ABOUT THE PROGRAM

This is a program of many journeys. It begins with a bumpy wagon ride across southern Estonia in June of 1909: a musical imagining of my great-grandfather August Kiiss who spent the summers of 1908 and 1909 traveling from village to village, transcribing Estonian folk songs. These song melodies are woven throughout my bassoon concerto Land of the Northern Frog, written for the incredible Estonian- American bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann. And the program ends with an allegorical journey—the journey of the birds of the world towards enlightenment, as depicted in Peter Sís’s 2011 graphic novel reinterpretation of the Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur’s 12th century poem The Conference of the Birds.

My translation of this story into music draws less from the original poem, in which the birds each embody a different human fault that impedes humanity’s progression towards the divine, but rather, from Peter Sis’s graphic novel, in which the birds become a vehicle to examine the power of leaders and the collateral damage left behind in the wake of even well-intentioned movements. In between these two large works is the final movement of my string quartet, 100 Years Grows Shorter Over Time, newly arranged for A Far Cry. The subject of this piece is not a physical journey but a temporal one: the passage of memories through time. In the full quartet, each movement is like a successive generation, retelling the same story. In this excerpted version, we only hear the final iteration: a foggy haze out of which appear fragments of melodies. At the end of the movement, a fully realized tune emerges: this is a melody written by my grand-uncle Ilmar (August Kiiss’s son!), an architect, composer and violinist, in the early 1950s during the Soviet occupation of Estonia. The melody appears like an old recording, as if a piece of the past, both beautiful and out-of-context, was re-discovered by a future generation.

In its own way, each piece on this program reflects on 20th Century Estonian history, directly through their source material, in the case of the first two pieces, or in a more indirect way, in the case of Conference of the Birds: Peter Sís grew up in Soviet Czechoslovakia, and his work has been profoundly influenced by the same realities of Soviet life under which my family lived in Estonia. And each piece involves a transformation of material from the past: August Kiiss’s song transcriptions are threaded throughout Land of the Northern Frog, Ilmar Kiiss’s melody is the culmination point of 100 Years Grows Shorter Over Time, and Peter Sís’s idiosyncratic reinterpretation of Attar of Nishapur’s poem inspired the emotional and gestural fabric of Conference of the Birds. Seen as a whole, the arc of the program takes us on a journey from history to memory to story, the specifics of archives and family history giving way to dreamlike fables and myths.

Land of the Northern Frog is a fantastical imagination of a day in the life of my great-grandfather, the Estonian violinist, composer and teacher August Kiiss (1882-1965). As a young man, August spent two summers traveling around south-eastern Estonia, transcribing folk songs—in particular, the centuries-old regilaul (runic songs) that are a core feature of Estonian identity. 35 years later, during WWII, August, my grandmother, and two-year-old mother escaped Estonia—my grandmother had turned a picture of Stalin upside down on her high school classroom wall and the occupying Soviet authorities had put her on a list to be sent to Siberia. I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, speaking Estonian with my mother and English with my father. As is the case in many diasporic communities and families, my sense of Estonian history and culture was patchwork, powerful but full of holes. I first came across my great-grandfather’s folk song transcriptions during a trip to Estonia in 2008. As I began work on this piece, I thought of those transcriptions and tried to imagine what my great-grandfather’s travels across Estonia would have been like: the sounds and smells of the Estonian countryside, that particular moment of hopeful uncertainty for the Estonian people (which eventually led to the country’s independence in 1920), and what this music, part of a tradition that was already slipping away, must have felt like to hear.

