kernis's First Quartet (Arabesque Z6727; CD), ''Musica Instrumentalis'' is revealed as one of the finest American string quartets of the last two decades, and perhaps more. If some of his early music betrayed strong influences of Leonard Bernstein in its jazzy melodic contours and populist inspiration, as well as an occasional polemical shrillness, his Second Quartet demonstrates that the 39-year-old Mr. Kernis has, in a relatively short time, evolved into a composer of real mastery and individuality.

Commissioned for the Lark Quartet, the work is cast in three movements. The subtitle reflects the Renaissance inspiration in the suite of dances in the opening ''Overture.'' Despite the movement's sharply rhythmic elements, Mr. Kernis's capers never lose their essential geniality. A canzonetta, offering dainty counterpoint, is followed by a dark-hued musette, and the individual instrumental lines, often playing in the highest registers, show great freedom throughout the movement. The dances are recapitulated in a frenzied conclusion, which also introduces a striking choralelike theme.

''Sarabande Double, Sarabande Simple,'' the playful, Brittenian title of the second movement, belies its scale and expressive depth. The movement is dedicated to the memory of Bette Snapp, a supporter of young composers, who died as Mr. Kernis was writing this music. The composer skillfully sustains the 16-minute span of this understated yet deeply felt movement.

The long-breathed double sarabande starts in the cello and proceeds to the other instruments, and bursts of frenzied counterpoint interrupt the still surfaces of the richly spun lyrical phrases. Yet it is the Tallis-esque calm and elevated spiritual introspection of this music that are most compelling, conveying a melting, tender intimacy tempered by a dignified seriousness of expression.

The final movement, ''Double Triple Gigue Fugue,'' may suggest a basketball statistic, but here the inspiration comes from the last movement of Beethoven's Third ''Razumovsky'' Quartet (Op. 59, No. 3). Mr. Kernis's finale is as structurally clever as it is satisfying on a surface level, developing Beethoven's main theme, in a tightly packed 10 minutes, into his own double and triple fugue. Yet this music is anything but dryly didactic in its vibrant rush of good humor and rude vitality.

The composer here delights in his virtuosity, tossing in a tarantella, gigue and rondo for good measure and, in the process, offering some of the most life-affirming and refreshingly unneurotic American chamber music heard in years. A few atonal burps near the end sound like an ironic nod to the obligatory modernism of years past. The development has an irresistible drive and energy, and the false endings and back flips before the brief coda make for a genuinely witty finale not unworthy of Beethoven himself.

Although Mr. Kernis's First String Quartet, dating from seven years earlier, may not be on quite the same level as the Second, it is still a notable achievement. The vaulting lyricism and dervish eclecticism of the long first movement are perhaps less indelible, with a certain predictability to the to-ing and fro-ing between furious counterpoint and lyrical sections, which are less interestingly developed.

THE brief third and fourth movements are more self-contained. The scherzo alternates Mahler-hard pizzicatos with frenzied violin solo flights, and the propulsive finale proves more chaotic than cumulative.

Once again, it is in the slow movement that Mr. Kernis's gift for melody finds its natural voice. Subtitled ''Musica Celestis,'' the music draws inspiration from Hildegard of Bingen, which it makes palpable in its rapt mysticism. As before, the composer explores a vein of concentrated spirituality, evolving from the monastic stillness of the gentle opening to a Bernsteinian sweetness and sense of release; the return to the reflective opening material is most affecting in its sense of inevitability.

Both works are given first-class advocacy by the superb musicians of the Lark Quartet, itself a prize winner (a Naumburg Award in 1990). At times, the song of the Lark violins turns a bit piercing under pressure, but generally the young players make the strongest possible case for this music, playing with great unanimity, eloquence and intensity. They are especially adept at exploring the restless, searching quality of Mr. Kernis's slow movements without gilding the lily.

Though the Second Quartet is the more impressive work, both would repay investigation by chamber ensembles looking for music that manages to be both communicative and substantive without hitching yet another ride on the neo-Romantic or mystical Minimalist bandwagon. Mr. Kernis's fine quartets show both American chamber music and Mr. Kernis himself to be, at least in part, in robust artistic health.

Kernis Takes On Ibn Gabirol in 'Meditations'

Posted by Mike Melia,

"Your works are wondrous and I know it acutely" -- From Part 1 of Solomon Ibn Gabirol's "Kingdom's Crown," translated by Peter Cole

What do you get when you pair an 11th century Spanish poet with a modern American composer? Last week, the audience at the Seattle Symphony found out at the world premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis' "Symphony of Meditations," based on the poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol.

Kernis is one of the country's most-renowned composers and finds inspiration from an often surprising mix of sources, using jazz, Latin music, rap and poetry. He rose to fame at a very young age, having a work premiere with the New York Philharmonic in 1983 at the age of 23, and has won a number of major awards, including the prestigious Grawemeyer Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

"I've been following and collecting poetry over the years. What's most important to me is finding poetry that I really emotionally connect with and words that become so internalized and personalized for me that they seem utterly necessary to set," said Kernis. "Certainly, this text was a case of something I absolutely needed at this time in my life to address."

I spoke with Kernis by phone last Thursday, just before the world premiere:

Following the death of his parents, Kernis was introduced to Gabirol's work, translated by his friend, poet Peter Cole. Kernis mainly reflected on Gabirol's longest poem, "Kingdom's Crown," a lyrical meditation often used in Yum Kipper services that deals with the universal themes of life, death and one's relationship to God.

"Symphony of Meditations," which was commissioned by Seattle Symphony's music director and conductor Gerard Schwarz, takes on many of the heavy themes for which Kernis has become famous. His other recent works include "Lament and Prayer" and "Colored Fields," which reflect on the Holocaust; "Second Symphony," which is about the Persian Gulf War; and "Still Movement with Hymn" tackled the Bosnian genocide.

"Meditations" is written in three movements and combines vocal solos with the voices of the Seattle Symphony Chorale. Listen to selections of the premiere, courtesy of the Seattle Symphony.

Why Star Performers Want New Compositions from Aaron Jay Kernis

Pulitzer-winning composer is responsible for creating several vital string works

By StringsMagazine.com

If there is any aspect of human existence that hasn’t shown up in Aaron Jay Kernis’ music, it’s only because he hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Which would be understandable, because the 39-year-old composer is one very busy guy.

Commissions fly thick and fast into his mailbox, from orchestras, soloists, and even the Walt Disney Corporation. There are revisions to make, proofs to check, rehearsals to drop in on, musicians to consult with, scores to look at in his new capacity as new-music advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra. And amid all this, Kernis is patiently building a body of work that is one of the most diverse and magnificent on the contemporary scene.

