MUSIC AT THE MISSION

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Sunday, August 12, 4pm & 8pm

Mission San Juan Bautista
Tickets: $38/day; $33/eve

Kenneth Fuchs: United Artists (World Premiere)
Aaron Jay Kernis: Valentines (Susan Narucki, soprano) (West Coast Premiere)
Kevin Puts: Symphony No. 4 (World Premiere–– Commission)

There are few settings more spiritual or profound in which to experience music than the Old Mission at San Juan Bautista. For more than 30 years the Festival has presented Grand Finale performances in the church’s sanctuary that leave audiences deeply moved and transcendent. Maestra Alsop closes the 2007 season with another such program––two world premieres and a west coast premiere with all three composers in attendance. Composer Kenneth Fuchs makes his Festival debut for the world premiere of United Artists, a work commissioned for the London Symphony Orchestra for an upcoming recording. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis returns for his steering song cycle sung by Grammy Award-winning soprano Susan Narucki. Titled Valentines, the piece is set to poems by contemporary British poet Carol Ann Duffy. The concert ends with a work by composer Kevin Puts. Commissioned by Howard Hansen in honor of his wife Carrie for the Festival’s world premiere performances at Mission San Juan, Puts’ Symphony No. 4 takes its inspiration from the musical legacy of the Mutsun Indians of San Juan Bautista. 200 songs were transcribed in the first half of the 19th century by a friar working at the Mission and now preserved in a manuscript at the University of California/Berkeley library. Puts makes this a tribute celebration and preservation of the Mutsun music at the Mission. And a powerful close to another extraordinary Festival season.

PROGRAM NOTES:
United Artists (for Orchestra) (2006) (World premiere)
Kenneth Fuchs (b. 1956)

Kenneth Fuchs received music degrees from the University of Miami and the Juilliard School, where he studied composition with Milton Babbitt, David Del Tredici, David Diamond, Vincent Persichetti and Alfred Reed. He currently serves as professor of composition and head of the Department of Music at the University of Connecticut.

Although United Artists has already been recorded, the CD hasn’t been released yet, making this performance the world premiere. The piece is dedicated “To Marin Alsop and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.” Heath has written the following note:

In September 2003, I had the extraordinary experience of having three of my orchestral works recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. I was dazzled by the orchestra’s ability to collectively read at sight and simultaneously record the most virtuosic musical passages without prior acquaintance with the music. In anticipation of our second recording project together, in November 2006, I composed United Artists as a tribute to this remarkable group of musicians. It is a bright and energetic score, celebrating the artistic power of a world-class orchestra. The principal musical element of the composition is a four-note motive—the intervals of a descending perfect fourth, an ascending major sixth, and an ascending minor second—stated forcefully at the outset by the entire orchestra. This motive is extended and taken up in various melodic and harmonic combinations by the players and provides the basis for musical development and transformation throughout the remainder of the composition.

Recording to be released in 2008 on the Naxos America label with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta

Valentines for Soprano and Orchestra (1999-2000) (West Coast premiere)
Aaron Jay Kernis (b. 1960)

Born in Philadelphia, Aaron Jay Kernis studied composition at the San Francisco Conservatory, the Manhattan School of Music and the Yale University School of Music, and had his first orchestral work performed by the New York Philharmonic in 1983. The youngest composer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize (in 1998 for his String Quartet No. 2) he is also a 2002 recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award. He currently serves as new music advisor for the Minnesota Orchestra.

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music has previously performed six Kernis works: two in 1995, New Era Dance (1994) and the chamber work Le quattro stagioni della cucina futurismo (“The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine”) (1991), Lament and Prayer (1995) for violin and orchestra in 1999, Color Wheel (2002) in 2004, a version of his Air (1995) for cello and orchestra performed in 2005 at Mission San Juan Bautista, and a performance last season of Newly Drawn Sky (2005). This program note is by Russell Platt, annotated by Aaron Jay Kernis, and is used with generous permission.

