"Ecospheres," composed in 2019-2020, is an evocation of the urgency that should move  us in a time of environmental crisis and climate change.  The music is meant both to suggest what is being lost and to give voice to an aspiration--hope may be too great a reach--to preserve as much as we can: to keep what remains.

"Remains" is the name of a cycle of prose poems on these themes by Elisabeth Frost and of a collection of photographs, paired with the poems, by Dianne Kornberg.  Two of the poems, "Passerine" and "Wolf," give their texts to "Ecospheres," which sets them as its first and third movements, respectively.  The middle movement, "Valley," combines a text by the composer, inspired by a poem by Alice Oswald, with an adaptation of a biblical passage, the valley of dry bones from the book of Ezekiel.  The key question of the 17-18 minute cycle is the one asked by the ancient prophet: can these bones live?

This studio recording was made one day before the premiere of the work by members of Contemporaneous at Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall in February 2022: Nathaniel Sullivan, baritone; David Bloom, conductor; Yoshi Weinberg, flute; Christina Teuschler, clarinet; Blair Hamrick, French horn; Finnegan Shanahan, violin; Sarah Haines, viola; and Amanda Gookin, cello.  

Credits: "Passerine" copyright 2017 by Elisabeth Frost, "Wolf" copyright 2018 by Elisabeth Frost.  Printed, set, and posted by permission; the texts may be reproduced in program notes provided that copyright credit is given. 

The image of the water nymph in "Valley,"an ancient bone figurine seeking to revive her lost environment milieu, was inspired by Alice Oswald's poem "Dunt: A Poem for a "Dried-Up River."  The passage describing the valley of dry bones derives from Ezekiel 37, KJV.

Ecospheres

The title of this string trio refers to a common need.  When something is sought for that can  be found or accomplished only gradually, we have to trust that the desired end will come in time--
that there will be enough time to reach it and that we will really reach it "in time," before it is too late.  This piece entrusts the traditional four movements with forming a musical parallel to this 
experience.  The first movement begins quietly and becomes increasingly exuberant.  Each of the subsequent movements takes up some feature of the first and makes it a part of its own sound world, enacting a process that finds its completion in the fullness of time.  A through-line arises as the music dwells on the constant exchange among its three independent voices, each of which carries what it "hears" in the others into its own higher or lower voice. The music continually crisscrosses its tonal space.  It is cast as a string trio rather than as a quartet to emphasize the distinct color of each voice, thus making a virtue of the exposed texture that is one of the challenges of the genre.

Fullness Of Time (String Trio No. 2)

In nature a trefoil is a three-leafed clover.  In architecture it is an ornament in the shape of three  overlapping leaves.  In mathematics it is the first "nontrivial" knot, meaning that a knot tied in the trefoil shape cannot be untied without cutting it. The title of this composition refers first of all to the texture of three distinct, often exposed, instrumental voices. But it refers even more to the knot metaphorically tied by the music. The work is based on the separate elaboration of two very different ideas, ideas so different that each can be imagined as continuing silently while the other sounds. Yet the ideas are somehow so closely intertwined that one they could not be untied without cutting them.  This is not to say that they have some sort of "organic" relationship; they don't, and that is the point. Their intimacy is formed by the way they address and interrogate, yield to and overtake 
each other, as if each were always  aware of the other as an alter ego. The same relationship obtains between the main body of the work and the strange, floating, seemingly unfinished Prelude that introduces it--the third leaf in the large trefoil of the work.

Trefoil

The title of this two-movement string sextet alludes to images from two of my
favorite poems, Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and Hart Crane's
The Bridge. The passages from which the images come describe two different
crossings of the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan, one via the ferry and
the other via the famous bridge that replaced it. In each case the act of crossing is imaginative as well as physical; it symbolizes the blending of a multitude of sights and sounds into a coherent act of perception--a process that has increasingly come to interest me as a composer. In each case, too, the figure that embodies this possibility of this synthesis is a seagull on the wing: hence my title.

Crane's and Whitman's gulls embody two complementary versions of the flight of sensory fullness: for Crane the tracing of a curve in the air that echoes the curvature of the bridge and the curve of the earth, the other a hovering in place that gathers the lines of perception to itself. The first takes place at sunrise, the second at sunset.

The two movements of Wingspan (composed, respectively, in 2017 and 2010/17),evoke these crossings in the order of occurrence rather than of chronology: Crane precedes Whitman. The first movement (7 minutes), lively in tempo after a slow introduction, traces the way in which emergent events exceed the premises from which they arise. The slow second movement (14 minutes), essentially a set of variations, traces the way in which the implications of a single perception may be unraveled. It consists of eight 21-measure segments, to be played without pause, followed by an extended 
coda. Each segment (including the coda) is based on a single triad; the coda lifts passages from the preceding segments, transforms them, and weaves them into a single continuous utterance. Here are the passages invoked by the titles of the individual movements ("Dip and Pivot," "Floating High"):

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—
                                                              Crane, "To Brooklyn Bridge"

I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,
Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating
with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest
    in strong shadow,
Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south.
                                                              Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"

Wingspan

"Clouds, Wind, Stars" is an evocation of freewheeling energy with the barest pause for reflection.  The music vacillates between serene and excited, contemplative and impulsive modes of experience but the pulse never flags.