"For me," he says with the thoughtful, slightly self-conscious air of someone delivering an artistic credo, "the basic source from which all my work flows is a belief in the inexhaustible number of things music can do—its ability to spring from the inexhaustibility of the thoughts and emotions of human beings."

A tall order, no doubt—yet one of the striking things about Kernis’ music is how much of the human condition it manages to pack in. Caught in different aspects, his music is funny and sorrowful, diffident and self-righteous, intricately learned and plain-spoken, lyrical and pugnacious, and very, very beautiful. No less various is the range of genres to which he’s put his mind, from symphonies, string quartets, and concertos to choral and chamber music and songs (there’s even an opera in the early planning stages, although Kernis is resolutely tight-lipped about the details).

Yet running like a recurrent motif through all this work is a deep commitment to the importance of music as a communicative art. Every piece of Kernis’ that I’ve heard addresses the willing listener with extraordinary clarity and directness. The music is subtle but never arcane, accessible without pandering. It’s the kind of contemporary music that could slip around the defenses of all but the most hardened traditionalist.

Kernis’ establishment credentials are impeccable, and his stature was confirmed last year when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his String Quartet No. 2, musica instrumentalis. But he has his more provocative side as well, seen in the salsa-flavored 100 Greatest Dance Hits or the turbo-charged Too Hot Toccata. In New Era Dance, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 150th anniversary, he ruffled the feathers of that notoriously cranky bunch of musicians by asking them to rap while they played.

When we spoke in April, Kernis was hip-deep in work on a large choral symphony, commissioned by Disney for the millennium and due for a world premiere in October. But even now, Kernis is poised for a triple-threat assault on the CD market. The Lark Quartet has recorded his two string quartets for release on Arabesque (The Lark Quartet Plays Aaron Jay Kernis, Z6727), and Phoenix is set to issue a disc of his chamber music (Chamber Music of Aaron Jay Kernis, PHCD142), played by the Eberli Ensemble, a quartet that includes Kernis’ wife, pianist Evelyne Luest.

For devotees of solo string music, though, the biggest splash is an imminent release on Argo (CD 460226 2), featuring three big works for solo violin performed by some of the preeminent instrumentalists of the day. The disc will feature Joshua Bell as soloist in Air; the Double Concerto for Violin and Guitar with soloists Cho-Liang Lin and Sharon Isbin (originally written for Isbin and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg); and Lament and Prayer, a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, featuring Pamela Frank.

As he so often does, Kernis wrote each piece with the artistic personality of the soloist in mind. "Whenever I write a piece, I try to let it take on some aspect of the person I’m writing for," he says. "I try to hear them live and think of what might suit them best. That doesn’t preclude anyone else from playing it; it just gives me a spark, a way in. "In the Air, for instance—there is a certain kind of sweet, intense lyricism in Joshua Bell’s playing, and I wanted to write something very pure and direct. Lament and Prayer is a very Jewish piece, intensely emotional, and Pamela Frank’s sound has that focus and intensity and great warmth, as well as more of the Russian Jewish technique."

As for the Double Concerto, with its jazzy byplay, that was inspired by watching television. "The first time I’d seen Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg was on the Tonight Show," Kernis recalls. "She was playing something like Wieniawski, some highly technical showpiece. But my idea was for her to solo with the Tonight Show band, and imagining that was what helped me start the piece."

Kernis was born in Philadelphia in 1960, and began his musical life—briefly—as a violinist. "I wasn’t much of a success as a violinist," he recalls today. "The problem was that I sounded so dreadful I couldn’t stand to hear myself play. And none of my teachers ever helped me figure out how to get a good sound.

"I didn’t study long enough to get much technique, and I certainly don’t write for the violin as a player. Still, I acquired a love for stringed instruments, especially their singing quality. When you hear the violin pieces on the new CD, it’s clear that most of what the instrument does in them is about singing."

At 12, Kernis began teaching himself to play the piano and, shortly thereafter, to compose. His youthful musical experiences also included time spent as part of "a very weird jazz group, sort of a cross between Thelonious Monk and Frank Zappa. Basically, we’d hang out in the basement with a lot of tape machines. I’d play glockenspiel or out-of-tune piano and my friend would honk away on the saxophone. It was all good clean fun, and stuff that no one would ever want to hear."

His formal education was spread among three institutions, where he studied with a triumvirate of teachers as eminent as they are stylistically diverse. At the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 1978–79, he worked with John Adams, at a period when that composer’s allegiance to Minimalism was stronger and less ambivalent than it is today. From there he moved to New York (where he still lives) to study at the Manhattan School of Music with arch-serialist Charles Wuorinen, and finally to the Yale School of Music, where he studied with the late Jacob Druckman, at the time when Druckman was first arguing for the existence of a style worthy of the name neo-Romanticism.

If none of those teachers quite acquired a disciple in Kernis, each one left his fingerprints on Kernis’ composing style, which is not so much eclectic as all-inclusive. "I had very open teachers all along the way," he says. "Even Wuorinen was not dogmatic with me, although he can be. But there was a certain rigor that came through in my lessons with him; he gave me an ability to move subtly from the tonal world to the atonal world to whatever’s in between."

Kernis’ first big break came in 1983, when Druckman selected an orchestral piece, Dream of the Morning Sky, to be given a public reading by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic as part of the orchestra’s first Horizons Festival. Mehta gave the piece a perfunctory run-through and then began to lecture Kernis, with the unthinking condescension that only a veteran conductor can muster toward a beginning composer, on the various weaknesses in the orchestration.

But if Mehta thought this young whelp would take his lesson with the appropriate deference, he had a surprise coming. In a display of self-confidence that no one who was there will soon forget, Kernis went toe-to-toe with the maestro, defending every bar and every instrumental combination he had written. And for observers like myself, who had been nursing a growing suspicion that the problem lay not with the orchestration but with the conductor’s inadequate mastery of it, the thrill was profound.

For Kernis, though, looking back on it, the memory is bittersweet at best. "It was one of the most wrenching experiences in my whole life," he says. "It shaped my sense of the whole music business and its relation to composers. After that performance, I naively thought I’d get some phone calls, and people would want to play the piece. But in fact there was absolute silence. There were newspaper and magazine accounts, but in terms of anything concrete, it was a complete and utter zero.

"Well, after six months of being very depressed about it, I finally had to pick myself up and go on. I thought, ‘No matter what happens, my focus must always be on the work.’ Ultimately, I think that helped me create a kind of stronger focus on the future, since for composers, things very rarely happen overnight."

