Distance Learning: Archive

Letter from a Friend

Benjamin Kim

Letter from a Friend is a representative of current trends in music for Korean film. It was composed for the movie “Let’s play, Darma”, a comedy about a group of gangsters seeking refuge in a Buddhist monastery. This music evokes an appreciation of nature and happiness.

Excerpts From Kathleen Raine’s Poetry, Op. 55

Margrethe Fredheim

Sommerfeldt has a dew-like freshness of tonal language, partly based on free tonality and folk music rhythms. About his nationality there is no doubt. In the words of Sommerfeldt himself: “Many composers today feel the pressure from society to compose in a specific way. I too feel this inner pressure that forces me to write the way they do. Besides, originality can be found in C Major.”

Lyrics

I. Amo Ergo Sum

Because I love
The sun pours out its rays of living gold,
Pours out its gold and silver on the sea.

Because I love
The earth upon her astral spindle winds
Her ecstasy-producing dance.

Because I love
Clouds travel on the winds through wide skies,
Skies wide and beautiful, blue and deep.

Because I love
Wind blows white sails,
The wind blows over flowers, the sweet wind blows.

Because I love
The ferns grow green, and green the grass, and green
The transparent sunlit trees.

Because I love
Larks rise up from the grass
And all the leaves are full of singing birds.

Because I love
The summer air quivers with a thousand wings,
Myriads of jeweled eyes burn in the light.

Because I love
The iridescent shells upon the sand
Take forms as fine and intricate as thought.

Because I love
There is an invisible way across the sky.
Birds travel by that way. The sun and moon
And all the stars travel that path by night.

Because I love
There is a river flowing all night long.

Because I love
All night the river flows into my sleep.
Ten thousand living things are sleeping in my arms,
And sleeping wake, and flowing are at rest.

II. Rock

There is stone in me that knows stone.
Substance of rock that remembers the unending, unending simplicity of rest,
While scorching suns and ice ages pass over rock-face, swiftly as days.
In the longest time of all come the rock’s changes.
Slowest of all rhythms, the pulsations that raise from the planet’s core.
The mountain ranges and weather them down to sand on the seafloor.

There remain in me records of rock’s duration.
My ephemeral substance was still in the veins of the earth from the beginning.
Patient for its release.
Not questioning, when, when, will come the flowering, the flowing.
The awakening, the taking wing.
The long longed-for night of the bride-groom’s coming.

There is stone in me that knows stone,
Whose sole state is stasis.
While the slow cycle of the stars whirls a world of rock.
Through light years, where in nightmare I fall crying.
Must I travel fathomless distances forever and ever?
All that is in me of the rock replies:
Forever, forever if it must be.
Be and be still.
Endure.

III. Love Poem

Yours is the face that the earth turns to me.
Continuous beyond its human features lie
The mountain forms that rest against the sky.
With your eyes, the reflecting rainbow, the sun’s light
Sees me; forest and flower, bird and beast
Know and hold me forever in the world’s thought,
Creation’s deep untroubled retrospect.

When your hand touches mine it is the earth
That takes me–the green grass,
And rocks and rivers; the green graves,
And children still unborn, and ancestors,
In love passed down from hand to hand from God.
Your love comes from the creation of the world,
From those paternal fingers, streaming through the clouds
That break with light the surface of the sea.

Here, where I trace your body with my hand,
Love’s presence has no end;
For these, your arms that hold me, are the world’s.
In us, the continents, clouds and oceans meet
Our arbitrary selves, extensive with the night,
Lost, in the heart’s worship, and the body’s sleep.

Elifelet

Guy Mintus

*This performance is dedicated to Shmuel Mintus.

This is a memorial song written and composed during the 1960s in Israel.

Alongside its exuberant and multicultural middle eastern spirit, the young country of Israel carries a burden of bereavement and loss. Throughout its 65-year-long existence, Israel had to fight for survival many times. Thus, memorial ceremonies and songs for fallen soldiers take a substantial part in the Israeli culture. Despite its musical and textual complexity, the song Elifelet is a key song in the Israeli memorial songbook. It’s been sung in memorial ceremonies all over the country every year. Elifelet is a somewhat unusual memorial song. In it, Elifelet, whose name is taken from the Bible (one of King David’s heroes), is not portrayed as the classic heroic soldier figure we would expect, but as a funny, odd and almost autistic figure who laughs and smiles without reason. At the moment of truth, Elifelet bravely crawls in front of the live fire to save his friends, losing his own life. The song leaves a lot of question unresolved regarding the heroic figure, memorialization, the value of sacrificing your life in war and of treatment of society’s dead soldier. A key moment in the song is the sudden and brief change from E minor to E major accompanying the description of sounds of flutes and strings surrounding Elifelet’s character. This special moment leaves a strong effect of exaltation and almost recreates Elifelet’s dead spirit.

Song text by Nathan Alteman
Translated by Guy Mintus

We shall sing now the song of Elifelet,
and shall say all of us out loud,
ever since he was just a child,
he was already very odd.