Composed in 2008, "Clouds. Wind. Stars" is a little over six minutes log.  It is both an independent composition--winner of the Composers Concordance 2013 "Generations" prize--and the Finale of my String Quartet no. 8, "Reflections and Memories," which premiered (via Zoom) in the summer of 2020, performed by the Eurasia String Quartet.  A video of the premiere is available online.

Clouds, Wind, Stars

Songs and Silences to Poems by Wallace Stevens was composed in connection with a conference, "Absence, Silence, and Ellipsis in Words and Music," held by the International Association of Word and Music Studies (WMA) in London in 2013. Why Stevens? The poems (chosen partly, I confess, because they are out of copyright) belong to the early phase of the poet’s career. The works from this phase typically set up a stark opposition between a banal, mundane reality and a sensuous, exotic, and fanciful
imagination. What makes this opposition powerful rather than merely glaring is the constant intimation that the world without imagination is not banal for social or accidental reasons, but banal in essence. The unimagined world is in and of itself a void.  Stevens’s regular word for its condition is “poverty.” Modernity, whose only wealth for Stevens was an abundance of lost illusions, made the knowledge of this poverty inescapable, however much we may wish to hide it from ourselves.  And it is this surplus absence that compels the products of imagination to attain the force of surplus presence. The music of Songs and Silences seeks to unveil the haunting traces of this underlying
emptiness--absence, silence, and ellipsis all in one--in ways that allow the paradoxical fullness of imagined things to find a voice.

Songs And Silences to Poems by Wallace Stevens

Dark Matter - Late Light for String Quartet (String Quartet no. 6)
was composed in 2011. The first half of the title refers to the mysterious
substance now known to compose most of the universe; the matter is
"dark" not only because it does not appear in the visible spectrum but
because we know next to nothing about it. This sense of an enigma at
the bottom of things also gives a second sense to the half-title; in an older
English usage, "dark matter" would refer to an enigmatic discourse, most
often an allegory. Both senses apply to the vigorous but troubled first
movement, which inhabits the sphere of enigma without trying to solve
its riddles (at least not all of them). The second movement initially may
seem the exact opposite of the first. Its figurative light, in the form of a
transparent and melodious texture, is perfectly clear, however belated.
But the impression proves to be not--not quite--true (though, enigmatically
enough I suppose, not quite false either).

String Quartet No. 6 - Dark Matter, Late Light

First drafted in 2009, A Short History was completed in 2012 for a premiere at the conference "Music and Genocide," held in November at the Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

     The text of A Short History is a list of forty-eight place names, each of which marks a scene of atrocity and mass death.  The implication speaks for itself.  Most of the history spans the period between World War I and what the composition takes to be the symbolic end of the century on the slightly belated date of September 11, 2001.  The close of the composition makes allowance for what was to follow, and what will.  Interspersed with the place names are a few brief quotations and a paraphrase from T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem The Waste Land--phrases (shown in parenthesis in the text) that in retrospect take on the weight of premonitions: iconic place names, the idea of the city as a utopia gone bad, and the image of falling towers.  The sequence of names is roughly chronological; some acts of naming occur out of sequence to mark historical connections or ironies.  And of course some names are missing.  There are all too many to choose from, and some mass killings--Stalin's famine in Ukraine, the murder sprees during the partition of British India--were diffuse.   A Short History is not inclusive, only exemplary.

      It is important to add that this piece with the iconic acronym ASH is not a lament or a threnody.  Those are genres not to be issued from a safe distance.  Instead, the music is a memorial.  It is a work of remembrance and a ritual of commemoration. Names, however evocative, tend to wear out with time and use.  The question addressed here is how to restore and reanimate them.

A Short History (Krakow)

A shift in the wind is both a commonplace natural occurrence and a metaphor for a change in the tenor of experience. This duality is at the core of Wallace Stevens's early lyrics "The Wind Shifts" and "To the Roaring Wind" and also of the composition inspired by them. The music understands the shifting winds, in both senses, as elements in a larger life cycle. Cyclical movement gives each movement its character at several levels. The work proceeds continuously but at the same time subdivides into segments that recur cyclically with different degrees of completeness and persistence. In the first movement, "The Wind in the Leaves," which sets a text I wrote for this piece as a preface to Stevens's poems, the cycle is purely harmonic. The movement dwells on and in the continuous flux in which utterance lies latent.  In the second movement, "The Wind Shifts," the harmonic cycles--different from those of the first movement--revolve within discrete sections that in turn move in cycles of their own. “The Wind Shifts” focuses on the search for utterance itself.  In both movements the harmonic cycles are based on successions of triads that unfold without the rationale of traditional tonal syntax. The second movement darkens the colors of the first, replacing violin and oboe with viola and English horn. The text setting, in keeping with the cyclical impulse, rotates (changing as it goes) through Stevens's "The Wind Shifts" and "To the Roaring Wind."