Kernis’ career did gradually pick up. He received the Prix de Rome, as well as a number of grants that enabled him to study in Europe. Since 1992, he’s made his living exclusively as a composer—a welcome development, he says, since he has "no other skills at all. It’s been a very gradual intensification, with nicer commissions and better fees. It doesn’t mean I’m rich, but the commissions are getting more in line with the time spent writing. In general, if you do the calculations, most composers make about 50 cents an hour."

Although Kernis’ output is prolific, he considers himself a slow and painstaking composer. "When I start a piece I usually work about ten minutes a day, and the rest is walking around thinking. Then I gradually work up to about ten hours a day.

"For some pieces, like the Double Concerto, the process never goes smoothly, whereas Lament and Prayer just rolled right out, because the material in it had been building up. It was such a pleasure."

One thing that can make composing difficult, Kernis says, is living with the ghosts of past masters. The String Quartet No. 2 in particular is full of historical echoes, from Baroque and Renaissance dance suites in the first two movements to the invocation of Beethoven in the finale, which is closely modeled on the finale to the third Razumovsky Quartet.

"Bach was a powerful influence; I play Bach keyboard suites every day. And the finale uses everything I learned from looking closely at the Beethoven movement and trying to figure out about his harmonic planning. For me, the string quartet is still the scariest medium there is, because it’s the only medium where I really feel the weight of history. I have to work the form until it’s absolutely perfect." The Pulitzer Prize, although it didn’t bring him new work, does seem to have calmed Kernis’ anxieties a bit. "The sense of affirmation coming from outside was very good for me; it made me feel more secure. I worry about my work a great deal, and this helped me feel like I could go on from here, as well as pay this month’s telephone bill."

The Quartet No. 2 also marked Kernis’ emergence from a period in which he tackled large, morally complex themes in his music. In addition to Lament and Prayer, he wrote his Second Symphony, a huge, Mahlerian cry of rage and disgust at the Persian Gulf War; the quartet Still Movement with Hymn in response to the first wave of atrocities in the former Yugoslavia; and Colored Field, a dark-tinged English horn concerto, some of which was inspired by a visit to Auschwitz (Kernis’ next project will be to arrange that concerto for cellist Truls Mork).

"Some people thought I was being overly programmatic in those pieces, and some thought it’s not the kind of thing composers ought to do. There are a lot of composers who think their work should be pure and abstract. But even though I got a certain amount of criticism for them, I really don’t care. I did what I had to do; those concerns were real.

"But since the Second String Quartet, I’m choosing not to write those pieces any more. I don’t have to take myself so seriously all the time. I’m very happily married, and for now I’d rather write music that’s a little more optimistic and looking happily to the future."

Pamela Frank’s Kernis Commission

"It’s one of the nicest gifts I’ve ever received," violinist Pamela Frank says of Kernis’ Lament and Prayer, a piece commissioned for her by the Minnesota Orchestra. "It’s a fantastic piece, and the Minnesota Orchestra players have become friends of mine, so it’s like a big family piece. That’s always better for music making."

For Frank, Kernis’ success lies in the emotional nature of his music. "He knows how to pull at your heartstrings," she says. "If a piece is just cerebral or intellectual or interesting on paper, if it doesn’t grab me emotionally, then it’s not interesting to me. But he really knows how to make your hair stand on end. It’s powerful, gripping, passionate music. It’s certainly not easy to play, but it’s very easy to connect with on a human level."

She describes this particular piece as a gratifying experience for both player and listener. "It’s elegiac and mournful and pleading and screaming for so long, and then comes redemption. He builds you up and then creates a release that’s so moving, you don’t realize that the time has gone by. I recognized that from the audience reaction—you can feel that they’re not breathing [while you play], and that’s really good. People only realize afterward that it’s not a short piece—it’s 30 minutes long—but it has such incredible line, and the intensity doesn’t let up for a second. So you’re hanging on every note, waiting to see what happens. That element of suspense is a very unusual compositional technique."

Frank has had experience in commissioning new music from others, and one of her favorite opportunities is getting feedback from the composer. "I have so many questions for the dead guys!" she laughs. "It’s frustrating. This way I can find out what’s really in the [composer’s] head. Sometimes things get lost between the head and the hand. I’m most interested in bringing out what they really want."

Kernis himself, Frank says, is "very hands-on, and that’s something I really appreciate about him. He’s extremely exacting and extremely thorough, and he’s very helpful to the performer because he knows what he wants to hear. In general there’s very little revision necessary [on his pieces] because he’s so thorough—but he’s such a wonderful person that I almost try to look for things even when it’s not necessary, because I like discussing music with him. He’s so open to what you have to bring to the table."

—Mary VanClay

In Their Own Words: Composer Aaron Jay Kernis By Aaron Grad

Orpheus Chamber Orchestra opens its 37th season Oct. 8 at Carnegie Hall with a

program of Stravinsky, Bach and Beethoven. The evening leads off with the world- premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis’ Concerto with Echoes.

**

Kernis recently discussed his new work, the latest installment in the Orchestra's New Brandenburg commissioning project:

How important has Bach been in your development as a musician?

From the time I started with music, I always had some relationship to Bach. I played the Inventions when I started the piano, and The Sixth “Brandenburg” Concerto was one of the first records I bought when I was 10. In my attempt to be a violinist, I remember buying a copy of the Sonatas and Partitas, and being utterly wowed by them. Almost every day, I play or hear Bach in my house— usually, the Well-Tempered Clavier or the organ music, something I can sit down

Aaron Jay Kernis and feel refreshed and challenged by. photo by Richard Bowditch

What was it like for you to write a piece for Orpheus’ New Brandenburg Project, with such a direct link to Bach’s music?

Many times, if there is a specific influence suggested to me for a work, I find that my thought processes at first get short-circuited or overwhelmed. In this case, the relationship to Bach for a long time made me feel very stuck; there was so much history and so much love of the music that it was hard for me to pull back and find what I needed to express. It took an extra long time to put that in the background and just write the piece I needed to write. But having done that, I am intrigued with the results.

How was it to follow Bach’s model in the Sixth “Brandenburg” Concerto and omit violins?

Writing primarily for an orchestra of violas, cellos and basses was pretty challenging. In fact, I held out the possibility that I might include violins until the very last minute. Only once the piece really started going did I decide to find my way with the lower strings. What I wound up doing in this piece is essentially writing for ten solo strings. I also knew that at a particular point in the piece I wanted to gradually add the winds from the First “Brandenburg” Concerto, because I needed to enlarge the instrumental sound world and take the piece in another direction.

