Concerto with Echoes
inspired by Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 6
For orchestra consisting of 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, percussion (crotales, chimes, vibraphone, pitched gongs, medium tam-tam, medium suspended cymbal, timpani), violas, cellos and basses. Approximately 14 minutes.
Carnegie Hall Premiere: October 8, 2009
The essential element in Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 6 that inspired Concerto with Echoes comes from the very first measure: the opening passage with two spiraling solo violas, like identical twins following each other breathlessly through a hall of mirrors. I also had in mind other Bach works that I think of constantly, such as the Ricercare (also on tonight’s program), keyboard Toccatas, and the C-minor Organ Passacaglia. The concerto also echoes some of my own recent works, as well as other composers I love who have paid homage to Bach in their music.
Each of the “Brandenburg” Concertos is exceptional in its use of instruments. This concerto mirrors the Sixth by using only violas, cellos and basses, while gradually adding reeds and horns to loop back to the sound world of the First “Brandenburg” Concerto (and extending it with trumpet and percussion).
The first movement begins with a soft introduction that lays out some of the important building blocks of the concerto’s harmony, followed by a fiery, toccata-like virtuosic display. The lines in the movement are constantly mirrored and layered in a maze of sound. The heart of the piece, the slow movement, is essentially a Passacaglia built on slowly moving bass lines, mirrored layers of melody, and open harmonic spaces. Strongly consonant, its harmonies are built in imitative spirals, while the more angular climax uses compressions of the work’s opening harmonies. Rather than closing with a faster dance movement, the brief, slow Aria suggests a courtly dance, and is expressive and pensive, ending with a sigh rather than a flourish.
Concerto with Echoes was written in the spring and summer of 2009, and was commissioned by Orpheus for the New Brandenburg Project.
–Aaron Jay Kernis
In 1983, the New York Philharmonic premiered a work entitled Dream of the Morning Sky that came from the pen of a 23-year-old composer named Aaron Jay Kernis. It would result in his national acclaim, and his star would only grow. He has won honors from ASCAP, BMI, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the American Academy in Rome; eventually he went on to be the youngest composer ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize — awarded for his String Quartet No. 2 (“musica instrumentalis”) in 1998. He won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition in 2002 for his work Colored Field, making him the youngest composer to win that prize. He would also go on to be commissioned by Disney to ring in the new millennium with his choral symphony Garden of Light. The list of people who have commissioned and performed Kernis’ work runs a veritable who’s who of the classical music world, and his list of honors and awards make him among the most feted composers. He is one of America’s leading lights, having passed from youthful phenomenon to a genuine potent and original artist, possessed of an accessible yet sophisticated voice. “With each new work and new recording,” says the San Francisco Chronicle, “Kernis solidifies his position as the most important traditional-minded composer of his generation. Others may be exploring musical frontiers more restlessly, but no one else is writing music quite this vivid or powerfully direct.”
In coming down on a particular side of the now-defunct schism between the avant-garde and the listening public, Kernis safely sides with neither—hewing, instead, to his own personal vision of what is beautiful, flowing easily from moments of dissonance to moments of lyrical resolution. Or, as one critic wrote: “Kernis is at or near the top of a list of young American composers who have made it safe for music lovers to return to the concert hall and enjoy new music that neither panders to nor alienates audiences.” With this as his raison d’etre, Kernis might well be among the true postmodernists.
Born in Philadelphia in 1960, Kernis, largely self taught on violin, piano, and composition, attended the San Francisco Conservatory, the Manhattan School of Music, and Yale University, working along the way with a diverse array of teachers: John Adams, Charles Wuorinen, Morton Subotnick, Bernard Rands and Jacob Druckman. His West to East coast trajectory is betrayed in the wild catholic range of his influences—everything from Gertrude Stein to hard-edged rap to the diaphanous musical canvas of Claude Debussy. Coming up when he did, in the 1980s and 90s, he took from what was around him — the disparate musics and the collapsing aesthetic streams — and, gathering influence from his broad swathe of teachers, forged a rich, distinctive, emotionally immediate music, neither “this” nor “that” but simply and clearly good. The brilliance of his work rests on the exuberant splay of his instrumental palette (even when writing solo or chamber music) crossed with a brooding, poetic depth cut in sharp relief: wild, visceral, violent passages against calm, prayer-like quietude. “Kernis,” Michael Fleming wrote in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, wrote, “is a composer of fastidious technique and wide-ranging imagination.”
During the 1980s and 1990s, Kernis composed two deeply contrasting symphonies, works that were to him were pre- and post-tragic — the tragedy, in this instance, being the first Gulf War of 1991, an event that affected him deeply. Before it struck, his 1989 Symphony in Waves, a large-scale five-movement work, is of a particularly colorful bent, caffeinated and lively, but with passages of overwhelming lyricism; in contrast, his Symphony No. 2 (1991), commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony, is an enraged, topical work, delineated by aggressive, clangorous writing for percussion.
Other orchestral pieces by this accomplished colorist include Symphony of Meditations(2009) with solo voices and chorus, Newly Drawn Sky (2005); Color Wheel (2001); Musica Celestis (1990) for string orchestra; New Era Dance (1992), commissioned to mark the New York Philharmonic’s 150th anniversary, which Edward Seckerson called “…Aaron Jay Kernis' street-smart power-mix circa 1992. Latin salsa and crackmobile rap meets 1950s jazz;” a violin concerto, Lament and Prayer, written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II and the Holocaust; Goblin Market (1995), a setting of Christina Rosetti’s puckish poem for narrator and large ensemble; and Air for violin and orchestra, commissioned in 1995 by Joshua Bell (originally for violin and piano, but later reconfigured for orchestra and premiered in 1996).
His chamber, solo and vocal repertoire is equally colorful and varied: Two Movements (with Bells) (2007); the salsa-inspired 100 Greatest Dance Hits for guitar and string quartet from 1993; Quattro Stagioni dalla Cucina Futurisimo (“The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine”) for narrator, violin, cello and piano; and the piano quartet Still Movement with Hymn (1993), commissioned by American Public Radio for Chrisopher O’Riley, Pamela Frank, Paul Neubauer, and Carter Brey; a song cycle for soprano Renée Fleming, scored for voice and piano and later orchestrated and performed by the Minnesota Orchestra; and the piano suite Before Sleep and Dreams (1990) written for superstar pianist Antony De Mare.
Kernis currently serves as Director for the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute. Each season, in partnership with the American Music Center, eight or so composers are given the chance to hear their music performed by a professional orchestra after a week-long immersion under the trained and experienced eye of the composer.
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 and feel refreshed and challenged by.
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.
Interview conducted by composer Aaron Grad has been the Program Annotator for Orpheus since 2005. To comment or to read his blog about music, please visit www.aarongrad.com.