Love, death and the fear of separation have always been the favorite subjects of art song composers, being the subjects closest to our hearts, and are nothing if not a direct form of musical communication—using the human voice, the one instrument all of us can play. In Kernis' Valentines, these emotions come out direct, unmediated; he must of necessity set the words of his chosen text, but Kernis tries to go beyond this, finding the emotional core of a poem and exploding it off the printed page. Every listener will have their own reaction to Valentines, but no one will be bored by them; they are bracing, confrontational things.
While these songs are beautiful, they do not wear their beauty lightly. “I have little interest in using irony, but there's a definite tension between the title and the texts,” Kernis says. While the songs were originally written in 1999-2000 for internationally known diva Renée Fleming, they are dedicated to the memory of Jacob Druckman, one of the composer's principal teachers and for years a professor of composition at Yale School of Music (where Kernis now teaches) and a formidable figure in American music. It was Druckman who arranged for Kernis' first orchestral work, Dream of the Morning Sky to be read by the New York Philharmonic at the start of Kernis' career, and Druckman's last work for voice and orchestra—Counterpoise, introduced by Dawn Upshaw—is a piece for which Kernis has a particular fondness. In addition, Valentine is the title of a solo bass piece by Druckman, one of his most frequently played compositions. “There's a definite connection to Jacob's title,” Kernis says. “There's a sense of loss in these songs, for someone important to you, but who is very much removed, far away.”
In texts by the contemporary British poet Carol Ann Duffy, Kernis found a language to suit his singer’s gifts and his own musical needs. They were not easy to come by; though initially recommended by a close friend, Duffy's poems were not published in the US, and finding a collection of them took a lot of searching. They are full of light images, favorite things of Kernis' and found in many of his works with text and orchestral pieces.

Yet in Duffy's poems, these images are fraught with ambiguity. In the first, second and fourth poems, light can be many things; the color of absence, a reminder of a departed lover, the promise of reunion, of an agent of death. In the third, the anchor of the cycle, it provides the central metaphor—the brilliant gold, intense as “the sun” that enriches and yet destroys. When the “fool who wished for gold” arrives in the woman's garden, “the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky,” and before long it is clear that she will no never again feel “his warm hands on my skin, his touch.” The gift of gold means the ruin of the gift of intimacy. Each text touches on distances, irreparable gulfs between the living and the dead, the lover and the loved, the safety of closeness along with the potential for tragic, final separation.

Frustrating subjects, which Kernis couches in an appropriate musical language: tone clusters of clashing triads set in parallel or contrary motion, roulades and flourishes thrown about with maddening velocity, their musical journey occasionally broken by oases of softer jazzy harmonies, warmer in mood but providing no rest. Only in the finale—which, for the first time uses a key signature—do poet and composer find their goal, Kernis developing the possibilities of the refrain structure, which by its nature seeks to impose order and calm. But even the final moments seem hard won.

Valentines was commissioned in two forms: the initial version for voice and piano commissioned by Great Performers at Lincoln Center, and the orchestral version by the Minnesota Orchestra. A recording by Susan Narucki and Donald Berman of the piano version on a disc of three Kernis song cycles will be released by Koch Classics this fall.


VALENTINES
Music by AARON JAY KERNIS (1999)
Texts by Carol Ann Duffy

1. VALENTINE

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
like a lover.
It will make your reflection
a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
possessive and faithful,
for as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
if you like.

Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
cling to your knife.

2. MILES AWAY

I want you and you are not here. I pause
in this garden, breathing the colour thought is
before language into still air. Even your name
is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again
and again, it will not stay with me. Tonight
I make you up, imagine you, your movements clearer
than the words I have you say you said before.

Wherever you are now, inside my head you fix me
with a look, standing here whilst cool late light
dissolves into the earth. I have got your mouth wrong,
but still it smiles. I hold you closer, miles away,
inventing love, until the calls of nightjars
interrupt and turn what was to come, was certain,
into memory. The stars are filming us for no one.

