BSO Classical Saturdays: Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony
BSO at Strathmore
Saturday, December 1, 2007 at 8:00 PM
Music Center at Strathmore

Newly Drawn Sky & Lament and Prayer
Aaron Jay Kernis
Born January 15, 1960, in Philadelphia, PA
Now living in New York City

“I want to write music that is visceral,
that is moving, and that is impeccably put
together. I don’t want classical music to be a
passive experience. I want it to have as much of an impact as the best rock concerts.” Aaron Jay Kernis

Though many serial compositions
that dominated the middle of the 20th
century have been criticized as being
cold-hearted, and overly intellectualized,
it is far less the case today. No one would
think of using these words in connection
with Aaron Jay Kernis, whose music is
unafraid to embrace old-fashioned tonality
to be powerfully communicative, and
to speak directly to the listener’s heart.
“I want everything to be included in
music,” he has written, “soaring melody,
consonance, tension, dissonance, drive,
relaxation, color, strong harmony, and
form—and for every possible emotion to
be elicited actively by the passionate use
of these elements.”

The power of Kernis’ music has
won him a series of prestigious awards
relatively early in his career. In 1998, he
won the Pulitzer Prize for music (for his
Second String Quartet), and in 2002 he
became the youngest composer ever
to be awarded the most prestigious of
all American composing prizes, the
Grawemeyer Award (for his concerto
Colored Fields). His compositions range
from the pop-influenced, infectiously
sassy New Era Dance to his Second
Symphony about the Gulf War of 1991.
His style is excitingly, unpredictably
eclectic: in David Wright’s words, he
writes music “in which Mahler rubs up
against boogie-woogie, Barber and Berg
converse, Sibelius dances with John
Adams.” Yet all these disparate influences
have combined smoothly into a voice
that is unmistakably his own.

Despite his early ascent to the top
rank of composers, Kernis didn’t really
become passionately committed to music
until he was on the cusp of adolescence.
Born in Philadelphia but growing up
in California, he studied at the San
Francisco Conservatory for a year with
another of the BSO’s “living Beethovens,”
John Adams, and was influenced by
Adams’ free-floating stylistic mix and
specifically his early minimalism. Kernis
then moved back to the East Coast for
undergraduate studies at the Manhattan
School of Music, with Charles Wuorinen
as his principal teacher, followed by graduate work at Yale with Jacob
Druckman. It was Druckman who gave
Kernis his first big opportunity in 1983
when he urged Zubin Mehta to read
through the young composer’s dream of
the morning sky at an open rehearsal at
the New York Philharmonic’s “Horizons”
Festival. Not only did the work delight
the audience and the musical press but
Kernis also won extra points for coolly
defending his piece against Mehta’s criticisms
from the podium. Kernis’ career
was suddenly off and running.

Newly Drawn Sky

Even after the horrors of 9/11, Kernis
stuck to his earlier promise to “leave the
world conflicts out of my music.” In an
interview with The Christian Science
Monitor in 2002, he said: “I want to write
pieces that are more consoling, searching
but peaceful, not so apocalyptic. ... At
this time of worldwide reflection and
the search for meaning in the wake of
[the September 11th] 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.”

Composed in 2005 for James Conlon
and the Chicago Symphony in honor of
Conlon’s first season as music director of
the Ravinia Festival, Newly Drawn Sky
draws its inspiration not from world
events but from a happy memory in
Kernis’ own life. And it emphasizes one
of Kernis’ greatest gifts: his complete
mastery of all the glorious colors a
modern orchestra can produce.

The composer has provided the
following guide:

“Newly Drawn Sky is a lyrical, reflective
piece for orchestra, a reminiscence of the
first summer night by the ocean spent
with my young twins (who were six
months old when the work’s initial inspiration
came to me), and of the changing
colors of the summer sky at dusk. While
the work is not programmatic or specifically
descriptive, it reflects a constancy of
change and flux musically and personally.