This program begins with Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, a work with its own ties to the “Brandenburg” Concertos and other Baroque concerti grossi. Did Stravinsky’s take on Baroque style have any impact on you?

The baroque influence on Stravinsky played an important role in my thinking about this piece. The Dumbarton Oaks Concerto is not a piece I know well, but I was reminded of The Rake’s Progress at moments during the writing, for example, and a cubistic approach to fracturing the musical line between instruments. Part of the reason the piece is called Concerto in Echoes—and there are many different manifestations in the piece of the word “echoes”—is that, as I was writing, I noticed that a number of composers who have had a strong relationship to Bach’s work influenced me along the way. I was paying a kind of homage to those composers, in sometimes subtle ways and sometimes more direct ways. Stravinsky is certainly one of those composers, and maybe Bartók or Ligeti a little bit, and Arvo Pärt. I hear certain echoes in the piece of their work as well as from Bach’s. There is another link between Bach and a more modern composer on this program, with Webern’s arrangement of the Ricercare. Did that piece influence you at all?

The influence of the Webern arrangement is actually really interesting for me, because when I started the second movement (which I composed first), I watched a couple of performances online that moved me alot. What a masterful and unique vision of it Webern has created! I was very much influenced by the Ricercare, certainly more than by the slow movement of the Sixth “Brandenburg” Concerto. My piece is essentially informed by the first couple of moments of the Sixth's first movement, and hardly at all by the rest of it. That opening, echoing viola line just exploded in my thinking to bring Concerto in Echoes into being.

How did you decide to end your piece with a slow Aria movement?

I had actually started a fast movement, but it was too close to a Baroque model, and I wasn’t comfortable with that. So after a while I put that down and let this Aria appear, which was very much a surprise. It is a slow, lyrical movement, beginning with the unmistakable sound of English horn, and ending in a very plaintive fadeout. It is a dance form, as in the Sixth “Brandenburg,” but a slow dance. As I started this composition, something didn’t quite ring true to me to follow the baroque model of fast-slow-fast precisely. I was very happy when I finished the third movement and it had gone in a different direction. The first movement is only strings, and the second movement begins with a number of important viola and cello solos and gradually, bit by bit, adds oboes and horns and the other instruments in the piece. But the third movement really focuses to a great extent on winds, and their special solo characteristics, so it took a very unexpected direction.

Did the ensemble itself influence your ideas, especially the fact that you knew Orpheus would be playing it like chamber music, without a conductor?

The piece underwent such a transformation from my very beginning ideas to what wound up being written. I was initially very concerned about how the music would be coordinated, but as I was writing the music the issue of not having a conductor just evaporated completely. I saw how deeply the piece had been influenced by Baroque concerti: it would not need a conductor, but would use various leaders as the principal lines moved around the orchestra.

Beethoven (whose Violin Concerto appears on the second half of this program) is another composer one might think would hold as much sway as Bach. Yet, in speaking with composers, I find that reactions to Beethoven are surprisingly mixed. What has your relationship to Beethoven been like?

Bach is a composer I have always embraced, and Beethoven is a composer I have always wrestled with. There are types of pieces that I love, and others that I have a more complicated relationship to. The string quartets are unbelievable; I have a more awkward relationship with the piano sonatas and the symphonies, for example. I found I could only really relate to Beethoven once I heard his music through the prism of Baroque performance practice, and conductors and orchestras who cleaned out heavy vibrato from the string playing. I found a lot of the heavy and ponderous aspects of late Romantic performance practice fell away for me, and I began to relate directly to the greatness of the music.

***

Music American Adventures at the Royal Festival Hall, London — high quality The LPO performed a well-planned overview of American musical history

Marina Piccinini was the soloist in Aaron Jay Kernis's Flute Concerto © Eslah Attar

Richard Fairman

The coincidence of three major composers’ birthdays this winter — Steve Reich and Philip Glass at 80, John Adams at 70 — is a gift. Here is an opportunity to showcase the music of a generation, of a nation (the US), and of a style (minimalism) that they have shared. Concert programmers have rarely had it so good.

This “American Adventures” concert from the London Philharmonic Orchestra focused on nationality. In an overview of American musical history, it ran from Charles Ives, the progenitor of a uniquely American sound, to a hot-off-the-press concerto by Aaron Jay Kernis, taking in the anniversaries of Glass and Adams on the way.

As an example of minimalism, Glass’s The Light is as central as they come. The work was Glass’s first score for orchestra, inspired by scientific exploration into the speed of light. It is, appropriately, constant in speed, based on repeated patterns in gradual flux, and plays like a modern-day version of Ravel’s Boléro. It even has the tambourine.

There is not much in The Light to detain the intellect, but Kernis’s Flute Concerto, getting its first UK performance, made up for that. Given the slight volume of the flute, most concertos for the instrument are modest affairs. Kernis though, has composed a big and entertaining work, which has a lot to say. The music is intricately written and from its highly eclectic standpoint casts its eye over Baroque dance forms, Hollywood melodies and the classic rock of Jethro Tull. The flute part is a virtuoso challenge and, as at the premiere, Marina Piccinini was the expert soloist.

Ives’s The Unanswered Question opened the second half, reminding us where American boldness in mixing styles came from. Then Andrés Orozco-Estrada and the LPO detonated Adams’s combustible Doctor Atomic Symphony, drawn from his opera about nuclear weapons. Since its premiere at the BBC Proms in 2007, Adams has tightened up this score and it makes a power-packed half-hour. The orchestral playing was resolute. Principal trumpet Paul Beniston played his long solo (a setting of Donne’s “Batter my heart” in the opera) with clarion authority. Well-planned programme, high quality, adventure rewarded

MUSIC REVIEW; Americana, Written for Fleming

By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

The popular soprano Renee Fleming could fill virtually any concert hall these days, even by singing the most traditional repertory. But this season at Alice Tully Hall she has presented two programs of new and recent American songs. The second, on Sunday afternoon, offered new works by four composers written expressly for her. And not only was the hall full, two sections of stage seats were needed.

Ms. Fleming champions living American composers not from some sense of obligation but because their music excites her. This program began with ''Night Flight to San Francisco,'' the composer Ricky Ian Gordon's setting of a monologue from Part II of Tony Kushner's play ''Angels in America.'' That so many female singers love Mr. Gordon's songs is inexplicable to critics who find his warmed-over pop style terribly cloying. This 12- minute work has some musical substance, however. Mr. Gordon mostly stays out of the way of the text, a pensive speech by the frail character Harper, who fears open spaces. He frames her words with atmospheric harmony and coloristic piano effects, played beautifully by Richard Bado. That said, though all the composers Ms. Fleming performed make the most of her ability to sing sustained, high, soft vocal lines, Mr. Gordon overdid it in his work.