Combining melodies drawn from these archival transcriptions, family stories, and fantasy, the piece unfolds like a musical fairy tale: in the first movement, August travels across the Estonian countryside on the back of a rickety wagon, daydreaming and strumming his violin like a guitar, with traditional herding calls and snippets of folk melodies heard all around. As August arrives in his childhood village, the movement concludes with a rush of joy and a peaceful exhale. In the second movement an Estonian folk melody is heard in the strings while the bassoon embodies August, hurriedly moving his pen across paper, as he transcribes the notes of the melody. A passing group of musicians play a rollicking dance tune and as they disappear into the distance August is left alone with the wind and trees. He hears, perhaps in his head, a quiet but wild version of the folk song that opened the movement, an ancient, shamanistic memory coming into the present. Evening comes with the third movement, the peaceful, flickering June twilight giving way to crickets, frogs, and a lyrically yearning melody. The movement ends with a bassoon cadenza as night arrives and August stumbles into a strange, misty nether land on the edge of the underworld. As the fourth movement begins, August follows a procession of spirits and leads them in singing a Saint Marten’s Day (All Hallows Eve) song. Deep underground in the chambers of the slumbering Põhja Konn (“Northern Frog”), a monster of Estonian lore who is seen sometimes as a protector and sometimes as a destroyer, August hears a strange and wild music, resembling the folk tune from the second movement, but with a sound of its own. Wondering whether this music is a glimpse of a deep, forgotten past or a distant future, August hurries back to the surface and finds his way to his sweet home, full of youthful optimism and unaware of the triumphs and tragedies that will befall Estonia and its people over the next 100 years. Land of the Northern Frog was co-commissioned by A Far Cry and Redlands Symphony.

One Hundred Years Grows Shorter Over Time was commissioned by South Mountain Association for the Juilliard String Quartet and written in honor of the 100th anniversary of South Mountain Concerts. As I began writing I thought about the span of 100 years: how, over time, our lives turn into stories told by our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, the complications and subtleties of life crystalizing into anecdotes (with careful omissions) as actual memories fade. The three movements of this quartet are like successive generations retelling the same story. Musical material is passed from movement to movement, but along the way it is reinterpreted and reshaped into something quite different. As I wrote, a melody kept coming into my mind: a waltz written by my Estonian granduncle Ilmar Kiiss. He had written the waltz in the 1950s after the Soviet occupation of Estonia and I had first played this music with my violinist brother when we were teenagers. Over the years we have kept returning to it and it felt right to let this little bit of my granduncle’s life that had meant so much to me into this piece. The waltz melody, hinted at in the first two movements of the quartet, only appears in full in the final moments of the third movement, in a viola solo which appears out of a textural haze like a long-lost recording. The viola part in the original quartet was written for and premiered by Roger Tapping, whose musical memory continues to shine through so many of the players in A Far Cry.

I first came upon the story of The Conference of the Birds through an adaptation by the brilliant Czech-American illustrator and author Peter Sís. The original is a 12th-century Sufi epic poem by the Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar. It tells a story about the birds of the world who gather together in a time of strife. Led by the hoopoe bird, they decide to set out on a long journey to find their king. Many birds desert or die along the journey, but after passing through valley after valley, the remaining 30 arrive at a lake at the top of a mountain. Looking in the lake at their own reflection, they realize they are in fact looking at their king. Sís’s version was one of the most beautiful books I had ever seen: an adult picture book with an unusual graphic sensibility, a concise and beautifully ambiguous text, and full-page illustrations of mysterious landscapes that carried surprising emotional weight. Numerous adaptations of the original poem, including plays, children’s books and pieces of music, have emphasized the story’s narrative of self-realization and spiritual understanding, but what drew me to Sís’s version, aside from the expressive, textural drawings which so suggested music, was the deep sense of loss in the pages. So many birds are left by the wayside during this journey towards truth and self- discovery. Does progress or attempted progress always come at a cost? What are we to make of the hoopoe who leads so many others to their deaths even as a few find enlightenment?

I initially thought about trying to turn the story into an opera – but I realized I was less interested in the narrative scope of the story than in the emotions and visceral energy of specific moments. I also knew I wanted to write music as Sís created his drawings, with strong gestures and lots of small figures combining to form large shapes. A string orchestra seemed perfect for creating solo lines that gathered into clouds of sounds. When I began talking to A Far Cry about writing a piece, I realized this would be a perfect project for the group. Having gotten to know the group, I wanted to write music for individual personalities: every member of the ensemble has their own part. These parts join each other in different combinations, but just as quickly split up again. The leadership of the music and the relationship of individuals to the group is always changing. As I wrote I thought about the power of crowds, the motivating capability–both dangerous and inspiring–of leaders, and the distinct values of individuality and unity. But I also thought about the players of A Far Cry, and how much I admire the way they function as an ensemble, share leadership, and make music together.

-Program notes courtesy of Lembit Beecher