All the neighbors have spoken of his fault,
and would say that nothing would help,
Elifelet is a child with no character,
he has no character at all.

If you stole a toy from his hands,
he would remain confused and smiling,
smiling without knowing why,
or how or what for and where?

And it seems like around him, it’s strange,
Something of music and joy arises,
without a rhyme or a reason,
without knowing why, how and wherefore?
without a goal, without a way,
without knowing how much or when?
for around him sounds of flutes and strings,
a lightning beautiful melody,
if we shall explain to you, what good will it bring?
what kind of child are you Elifelet?

And at night under the thunders of battlefield,
among the division the message went by:
the front lines were cut off,
They’d been out of ammunition for a while.

Then Elifelet felt as if
he must renew their supply,
and since he had no character at all,
he crawled right in front of the wild fire.

And as he returned wounded, in shock,
he collapsed smiling,
he had smiled without knowing why
or how or what for and where?

And in the hearts of his friends, it’s strange,
Something of music and joy arises,
without a rhyme or a reason,
without knowing why, how and wherefore?
without a goal, without a way,
without knowing how much or when?
for around Elifelet sounds of flutes and strings,
a lightning beautiful melody,
if we shall explain to you, what good will it bring?
what kind of child are you Elifelet?

And at night, wearing a steel helmet,
The angel Gabriel from the sky descended,
he approached the cot of Elifelet,
who was on the battlefield dying.

He said to him: Elifelet, fear not,
Elifelet, fear not at all.
in the sky we are very pleased with you,
although you have no character at all.

This is a simple and strange song,
With no beginning or ending or future,
We’ve been singing it without knowing why
or how or what for and where?

We’ve been singing it just like that, it’s strange,
Something of music and joy arises.

Acequia Madre

Taavi Oramo

Acequia Madre was composed at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival the summer of 2012. It continues the path that Lindberg has tread from the hard-core modernism of his youth towards music synthesized from the tonal tradition.

Dance of the Yao People

Yitong Guo

Yao, a government classification for various minorities in China, have very distinct and fascinating cultural characteristics (especially in religion, handcraft and, of course, music). The original Yao people are basically peasants who have to live on farming; luckily, their creativity colorizes their daily work with numerous songs and dances that are extremely Yaoist. Dance of the Yao People was originally one famous Chinese orchestral piece composed by Mao Yuan and Liu Tieshan in the 1950s. The piece was based on the materials from the Long Drum Song of the Yao. It shows three different scenes: dancing slowly accompanied by the profound long-drum song in the fields; dancing passionately in the festival; and singing a song of love for lovers, friends and families.

While the new arrangement for viola and piano uses more Western compositional techniques than the orchestral piece, it retains the spirit and originality of Yao music.

Prelude in C
Modular Scale Prelude
Prelude for Piano

Jane Yu

Simon Bethell was born in 1990 in Cape Town. He matriculated from Bishops Diocesan College in 2008 and studied Composition at the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town, graduating at the end of 2012. He was awarded the Nicholas Abbott Prize for Composition, the Peter Klatzow Prize and the Meyere Levinson Prize for Best Original Composition during his time at University. He is currently teaching music at Herzlia High School in Cape Town as well as teaching and composing privately.

Simon writes in a mix of styles, primarily Romantic/Modern with influences encompassing Bach, Grieg, Britten, Sibelius and many Russian composers, as well as several jazz and pop influences such as Frank Zappa and Pink Floyd.

Prelude in C – This light harmonic prelude, slightly reminiscent of Brahms’ Intermezzo Op. 119, No. 1, emphasizes the use of non-chordal notes at the end of the bar as well as the use of the minor dominant seventh resolving to the tonic.

Modular Scale Prelude – This prelude is based on a repeated 1+1+1+3 interval pattern beginning on C: all harmony is derived from this scale. The slow, introspective melody is driven by the underlying rhythm of the accompaniment. The prelude is, overall, quite temperamental, with a short cadenza near the beginning, an ethereal account of the melody in high octaves, and one last outburst that winds down to silent rest.

Prelude for Piano – This prelude has a slight Spanish influence in its inspiration. It begins with two interspersed characters – one boisterous and the other quiet and melodic – leading up to a joyous outburst of melody. A quiet middle section follows based around the melodic character. The accompaniment here maintains a pedal point in the middle voice in a time-signature of 6/8 against the right hand’s 3/4. The boisterous character leads us into another melodic outburst that winds down to the end.

La Pequeña Czarda

Ana Garcia Caraballos

This prelude has a slight Spanish influence in its inspiration. It begins with two interspersed characters – one boisterous and the other quiet and melodic – leading up to a joyous outburst of melody. A quiet middle section follows based around the melodic character. The accompaniment here maintains a pedal point in the middle voice in a time-signature of 6/8 against the right hand’s 3/4. The boisterous character leads us into another melodic outburst that winds down to the end.

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