The composer Aaron Jay Kernis played the piano for Ms. Fleming in his new song cycle, ''Valentines,'' based on four sardonic and bracingly feminist poems by Carol Ann Duffy. Mr. Kernis's music here is like some spiky American version of Alban Berg expressionism. At times it has a ferocious intensity, and the harmonic language is thickly chromatic and wildly wayward. So when the music turns reflective -- clearer, simpler, more diatonic -- the effect is doubly powerful. The highly charged vocal writing is nevertheless lyrical, at least as sung by Ms. Fleming, radiantly.

''The Hill Has Something To Say,'' the composer Craig Harris's setting of a poem by Rita Dove, is scored for soprano, piano and ''amphora'' (the composer's term for the electronic element in the piece, which utilizes the recorded sounds of Mr. Harris blowing through bottles). Ms. Fleming had to activate the electronic keyboard while singing. Though there is a soft-focus New Age quality to the work, Mr. Harris's music is engagingly delicate and precise. And the way the electronic sounds hauntingly prolong piano chords mirrored Ms. Fleming's way with sustained vocal lines.

Andre Previn was the pianist in three works of his own, including two familiar arias from his 1998 opera ''A Streetcar Named Desire,'' in which Ms. Fleming created the role of Blanche Dubois. The more interesting work, which received its premiere, was ''The Giraffes Go to Hamburg,'' Mr. Previn's setting of a mournful excerpt from Isak Dinesen's memoir about two captured giraffes on a cargo steamer bound for a zoo in Germany. Here, adding a solo flute (Renee Siebert) to the mix of voice and piano, Mr. Previn treats the text like a gripping musical monologue, and the music is pungent and dramatically understated.

Shifting to his jazz mode, Mr. Previn was the stylish accompanist for three encores, songs by Arlen, Ellington and Van Heusen. Ms. Fleming, who sang with jazz groups in college, sounded utterly at home, scat-singing and shaping soft, improvised vocal lines with the breathy beauty of Betty Carter.

AARON JAY KERNIS WINS 2012 NEMMERS PRIZE

BY NEWMUSICBOX STAFF ON MAY 7, 2012

Aaron Jay Kernis. Photo by Richard Bowditch. Courtesy Dworkin & Company

Aaron Jay Kernis has been selected as the 2012 winner of the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University, Dean Toni-Marie Montgomery announced today. In connection with the Nemmers Prize, Kernis will be in residence at Northwestern for four weeks each throughout the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons, during which time he will undertake various educational activities. The prize will be formally awarded to Kernis in a ceremony to take place during his final weeks at the university.

“I am thrilled and deeply grateful to receive the Nemmers Prize,” said Kernis. “I thank the jury for this honor, which so generously recognizes a life’s work of composing. It is indescribably gratifying to sense that one’s dedication to creating new music can be meaningful to other people’s lives, and extend communication among us. I have had many memorable experiences with Chicago’s music groups in recent years; the area is becoming a center for the highest standards of new music performance and ideas. It will be a great pleasure to work with the young musicians and faculty at the renowned Beinen School at Northwestern, and deeply exciting to have my work performed again by the Chicago Symphony.”

The Nemmers Prize is the most recent of Kernis’s many awards. One of the youngest composers to win the Pulitzer Prize (in 1998), he has also received the Grawemeyer Award for Musical Composition, the Elise Stoeger Prize of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Rome Prize, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, among others. Kernis’s receipt of the Nemmers Prize follows a slew of Chicago performances of his music. He was the Chicago Chamber Musicians’ featured composer at its last concert, which he also curated, and his da l’Arte del Danssar was recently performed on the Chicago Symphony’s musicNOW series. Recent recordings include Goblin Market with The New Professionals and conductor Rebecca Miller on Signum Classics, and an album of orchestral works by the Grant Park Festival Orchestra (Cedille). His music is also available on Nonesuch, Phoenix, New Albion, and many other labels. Kernis’s music is published by AJK Music, administered by Associated Music Publishers (G. Schirmer/Music Sales).

The previous recipients of the Nemmers Prize, which is given for “outstanding achievement in music,” were John Adams, Oliver Knussen, Kaija Saariaho, and John Luther Adams.

Aaron Jay Kernis: A Colorist of Maximal Proportions

The Pulitzer and Grawemeyer Award-Winning Composer Introduces His Music By Daniel Stephen Johnson

Aaron Jay Kernis (Richard Bowditch)

Browse Q2 Music for all Aaron Jay Kernis interview, show, and concert audio

You'd be forgiven for thinking that, despite his unassuming physical presence, Aaron Jay Kernis is some kind of extrovert. Listen to these titles: 100 Greatest Dance Hits, New Era Dance, Too Hot Toccata, Superstar Etudes. The self- advertisement is all a bit ironic, of course, but there's no denying Kernis's eagerness to please. His music is never facile— there are always layers of musical activity and invention beneath the surface—but that surface is polished to a brilliant shine. His is an audience-centered aesthetic.

Listen to Aaron Jay Kernis introduce his works

The New York Philharmonic premiered Kernis's Dream of the Morning Sky when he was all of 23 years old, and since then he has only risen in prominence among American composers. His cello transcription of his Colored Field for English horn and orchestra (1994), in which moments of Romantic lyricism and hard-driving jazz syncopation dissolve into cascades of pure sonority, won the 2002 Grawemeyer Award, arguably the most prestigious prize in classical composition. When his Second String Quartet ("musica instrumentals") of 1997 won the Pulitzer Prize, he was the youngest composer ever to have received the distinction.

Calculated to stimulate players as well audiences, Kernis's music has been performed by artists as eminent and diverse as Joshua Bell, Christopher O'Riley, the Lark Quartet and Renee Fleming.

Kernis is eager to draw his effects from as vast a palette as possible. Disney commissioned him to write Garden of Light (1999), a 40-minute oratorio of Mahlerian dimensions, to celebrate the turn of the millennium. While the title of his Third Symphony ("Symphony of Meditations") suggests—correctly—that the sacred and intimate subject matter of its Englished Hebrew text will be reflected in a meticulously wrought, deeply personal work, the piece is also enormously vast, enveloping spectacle.

