Aaron Jay Kernis by Leta E. Miller

Author:Leta E. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2014-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

6 Triumphs and Tribulations

Big Commissions, Big Risks, Big Rewards (1995–2001)

IN 1995 THE AMERICAN ACADEMY of arts and Letters honored Kernis with a $7,500 prize to facilitate a recording.1 Accompanying the award was a tribute to the thirty-five-year-old composer noting his “Dickensian abundance” in pouring out “many remarkable large-scale pieces…. As each work grows in both precision and eloquence,” said the tribute’s author, “Kernis seems destined to prove that Blake’s ‘road of excess’ leads indeed to the ‘palace of wisdom.’” The extravagant prose proved more prescient than its author could have predicted. During the following five years Kernis would continue down the “road of excess,” churning out new works at a prodigious rate, but he would also be led to “the palace of wisdom” by confronting (and meeting) some difficult challenges.

The period began auspiciously with a mushrooming in the number of performances of Kernis’s works. In January the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group took Goblin Market on its English tour. In March the National Symphony played New Era Dance. In the same month Joshua Bell performed the new Air on his own U.S. tour and then took it to Germany that summer. In May Hugh Wolff conducted the European premiere of the Second Symphony with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, followed by the U.K. premieres of Musica Celestis and Invisible Mosaic III. Wolff then conducted the orchestra in all three works for a compact disc release.

The Birmingham performances and the recording were facilitated by Argo Records and its general manager and artistic director Andrew Cornall, who had signed Kernis to an exclusive recording contract. When he assumed the leadership position at Argo in 1989, Cornall began to refocus a label previously committed to traditional repertoire by developing a cutting-edge concentration on new music. “Labels were normally committed to an artist—to a pianist or a violinist,” he says. “There was somebody missing in that list, the composer.” Argo made long-term commitments to six young U.S. and U.K. composers: Graham Fitkin, Michael Nyman, Mark Anthony Turnage, Michael Torke, Michael Daugherty, and Aaron Jay Kernis. Prior to Wolff’s recording, Argo had already issued three discs of Kernis’s music. The Symphony in Waves and the first string quartet appeared in 1992, followed by recordings of New Era Dance and Colored Field in 1995 and 1996. The disc containing the Second Symphony, Musica Celestis, and Invisible Mosaic III was published in 1997. Argo would release one more Kernis recording in 1999 (featuring Lament and Prayer and the Double Concerto), but by that time the CD boom of the 1990s had collapsed and the label’s ground-breaking support for young composers disintegrated.2

In the summer of 1995 Kernis appeared for the first time as one of the featured composers at the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz, California, a two-week contemporary music extravaganza held annually since 1963. Director Marin Alsop had become of fan of Kernis’s music after performing New Era Dance with her Concordia Orchestra in New York; for the 1995 Cabrillo Festival she programmed that piece along with Quattro stagioni.

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