3. MRS. MIDAS

It was late September. I’d just poured a glass of wine, begun
to unwind, while the vegetables cooked. The kitchen
filled with the smell of itself, relaxed, its steamy breath
gently blanching the windows. So I opened one,
then with my fingers wiped the other’s glass like a brow.
He was standing under the pear-tree snapping a twig.

Now the garden was long and the visibility poor, the way
the dark of the ground seems to drink the light of the sky
but that twig in his hand was gold. And then he plucked
a pear from a branch, we grew Fondante d’Automne,
and it sat in his palm like a light bulb. On.
I thought to myself, Is he putting fairy lights in the tree?

He came into the house. The doorknobs gleamed.
He drew the blinds. You know the mind; I thought of
the Field of the Cloth of Gold and of Miss Macready.
He sat in that chair like a king on a burnished throne.
The look on his face was strange, wild, vain; I said,
What in the name of God is going on? He started to laugh.

I served up the meal. For starters, corn on the cob.
Within seconds he was spitting out the teeth of the rich.
He toyed with his spoon, then mine, then with the knives, the
forks.
He asked where was the wine, I poured with a shaking hand
a fragrant, bone-dry white from Italy, then watched
as he picked up the glass, goblet, golden chalice, drank.

It was then that I started to scream. He sank to his knees.
After we’d both calmed down, I finished the wine
on my own, hearing him out. I made him sit
on the other side of the room and keep his hands to himself.
I locked the cat in the cellar. I moved the phone.
The toilet I didn’t mind. I couldn’t believe my ears:

how he’d had a wish. Look, we all have wishes; granted.
But who has wishes granted? Him. Do you know about gold?
It feeds no one; aurum, soft, untarnishable; slakes
no thirst. He tried to light a cigarette; I gazed, entranced,
as the blue flame played on its luteous stem. At least,
I said, you’ll be able to give up smoking for good.

Separate beds. In fact, I put a chair against the door,
near petrified. He was below, turning the spare room
into the tomb of Tutankhamen. You see, we were passionate
then,
in those halcyon days; unwrapping each other, rapidly,
like presents, fast food. But know I feared his honeyed
embrace,
the kiss that would turn my lips to a work of art.

And who, when it comes to the crunch, can live
with a heart of gold? That night, I dreamt I bore
his child, its perfect ore limbs, its little tongue
like a precious latch, its amber eyes
holding their pupils like flies. My dream-milk
burned in my breasts. I woke to the streaming sun.

So he had to move out. We’d a caravan
in the wilds, in a glade of its own. I drove him up
under cover of dark. He sat in the back.
And then I came home, the woman who married the fool
who wished for gold. At first I visited, odd times,
parking the car a good way off, then walking.

You knew you were getting close. Golden trout
on the grass. One day, a hare hung from a larch,
a beautiful lemon mistake. And them his footprints,
glistening next to the river’s path. He was thin,
delirious; hearing, he said, the music of Pan
from the woods. Listen. That was the last straw.

What gets me now is not the idiocy or greed
but lack of thought for me. Pure selfishness. I sold
the contents of the house and came down here.
I think of him in certain lights, dawn, late afternoon,
and once a bowl of apples stopped me dead. I miss most,
even now, his hands, his warm hands on my skin, his touch.

4. WHO LOVES YOU

I worry about you traveling in those mystical machines.
Every day people fall from the clouds, dead.
Breathe in and out and in and out easy.
Safety, safely, safe home.

Your photograph is in the fridge, smiles when the light comes on.
All the time people are burnt in the public places.
Rest where the cool trees drop to a gentle shade.
Safety, safely, safe home.

Don’t lie down on the sands where the hole in the sky is.
Too many people being gnawed to shreds.
Send me your voice however it comes across oceans.
Safety, safely, safe home.