But even in his chamber works, he relies upon his skills as a colorist to generate the maximum possible range of moods and effects. His Dance Hits (1993), a seeming bagatelle for string quartet and guitar, takes the audience on a tasting tour down a long menu of Latin flavors. And from his First Quartet's exquisite reverie, "musica celestis," to the extravagant neoclassical complexity of the Second Quartet's finale, "Triple Double Gigue Fugue" his music for string quartet alone balances vivacious dance rhythms against moments of exquisite lyricism.

A composer of grand gestures By Benjamin Ivry, Special to The Christian Science Monitor

NEW YORK — Philadelphia-born Aaron Jay Kernis is America's most honored younger composer. Last November he received the world's top international music composition prize, the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award, worth $200,000 and previously given to such famous composers as Toru Takemitsu and Gyorgy Ligeti.

Last month, Kernis's specially commissioned piece "Color Wheel" was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra at the opening of the new Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts.

Just three years ago, Kernis became one of the youngest-ever Pulitzer prize winners for his Second String Quartet. He's currently laboring on a new opera commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera, due in 2006.

What is the secret of his remarkably quick career rise?

Kernis's music is varied, ambitious, and enjoyable to listen to. His "Air," originally written for violin and piano, has an 18th-century pastoral grace. His Pulitzer prize-winning Second String Quartet opens with a celebratory dance that's an Aaron Copland-style hoedown, as if emphatically rediscovering joy in music.

New York Philharmonic principal cellist Carter Brey, who has often played Kernis's works, says his music can range from the portentous to the ironic. "I like his scope, and the fact that he's not afraid to take chances in tackling huge issues," Mr. Brey says. "He's capable of irony and wit, but won't take cover behind those qualities. There's a lot of passion to his writing, and what ties his disparate pieces together are the grand gestures, the way he'll go for a big romantic statement."

One such romantic effort is "Colored Field" - for which he received the Grawemeyer Award - inspired by a visit to Auschwitz. The (London) Times called it "a deeply felt response to human suffering and the cycle of good and evil ... a hugely impressive score in the coherence of its structure and inventiveness...."

Kernis's Second Symphony is also dark and dramatic, full of echoes from the Gulf War. Yet in an interview from his Manhattan home, Kernis says that these days he's in the mood to write affirmative pieces.

"I want to write pieces that are more consoling, searching but peaceful - not so apocalyptic," says Kernis, an exceedingly soft-spoken person who nevertheless radiates confidence and energy.

Among his lighter and more celebratory works is "The 100 Greatest Hits," with a piano solo "in the style of Jerry Lee Lewis." Asked what he finds interesting about Lewis, Kernis replies, "The personality and energy of the artist. I regard him as a great commercial figure in the mixing of barroom music and blues into a much ... faster, danceable, and energetic kind of early rock 'n' roll."

Kernis is sometimes compared to Leonard Bernstein. He admits, "Bernstein was a very important influence, both in the sense of openness to the mingling of serious and popular culture and, more important, in looking for a kind of visceral energy in music, a kind of grab-you-by-the-lapel experience, a willingness to incorporate material he loved, which is also true of my work."

Some of Kernis's work is linked to a specific time, like "New Era Dance," a symphonic work commissioned for the 150th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic that one British critic described as "power-mix circa 1992. Latin salsa and crackmobile rap meets 1950s jazz."

Kernis explains that even when writing "New Era Dance," he "wondered what its shelf life would be. But through the later '90s, it became my most-performed piece. I think it's important to write what's necessary, and none of us knows the future. I've also found the reaction to a new orchestral work happens over several years.

"If a work is over 10 minutes long, you're lucky if it's performed twice, and if it's over 25 minutes, more performances [after the première] are a miracle."

Indeed, despite a high-profile recording on Virgin Classics, there are no immediate plans for future American concert performances of the large-scale "Colored Field."

Kernis says ruefully, "Most orchestras have a very traditional mindset about programs." To help attitudes evolve, Kernis commutes monthly to a job as the Minnesota Orchestra's adviser for new music, and next year he will be guest composer at the revamped La Jolla, Calif., chamber music festival, run by star violinist Cho- Liang Lin.

Says Lin of Kernis: "It's so interesting to follow Aaron's music; he endlessly fascinates. 'Trio in Red' [a work recently applauded at its New York première] is a fiercer piece than "Air" - it's like Jekyll & Hyde."

Even nightclub singer and Broadway star Ute Lemper is a surprise fan, saying she would love to perform his music: "Aaron Jay Kernis is a composer I enjoy very much. His music is so expressive in itself, I wonder if he could leave room for words."

Kernis typically leaves room for words when explaining his basic musical motivation: "At this time of worldwide reflection and the search for meaning in the wake of [the Sept. 11] tragedy, the power of music is more important than ever.

"Music can allow us to rediscover what is deep inside ourselves, free from the precision of language and the barrage of rhetoric, free from easy answers to impossible questions."

A crash course in Kernis recordings A good selection of compositions by Aaron Jay Kernis is available on recordings:

 'Colored Field,' 'Musica Celestis,' 'Air' Virgin Classics  Gifted cellist Truls Mork and conductor Eiji Oue produce classical renditions of some of Kernis's orchestral showpieces.  'Before Sleep and Dreams,' 'Meditation,' 'The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine' The Eberli Ensemble Phoenix USA  The Eberli Ensemble - formerly known as the Contrasts Quartet - is a chamber group led by Kernis's wife, the gifted pianist Evelyne Luest, making for a sympathetic program of chamber works.  String Quartets 1 and 2 Lark Quartet Arabesque  Kernis's second quartet, subtitled "Musica Instrumentalis," won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, but the first quartet, "Musica Celestis," is no less engaging.  'Air for Violin,' 'Double Concerto for Violin & Guitar,' 'Lament and Prayer.' Argo  An all-star group of musicians, including Pamela Frank, Cho-Liang Lin, and Joshua Bell give definitive performances of some of the composer's most popular works.  Kernis: Second Symphony Argo  Conductor Hugh Wolff and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra plumb the passionate depths of Kernis's large-scale Symphony No. 2.  Kernis: 100 Greatest Dance Hits New Albion  A glimpse of the composer in a lighter, more ironic mood. A delight.  Songs of America/Jan Degaetani, Gilbert Kalish Nonesuch  A Kernis setting of a Gertrude Stein poem in a splendid performance by mezzo Jan Degaetani.

Aaron Jay Kernis’s Tasty ‘Three Flavors’ By Barry Bassis | June 21, 2015

(Naxos Classical)

American composer Aaron Jay Kernis has received many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. The latest release of his music, the beguiling “Three Flavors” (on Naxos) is further evidence of his talent. Those who think they don’t like contemporary music should give this a try. Kernis’s work, usually labeled neo-romantic, is both eclectic and imaginative, suggesting his influences without descending into mimicry.

