Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra 
Stanislav conducting.

Nunatak

You Put Apples to Your Lips

A setting of Jane Hirshfield's poem "Speed and Perfection" from her collection Given Sugar, Given Salt. The poem captures the delicacy and ephemeral tastiness of apricots. I dedicate my setting to my mother, with whom I have many happy memories eating, procuring and protecting apricots.

June 16, 2012

Speed and Perfection

The musical materials Strange Woods were generated from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “Fairy-land.” Pitches and rhythms were assigned according to predetermined patterns and clusters and the accents of the text.  These raw materials were then redistributed and rearranged, and edited to create the overall piece and to try to capture the mysterious, mischievous, and evaporative quality of the original poem.

UCSB flute choir led by Calisa Hildebrand 2012

Strange Woods

The Return of Silence is an adaptation of a portion of the thirteenth century Roman de Silence by Heldris of Cornwall. The original romance follows a complicated plot that evolves over many years, but the oratorio focuses on a single episode in the story: Silence, the protagonist, returns to her parents, the Count and Countess of Cornwall after running away to become a minstrel only to find that all minstrels have been banished on pain of death.

The prologue explains the background of Silence’s predicament. King Evan has disinherited all the women of England and Silence has been raised as a boy so that she can inherit her father’s land. However, she decides to run away in order to train as a musician. In the first scene, Silence arrives at an inn only to have the innkeeper announce that since he is a minstrel he must turn him over to the court tomorrow so that he can avoid being executed for harboring her. To pay for her nights stay she entertains the crowd by playing her viele. In the second scene, Silence faces the court and tries to convince her father that killing her would be futile. Merlin, disguised as an old man, comes to her defense and announces that she is the Count’s long lost son, but this only infuriates the distraught count. In the third scene, Merlin once again tries to placate the Count. This time Merlin tells the Count that, while the minstrel is not his son, he does know him. The Count then invites Silence to his chambers where she explains that she is indeed his daughter and shows him the birthmark on her shoulder. In the final scene, Silence asks her father to lift the ban on minstrels and he consents. The town celebrates the return of both Silence and music.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Romance de Silence is its instance on using both the masculine and feminine pronouns for the protagonist in order to illustrate the perception of her gender by others and by herself. This aspect is preserved in the libretto. The tune that Silence plays for the crowd on her viele at the end of scene one is a variation on the only trobaritz (female troubadour) tune which survives with notation; “A chantar” by the Comtesse de Dia.

The Return of Silence

A polyphonic setting of the opening of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach". Performed by Sospiro at the University of Oregon, 2006. Lines interweave as ripples on the night ocean.

The Sea is Calm Tonight

A shouted fugue portraying the madness, pressure and violence of modern existence. Lyrics from Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man".

Tension, Apprehension, and Dissension

Inspired by my mother's quilting practices, the first movement of Quilt I was "patched" together using both isorhythym and fugue. The talea (rhythm) of the isorhythm was derived from length of the seams in a house-quilt pattern that my mother uses, and the colour (pitches) were taken from the trouvere chanson de toile, "Belle Doette". On top of this structure I built a fugue. Like a quilt, this composition has a front and a back. The two movements are designated by the medieval terms for the front and back of a manuscript page; recto and verso. Recto, the "chanson de toile," represents a song of work; it is both busy, and required much technical work in its composition, but the verso is a "chanson d'etoile," a song of stars, and is contemplative, still and reflective.  The movements can be played in either order.

Quilt I

Annie Thompson, mezzo-soprano and Yi Kai Sim, piano

The text for Memories of Silver was derived from Walter de la Mare’s poem “Silver”. This text, half-remembered, abbreviated, and altered, reveals the original poem in patches, as if it is being seen by moonlight. The music is gentle and full of romantic and impressionistic harmony. The bass line walks slowly depicting the flow of time, the passage of the moon, and the movement of water.

The lyrics to Memories of Silver:

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoes
This way, that, she peers, sees
Silver fruit on silver trees;

The windows catch
Her beams beneath silver thatch.

A mouse scampers by,
With silver claw, and silver eye;
And listless fish in water gleam
By silver reeds in a silver stream.

Memories of Silver

Music by Katherine Saxon
Words by Nicholas Alward

        Tsuki ga dete
	Shirogane no yoru
	Shiawase da

       The moon rises
	Overhead a silver night
	This is happiness

Tsuki ga dete/the moon rises was written an engagement present for my husband, Nicholas Alward. He wrote the poem for me the first Valentine's Day we were dating. I completed the first version of the score by the time we got engaged in December of 2014, but it went through a number of revisions before it was performed for our wedding the following October. 

We are both interested in Japanese culture. Nick studied Japanese while in college, so he wrote the poem both in Japanese and in English. He also has a love of minimalist and trance music, so I incorporated aspects of these styles into the composition. The original poem and subsequent composition were inspired by the scene of small ocean waves lapping against the shore in the moonlight below the bluffs on the UC Santa Barbara campus, which we walked often. 

Many thanks to my friend Ramin Haghjoo for coaching me on the Japanese pronunciation while I composed the piece in secret.

Tsuki ga dete/The moon rises

Ryan Gardener, trumpet
Louisa Ellis Woodson, harp

from the album Semptiternal Songs

1. morning star
2. the watchman
3. the jealous one
4. the lark/first light 
5. dawn

Alba is loosely based on the most famous troubadour abla, or dawn song, Reis Glorios, by Giraut de Bornelh (c.1140 – 1200). The poem like, like most albas, reflects on the closing of a tryst at the end of the night as dawn approaches. Each movement reflects on a aspect of the poem; the various natural phenomenon heralding the dawn, the patiently waiting friend, the jealous husband. The opening harmonies set out by the first seven notes of the original tune influence the harmonies of the other movements in various ways. The bird of the fourth movement, mentioned in the third stanza is the lark, as later referred to in the classic alba type situation in Romeo and Juliet , Act II, scene 5, “It was the lark, the herald of the morn, No nightingale”.  I am a west–coaster, so I chose to use the Western Meadow Lark and I transcribed a lark call for the trumpet part of the fourth movement. The final movement is a transcription and arrangement of the original troubadour tune Reis Glorios. Part of this work was written at the Banff Centre in Alberta during a residency program in the winter of 2015.

Katherine Saxon

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