“The piece begins with chromatically
shifting three-note chords in the foreground
that move upwards through the strings, then enlarge into the horns and
winds as a background to a long, singing
line in the violas. These chords and their
shifts ... are a fundamental element in
the formation of the work. ... Short
bursts of quick, scherzando music ...
alternate with continuations of the
increasingly expressionist singing melodic
line and rhythmically punctuated brass
and percussion outbursts. ...

“The calm middle section of the work
features serene melodic writing in the
winds and solo trumpet, underpinned
by undulating, slow-moving harmonies
in the strings. The opening lyrical line
returns in the strings and leads upwards
to a brief interruption, a transformation
of the scherzo-like music. This quickly
vanishes into a full return of the opening
music, which grows into a vast landscape
of sound in the entire orchestra. ...
Newly Drawn Sky closes with a simple,
consonant coda, which gradually and
lyrically calms the memory of tensions
that have surfaced over the course of
the work.”

Lament and Prayer

After writing relatively light-hearted
music during the 1980s, in the 1990s
the composer turned to a series of works
responding to catastrophic world issues:
the Second Symphony (1991) responded
to the recent Gulf War; Colored Fields
(1994), a concerto for English horn and
orchestra inspired by his visit to Auschwitz;
and Lament and Prayer (1995). Commissioned
by the Minnesota Orchestra for
the remarkable violinist Pamela Frank,
Lament and Prayer was written “in commemoration
of the 50th anniversary of the
end of World War II and the Holocaust.”

“Lament and Prayer,” writes Kernis,
“marks the end of a series—the other
bookend, so to speak—of a group of
works motivated by my reaction to war
and suffering, to genocide, especially in
terms of the Holocaust, and to what we
know has been going on in Bosnia. ...
Ever since my Symphony No. 2 ... I’ve
been writing pieces related to war. In
fact, I quote a number of these pieces
throughout Lament and Prayer. ...

“The image I often had in mind ...
was that of a cantor and a congregation.
The music proceeds as statement and response in much of the first part, which
is very chromatic, rather severe sounding,
and intense; the Prayer is mostly quiet
and spun from a very simple, long line
with pulsing harmonies underneath—
just the hint of the minimalist elements
that occasionally crop up in my music.
On the surface, it is mostly peaceful, and
the last part comes to a resolution, closing
this chapter of my work. Things on
this globe are even more precarious than
when I began this series in 1991. I have
to detach and leave the world conflicts
out of my music for a while.”

As Russell Platt has rightly commented,
Lament and Prayer “demands a spiritual
commitment from the audience beyond
the passive kind of experience that many
listeners have come to expect from concert
life.” The “Lament” opens with very
soft bell-tolling chords calling the congregation
to attention. Then the soloist
begins his cantillation, singing cantorial
melismas deep in the violin’s range to
imitate a man’s voice. The string orchestra
is the congregation, joining and amplifying
his Kaddish for the dead. Midway
through, listen for an extraordinary
passage: a great unison outcry from the
lower strings that ascends slowly and
culminates in a dissonant babble of individual
voices crying out in protest. After
rising to another shrieking climax of
pain, “Lament” subsides into the soloist’s
exhausted weeping.

Much more emotionally and harmonically
serene, “Prayer” searches for consolation,
hope beyond suffering. Drenched
in poignant lyricism, the violin part is
now less ritualistically cantorial, more
personal. After a lengthy and intense
solo cadenza, Kernis introduces “a little
surprise”: for the first time in the piece,
we hear instruments other than strings—
oboe, two harps, and delicate Asian bells
playing the beautiful principal melody of
Kernis’ Colored Fields. The close is one of
the most ineffably beautiful in modern—
or any—music.