“Three Flavors” is a work for piano and orchestra. The soloist on the recording is Andrew Russo, who has long been a champion of Kernis’s music, and he is accompanied by the Albany Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Alan Miller.

The work was conceived as an aural tasting of different cuisines.

Originally “Three Flavors” was written in 2002 as a concerto for an amplified toy piano, played by Margaret Leng Tan and the Singapore Symphony. Kernis later adapted the piece to feature a grand piano, which provides a better balance with a full orchestra.

The composer’s notes that accompany the album point out that the work was conceived as an aural tasting of different cuisines. The first movement, “Ostinato,” was inspired by Indonesian gamelan music. There is prominent use of metal percussion instruments in addition to the piano.

The “Lullaby–Barcarolle” movement is gentler. Written in anticipation of the birth of his twins, the composer’s aim is to suggest the smooth journey to life. The work shifts into high energy with the jazzy “Blue Whirl” (the third and final movement). It’s somewhat reminiscent of some of Leonard Bernstein’s orchestral works.

The album also contains two shorter works without orchestral accompaniment. The first is “Two Movements (with Bells)” written for violin and piano. Russo again plays the piano part and the violinist is James Ehnes.

The composer dedicated the piece to the memory of his father, Frank Kernis, who passed away in 2004. Frank was a jazz and blues fan and that is reflected in the work, albeit through the prism of Kernis’s sensibilities. It begins with the spiky “Poco Adagio” and the concluding section is “Song for My Father.” (Although this is the title of a famous jazz piece by Horace Silver, the music is entirely Kernis’s own.)

The second part is more introspective with sudden shifts of mood, a characteristic of Kernis’s music. Ehnes had performed “Two Movements (with Bells)” at its premiere in 2007 and he is excellent. Incidentally, despite the title, no bells are used in the work.

The last piece is a piano solo, “Ballad(e) out of the Blue(s)—Superstar Etude No. 3.” The three superstars referred to in the title are the early rocker Jerry Lee Lewis in the first part; in the second part, Thelonious Monk and the bebop movement; and in the last, George Gershwin and the blues.

The composer also cites Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, and Erroll Garner as jazz pianists he admires and wanted to suggest. He doesn’t actually quote from their work but there are passages that are definitely bluesy or jazzy.

Lovers of jazz and classical music should find something to savor here. Again, Russo is an outstanding interpreter of Kernis’s music.

The recording was made possible with grant funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, reminding us of the importance of government support for the arts as well as education. San Francisco Classical Voice

An Interview With Aaron Jay Kernis, Coming to Cabrillo BY BRETT CAMPBELL

In the decade since he became the youngest composer to win a Pulitzer Prize, for his String Quartet No. 2 (“musica instrumentalis”) in 1998, Aaron Jay Kernis has become one of the leading composers of his generation. Not yet 50, he’s won most of classical music’s top honors and garnered commissions from America’s leading orchestras. The New York–based composer has served for a decade as new-music advisor to the Minnesota Orchestra and directs its Composer Institute.

The thoughtful, soft-spoken composer finds inspiration in music of the past (particularly early music), in history and current events, in ancient and modern poetry, in popular music, and more. With so many influences, it’s not surprising that his music is both colorful and eclectic. Kernis is the father of 6½-year-old twins, though parenthood hasn’t slowed his compositional output. He’s continued to produce CDs and commissioned works, to wide critical acclaim.

Kernis’ Bay Area connections run long and deep. In 1997-1998, he studied with John Adams at the San Francisco Conservatory, which has since commissioned new Kernis works, and Music Director Marin Alsop has featured his music at Santa Cruz’ Cabrillo festival — including next weekend’s performance of his Invisible Mosaic III.

You’ve been to Cabrillo several times. How do you like it?

Whenever I go to Cabrillo, it’s such a joy! Marin has done a wonderful selection of my work over the years. The dedication of the players and Marin — it’s extraordinary to see them present program after program of new music, and do it so well, with such intensity and commitment. They’re incredible players, and they do it because they love it and believe in it. And the audiences are equally passionate and open-minded. The sense of a whole town banding together to listen to new music — I can’t think of anything like it.

Tell us about your work on the Cabrillo program this year, Invisible Mosaic III.

Mosaic III is a piece I wrote when I was very much in transition as a composer. It’s one of my first orchestral pieces from 1988.

I would call it an eclectic piece. It’s really a mixture, starting from a jangly chromatic, gestural orchestral world, very colorful, very busy. And then kind of a scherzo and trio in the middle, which gradually becomes a little more consonant, and toward the end of the piece a repetitive gesture and constant harmony coming out of minimalism, which I was just beginning to work with. So it’s a kind of journey from a language of chromaticism to an embrace of consonance. And you can see that in my work, as a constant shifting, trying to integrate consonance and a more angular language.

You’re an East Coast composer, but you have strong Bay Area connections. You attended the San Francisco Conservatory, you’ve worked with the San Francisco Symphony, you’ve had pieces performed at Cabrillo. With the Internet making so much music available to everyone no matter where they live, do you think there’s still a different East Coast versus West Coast aesthetic among young composers?

Actually, I just returned from San Francisco; we’re probably out there a month every year. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen much of what’s gone on in the Bay Area in new music, probably because I go out in the summer where concert activity is spread out. I still haven’t gotten to the Other Minds festival.

But, given the young composers whose work I know on the East Coast now, I can’t imagine there is so much of a difference anymore. Any sense of “coastalism” and boundaries is being broken down every day. I see this in my students. Between them, they’re all over the map in terms of style and influences. The music that has influenced them is quite different, from generation to generation. There’s such a wide palette, with so much being easily available if you know where to look.

READ FULL INTERVIEW HERE: https://www.sfcv.org/events-calendar/artist-spotlight/an-interview-with-aaron-jay-kernis-coming-to-cabrillo

DSO to premiere flute concerto by Aaron Jay Kernis

While the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's Brahms Festival is right around the corner in February, music director Leonard Slatkin's programming in January is all about the new.

This week the DSO gives the world premiere of Aaron Jay Kernis' Concerto for Flute and Orchestra with soloist Marina Piccinini. The performances come on the heels of last week's world premiere of "Desert Sorrows," a cello concerto by the fast-rising, 30-year-old Mohammad Fairouz. Once a wunderkind himself, Kernis, now 56, comes to the DSO as one of the most celebrated composers of his generation, having won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. (Photo: Richard Bowditch)

Though Kernis is best known for the unabashedly neo-romantic lyricism of his music, he works with an eclectic toolbox. His Second Symphony, inspired by the Persian Gulf War, swirls with massed dissonance, violence and consoling sadness. On the other hand, "100 Greatest Dance Hits" for guitar and string quartet is playful, pulsating with salsa, rock and disco rhythms. Other scores might channel Beethoven, minimalism or Renaissance and baroque forms.