The loveless men and homeless boys are out there and angry.
Nightly people end their lives in the shortcut.
Walk in the light, steadily hurry towards me.
Safety, safely, safe home. (Who loves you?)
Safety, safely, safe home.

Symphony No. 4 (2007) (World premiere)
Kevin Puts (b. 1973)

Works by Kevin Puts have been featured annually at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music programs since 2003 and he has been a Festival Guest Composer each time. In 2003 the Festival performed the West Coast premiere of his Symphony No. 2: Island of Innocence (2001), followed in 2004 by his Vespertine Symphonies (2004) and in 2005 by the West Coast premiere of River’s Rush (2004). Last season saw the West Coast premiere of his Percussion Concerto (2005). He has written the following notes for this premiere:

Every year in August, an entire orchestra of dedicated musicians gathers in Santa Cruz, California to play nothing but contemporary orchestral music for two weeks. On the last day of this period, they travel south about thirty miles to the town of San Juan Bautista to play their final concerts at the old Spanish mission there.

For more than twenty-five years, Howard Hansen (no relation to the composer who spelled his name “Hanson”) has not only avidly attended the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, he has been one of its most generous patrons. For Mr. Hansen, the high point each year is the concert at San Juan Bautista, and he decided to commission a work as a gift to his wife Carrie. He sent me some histories of the Mission and its town and asked me to write something inspired by this place that had become so special to him over the years.

That San Juan Bautista has been called “the Mission of Music” owes itself to the musical predispositions of some of its founding friars who baptized thousands of Mutsun Indians and took it upon themselves to teach them to sing church music. They were disturbed by the Mutsun’s failure to abandon their own music in favor of that which the friars presumably considered to be more civilized. Once I read this, I became immediately interested in tracking down any remnants of this Mutsun musical ancestry. Victoria Levine, an expert in Native American music who teaches at the University of Colorado Fort Collins, pointed me toward the Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley where a manuscript of Francisco Arroyo de la Cuesta which she believed contained transcriptions of around 200 Mutsun songs had been held since it had been sent there by the Smithsonian Institute several years ago. This manuscript, dating from around 1818, is falling apart, so I had it sent to me on microfilm only to discover to my disappointment many pages of Spanish and Latin text and only a few songs at the very end of the manuscript.

Quirina Luna Costillas is one of the few surviving descendants of the Mutsuns and a highly regarded leader among this small community. She told me that I had found Francisco Arroyo’s arriquetpon, a dictionary he made himself that contains several hundred Mutsun words and a few song transcriptions as well. Ms. Costillas said she had been searching all over the world for the volume of 200 songs Dr. Levine had described, but to no avail. She also told me that the songs of her people should not be misused—healing songs are for healing, wedding songs are for weddings, etc.—and that if the few songs I had found in Arroyo’s journal were to find their way into my piece, it could cause a sickness for her people. With this in mind, I decided I could treat this “source material” in much the same way I treated Bjork’s Vespertine in my third symphony. I would try to imitate the flavor and nuance of it but avoid direct quotation.

Symphony No. 4 begins with music designed for performance within the reverberant walls of Mission San Juan Bautista, in other words music inspired by an acoustic environment with which I became acquainted when Marin Alsop performed my Symphony No. 2 with the Festival Orchestra at the Mission in 2003. Rather “archaic”-sounding melodic lines recall the simplicity of early chant and feature an echo effect that is written into the orchestration. The second movement (arriquetpon) is an imaginary compendium of Mutsun tunes loosely based on the shapes and motives I found in Arroyo’s diary. From this festive and varied river of melodies, a prosaic, unchanging hymn tune repeatedly emerges and recedes. A return to the opening music follows this movement in the form of an interlude and reaches a climactic upheaval of some magnitude. It leads to a “healing song” which—in the midst of the current world climate—seems to me as appropriate as ever.

Not recorded