Symphony No. 6 in F Major, op. 68 “Pastoral”
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born December 16, 1770, in Bonn, Germany
Died March 26, 1827, in Vienna, Austria

Beethoven spent most of his adult life
as an urban man living in Vienna, but his heart belonged to the country. During
the summers, he spent the warm months
in outlying villages such as Heiligenstadt,
Mödling, and Baden. Musical sketchbook
in hand, he roamed the fields and woodlands
from dawn to dusk. He looked
forward to these rural sojourns, he wrote,
“with the delight of a child. No man on
earth loves the country more; woods,
trees, and rocks give the response which
man requires. ... Every tree seems to say
‘Holy, Holy.’ ”

So perhaps it is surprising that we have
only one “Pastoral” Symphony from his
pen, a work unique among Beethoven’s
output for its sense of geniality and
relaxation. Almost simultaneously with
this piece written in 1807 and early 1808,
the composer was creating his defining
Fifth Symphony. Unlike that symphony’s
dramatic mood of heroic struggle, the
“Pastoral” is leisurely, lyrical, conflict-free,
and radiating a joyful acceptance of life.

Since Beethoven gave descriptive titles
to each of the movements, Romantic
composers and commentators seized on
the work as an early example of program
music: a genre that portrays scenes and
events in musical terms. But this was
not Beethoven’s intention, as he suggests
in his subtitle for the work as a whole:
“Pastoral Symphony, or a recollection of
country life. More an expression of feeling
than a painting.”

Movement 1 (“Cheerful impressions
awakened by arrival in the country”):

The work’s uniquely serene mood
emerges in the gracious opening phrase
of this sonata-form movement. Unusual
for Beethoven, harmonies are simple and
straightforward, and they will remain so
throughout the work, except for the
“Storm” interlude. The scoring is gentle:
only strings and woodwinds are used in
this and the second movement. We share
with Beethoven the mood of contentment
and happiness he described himself as
feeling whenever he arrived at his country
haunts. Notice the ecstatic burbling of
the solo clarinet near the end of the
movement—reminiscent of birdsong
but also a sound of sheer delight.

Movement 2 (“Scene by the brook”):

The gentle second movement is the
heart of this symphony and one of
Beethoven’s most sublime creations. Arpeggios on muted cellos, violas, and
second violins conjure the murmuring
sounds of the brook, which pervade the
entire movement. The themes unfold in
leisurely, repetitious fashion reminiscent
of a summer day. Real birdcalls appear
in an exquisite passage near the end, in
which the solo flute, oboe, and clarinet
mimic, respectively, the nightingale,
quail, and cuckoo.

Movement 3 (“Merry gathering of
country folk”):

In this scherzo movement
we finally meet the people who
populate Beethoven’s country landscape.
According to Beethoven’s amanuensis
Anton Schindler, there was band that
played at The Three Ravens Tavern near
Mödling, one of the composer’s favorite
summer haunts. Though amateur,
Beethoven loved them and even composed
waltzes for them. Their spirit and
style influenced this jovial peasant-dance
movement. The middle or trio section
has two parts: a pert melody introduced
by solo oboe and a boisterous dance that
sounds like a real Austrian hoedown.

Movement 4 (“Thunderstorm”):

In the
Pastoral’s most overtly descriptive passage,
the dance is suddenly interrupted by the
ominous rumbling of thunder in the cellos
and double basses. The timpani, in its
only appearance in the symphony, imitates
the crack of thunder, the piccolo shrieks
overhead, and two trombones add to the
ruckus. The frightening sound deep in the
orchestra is produced by cellos playing
rapid five-note patterns clashing against
four-note patterns in the double basses.

Movement 5 (“Shepherd’s Song: Glad
and grateful feelings after the storm”):

The storm subsides, and a rainbow
appears in the rain-cleansed air.
Beethoven opens his uplifting finale with
the yodeling call of a ranz des vaches
or Swiss shepherd’s song, from which
his “Hymn of Thanksgiving” principal
theme immediately develops. When this
theme reappears near the end, it gradually
sheds its folk simplicity and grows in
grandeur to a sublime apotheosis.