"He’s a fireball of energy," said Slatkin. "And you never know what you’re going to get. He runs a true stylistic gamut."

The large-scaled Flute Concerto is cast in four movements and makes virtuoso demands on the soloist and orchestra. Kernis said the piece balances darkness and light, and each movement starts with an older dance form before moving in other directions. The finale references flute techniques associated with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull and the jazz flutist Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Kernis, who teaches at Yale, spoke from his home in New York. His new concerto shares space on the program with the 1996 Trumpet Concerto by John Williams, the multiple Oscar-winning composer. As it happens, Kernis had just taken his son to see "Star Wars," whose music was written by Williams. Unprompted, Kernis volunteered that the score was "fantastic." That's where the conversation started, before turning to today's landscape and Kernis' own artistic concerns.

Question: What was so good about Williams' score?

Answer: I felt like he was back to his old powers. I tend to assume that he has an army of assistants, and there are some scores where I felt I heard that more, where he had written really good opening music — "Catch Me if You Can" I felt had fantastic opening music — but the rest was more nondescript. This one had an operatic through line. Quality was maintained.

Q: Is this a good time to be a classical composer?

A: There are a couple of answers: artistic and economic. Artistically, the level of so many good composers and unique voices is fantastic. They’re flourishing, and they’re not ... trying to conform to any single way of thought. Every way of thinking is OK. But, economically, the fact that people expect everything for free is a problem. It's much harder to sell the music. You kind of have to be at live concerts to sell CDs — if CDs even exist anymore. It's taking even more ingenuity and more of an entrepreneurial spirit from composers to find their way and afford their life. ... It’s difficult, because it’s not something everyone can do. What do these composers do who are not great at sending out parts or billing or promotion? Those are not skills everyone has. Yet there are ways technologically of getting your work out to more people. So there is good with the bad.

Q: How much has the environment for composers changed since you were getting started?

A: The biggest change is that alternative venues are a typical thing now. You can do your concerts anywhere; it doesn’t have to be in the concert hall. There wasn’t video technology at that time, and the benefit of YouTube is that you hear a lot more things and can do a lot more research.

Q: In the old days, you sometimes had to really search to find recordings. Is there a danger for composers in having so much information at their fingertips? It can be easy to have cursory understanding of lots of music but not much depth of understanding of anything.

A: At a certain point you have to be selective. But I’m seeing people who are getting to know things well, and are following trains of thought and getting to know quite a range of stuff. It would be nice to have a guide. It’s a little hard to explain, but sometimes you’re shooting in the dark and amazed at what you find. And other times you’re kind of lost and can’t locate anything. I think it’s especially true for listeners. How do they know what’s out there? How do they know where to put their fingers to find what they’ll really like? Who’s going to guide that?

Q: We live in a pluralist age, when composers have freedom to write in so many different languages, as opposed to a couple of generations ago when there was still pressure to write in an atonal idiom. Does that freedom and the amount of information available today make it harder for young composers to develop an individual voice?

A: Partially because I’m around such great people at Yale, I don’t see that being a problem. I’ve been to other schools and seen not just technically talented people, but people who have a real freedom in their work. At the same time, one interesting personal note is that there was a period in my work where it was really important for me to figure out what kind of consonant music I needed to write, and that was very much a reaction to a lot of work I was hearing that wasn’t that way.

But now there is so much consonant music that in fact my language has become a little more thorny, a little more varied inside of one piece. I think you’ll hear that in the Flute Concerto. I don’t need to write the same kind of music as other people are writing. I'm reacting to the proliferation of a lot of pretty music, and that's where I see some composers who are reflecting a need not to offend.

Q: How conscious are you of dealing with politics or the world around you in your music?

A: It’s gone in and out. In the '90s I spent a good five years very wrapped up in topical elements and transforming that response into music. Something I hoped would be artistic rather than just a primal scream. There was a loss of innocence about what was going on in the world — the Gulf War, the L.A. riots, the Rodney King affair. Then I went into my Jewish heritage and those ideas that were important for my work. When my kids were born, that became the reality I reflected.

The element of responding directly to what’s going on in the world hasn't been a conscious part of my work since the '90s. But I just started a piece where I changed course after the Paris massacre. The piece now is very much a response to what seems like a vast division of culture. I’m always reflecting something of my life and what’s going on around me, but that’s not going to be politics all the time.

Hauntingly Beautiful Music

Last night (January 26) at Ruth Taylor Recital Hall at Trinity University, the SOLI CHAMBER ENSEMBLE completed its pair of concerts devoted to the music of Aaron Jay Kernis. One-composer concerts are certainly an artistic risk, but SOLI has no qualms about taking lots of risks. This one paid off with some of the most hauntingly beautiful music I’ve heard in a long time.

Like most contemporary composers, Kernis writes complex music at times. There are occasional dense textures, dissonant harmonies and complex counterpoint where it is hard to hear the relationship between the different parts. But Kernis uses these moments to setup up the structure of his music and provide contrast for his more introspective side. Without the complex, the simple might just be boring. But with this wonderful variety comes a unique sense of pacing and structure that allows Kernis to spin deliciously slow and introspective moments that are pure magic.

This music requires two different kinds of virtuosity and Ertan Torgul, violin; Stephanie Key, clarinet; Carolyn True, piano; and David Mollenauer, cello provided both kinds. First is the dazzling technique that Kernis demands. There are fast passages that border on the unplayable, but SOLI managed them all with flair. The second type of virtuosity required by Kernis is a rare sensitivity to indulge the slow and the simple. It is much easier to overdo a melody with lots of vibrato and call it expressive. It is a real accomplishment to pair down the music to its essential stillness and still sustain interest and momentum. This was rare virtuosic control of the most impressive and sensitive kind. A truly moving performance.

SOLI donated all ticket proceeds from this week’s concerts to Haitian relief. Their next NOT-TO-BE-MISSED performances are March 8-11.

Jack Fishman

For more information:

www.aaronjaykernis.com

Publisher Website: https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/composer/824/aaron-jay-kernis/

Commissioning and media inquiries:

Dworkin & Company Elizabeth Dworkin, [email protected] Allison Weissman, [email protected] 914-244-3803 dworkincompany.com