Duration is about 16 minutes.
Stevens's poems, published in 1917, are in the public domain

Words On The Wind

This composition originated during work on an a capella setting of a short
lyric by Walt Whitman, "Twilight."  It occurred to me in mid-stream that the
piece would also have a nice sound on string quartet, so I began making the
new version. It then occurred to me that the fragmentary nature of the poem
invited further treatment as well.  The result is this quartet, a series of seven
short pieces that constitute a series of variations without a theme.  Each piece  is conceived as a kind of mosaic in itself.  At the same time, by rearranging (reinterpreting, recasting, reframing) elements shared with the others, each  piece also adds itself as a tile to the larger mosaic.  The "Twilight"movement,  no. 5, forms both a long-awaited point of arrival and a necessary point of departure.  The poem (in its entirety) reads:

				The soft voluptuous opiate shades, 
				The sun just gone, the eager light dispell'd—(I too 
				           will soon be gone, dispell'd,) 
				A haze—nirwana—rest and night—oblivion.

   The music both yields to this evocation and resists it.  The poem is one of 
Whitman's frequent portrayals of oblivion as a quasi-erotic bliss.  The beauty 
of its language is captivating, but I don't want to believe what it's telling me.  
Mosaics" is a musical expression of this contradiction.
 
Composed 2015.  Duration: 19 minutes.

String Quartet No. 7 - Mosaics

Six Songs and an Epilogue is a setting of evocative passages from Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove.  The novel concerns an especially dark romantic triangle.  In love with the impecunious Kate Croy, Merton Densher woos a dying heiress, Milly Theale, in hopes of becoming her heir.  He does, but at the cost of both the money and his mistress, neither of which his conscience will let him keep.  The first three songs evoke Milly's experience of Venice, where she has gone in vain to recover her health; the fourth is a flashback to the moment that Milly, looking at a Venetian portrait, realizes that she is doomed; the next two take up Densher's discovery of the enormity of his actions; and the last sets the famous close of the novel, Kate's exit and parting words.

	The selection presented here consists of songs 1, 2, 4, 6, and the epilogue.  The cycle was composed in 2007-07 for baritone Michael Halliwell, who is heard in the recordings in songs 1, 6, and the epilogue, accompanied by David Miller; songs 2 and 4 are sung by Dylan Glenn, accompanied by Malivia Rarahjo.

	The texts of the selections follow.

	He heard her out in stillness, watching her face, but not moving.  Then he only said:

	1.  Hung about with pictures and relics, the rich Venetian past, the ineffaceable character, was here the presence revered and served: which brings us back to our truth of a moment ago--the fact that, more than ever, this October morning, awkward novice though she might be, Milly moved slowly to and fro as the priestess of the worship.  Certainly it came from the sweet taste of solitude, caught again and cherished for the hour; always a need of her nature when things spoke to her with penetration.  It was mostly in stillness that they spoke to her best; amid voices she lost the sense.  Voices had surrounded her for weeks, and she had tried to listen, had cultivated them and had answered back; these had been weeks in which there were other things they might well prevent her from hearing.

	2.  She made now, alone, the full circuit of the place, noble and peaceful while the summer sea, stirring here and there a curtain or an outer blind, breathed into its veiled places.  She had a vision of clinging to it. . .  She was in it, as in the arc of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness for it that why shouldn't this, in common mercy, be warrant enough? She would never, never leave it--she would engage to that; would ask nothing more than to sit tight in it and float on and on. 

 	4. She found herself, for the first moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair. . . . The lady in question, at all events, with . . . her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a great personage, but unaccompanied by a joy.  And she was dead, dead, dead.

	6. [Her] turn had possibilities that somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined.  It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was 
like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes--his pledge given not to save it--into the fathomless sea, or rather . . .  it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a faint, far wail.  This was the sound that he cherished, when alone, in the stillness of his rooms.  He sought and guarded the stillness, that it might prevail there.

	7.  (Epilogue.)  But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end.  "We shall never be again as we were."

Selections From Six Songs And An Epilogue To The Wings Of The Dove

"Ripple and Gleam,'' performed here by Claudia Schaer, violin, and Helen Lin, piano, is one of a group of three nocturnes composed between 2010 and 2014.  The piece was inspired by some lines from William Wordsworth's autobiographical poem, "The Prelude":

                                       No[t] without the voice
          Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
          Leaving behind her still, on either side,
          Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
          Until they melted all into one track
          Of sparkling light.  (I. 357- 67)

     "Ripple and Gleam" alternates between serenity and touches of ambivalent mystery, both suggested by the impression of distant light reflected on the water.

Ripple & Gleam (Violin And Piano)

Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University, author of sixteen books on music, returned to composing in 2007 after a long hiatus.  Performances have followed throughout America and Europe, with premieres in New York, San Francisco, London, Edinburgh, Oxford, Vienna, Ghent, and Stockholm, among many other venues.  Kramer’s output includes twenty-two song cycles and twelve string quartets.  He has won competitions held by Hartford Opera Theater, Ensemble for These Times, Composers' Concordance, The Arc Festival, The Composer's Voice, and the New York Contemporary Music Symposium.

Lawrence Kramer

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks