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String Players' Choice By Joshua Kosman 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 Find out what other players have commissioned from Aaron Jay Kernis and how they felt about the process in the July issue of Strings, available now on newsstands or by contacting Strings Customer Service.
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