Award-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis will premiere his trumpet concerto, “a Voice, a Messenger,” during the Illinois Wind Symphony performance at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.
Kernis is the winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and one of the youngest composers to ever be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, according to a press release. Before the performance, Kernis met with The Daily Illini to discuss where he found the inspiration for this piece and his other works.
Daily Illini: Can you tell us a little about “a Voice, a Messenger?”
Aaron Jay Kernis: It’s about 22 minutes and has a very broad scope to it. A soloist — Philip Smith — the principle trumpet of the New York Philharmonic, said that something he always hoped for was a piece that dealt in some way with the appearances of the trumpet and related instruments in the Bible … I went to a Yom Kippur service … and given the service and what it meant, I was able to begin to grasp an emotional direction to the piece and tone for the piece and wound up using as background the excerpts from the service and techniques specific to the shofar (horn, typically used for Jewish religious purposes).
DI: What influences most of your works?
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AJK: If I’m writing a symphony or a string quartet, I’m usually working with formal relationships that get developed in music. Then, I have also pieces that come from inspiration from the world or from art, from literature, the political landscape in some ways. I think the main thing is that I’m always trying to convey a very evolutional world that’s really coming from an emotional response. Music conveys things that we can’t express in words, and that’s one of the most powerful things about music — it expresses the things that we really can’t say otherwise in language. And that’s why I feel music is the language I speak.
DI: How would you describe your musical style?
AJK: It’s hard to describe because I’ve done many kinds of things, and I’m one of these composers where after a couple pieces, I want to turn around and do something completely different stylistically … So I’ll do some dark dramatic pieces, (and) then I’ll do some pop-inspired, more light-hearted pieces, then some extremely lyrical beautiful pieces.
DI: Your composition career started at the young age of 13 — did you always know you wanted to make composing your career?
AJK: By the time enough opportunities happened (at the end) of high school, I decided I was going to pursue it in college and in graduate school. By the time I was 16 or 17, it was pretty clear to me that that’s what I wanted to do.
DI: What do you think contributed to success so early in your career?
AJK: It probably helped that I started so early, and also that coming into college I just made a very clear decision with myself that I was just going to pursue this passion with my greatest intensity. That meant that when I left school, I chose to not go back into an academic environment, not go back to teaching, but just try to focus on composing and work on developing my craft and developing my expression over many years and really make that my focus.
DI: What is your goal for each composition, as far as how it moves the listener?
AJK: Often one of the most invigorating things to see is how people take music a different way and how they take it personally. As much as music is an emotional statement and an emotional journey for me, I hope that not everyone will have the same journey. But for me, whenever I write a piece, it’s definitely an emotional world I’m trying to create and to make for the listener, a relationship to the music that hopefully in each person will be kind of unique.
DI: How has your composing career changed since it began?
AJK: The more I go on in my composing career, rather than making a lot of decisions about where a piece is going to go from the beginning, now I’m much more comfortable following where the music takes me, rather than kind of controlling the music and playing with the tension between one’s own desires and where the music is actually heading. So it’s been a great discovery.
More information about the Illinois Wind Symphony performance can be found at www.krannertcenter.com.
Tickets range from $4 to $10, and can be purchased at Krannert all day before the performance.
Jordan can be reached at [email protected].
